Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/373

Rh legal protection promptly, and when it was needed, the community was swayed by a terrible cyclone of excitement and horror.

The conditions evoked, too, are most peculiar. The whites felt themselves outraged, and by a state of tutelage of the negro for which they were not responsible. This is no excuse for the crime of lynching. It is only stated to bring out the unfortunate facts incident to a great political crime in thrusting responsibilities on a weak and unfortunate race by a too rapid hotbed process of development, a procrustean operation.

The negroes felt outraged, too, for it appeared to them that only their race was lynched for the crime. They did not remember that white men, however loose in morals, did not find it necessary, in gratifying their beastly impulses for the other race, to commit the crime. This is no excuse for the white man to indulge his lustful desires. It was the misfortune of the negro race that in its condition of slavery and in the little time for improvement since free, habits of purity and chastity among them were not of a high grade. It was not to be expected that it should be otherwise. This is as much regretted by the conservative element of the negroes themselves as by their best well-wishers. At any rate, the negro was, as was natural, shocked and sullen and felt aggrieved. The two races in similar frame of mind from the peculiar circumstances, did not view, and have not as quickly viewed, the crime as it should have been. The example of the whites has been a bad one for the negroes themselves, for they, too, follow in the tracks of their neighbors. Only two years ago a negro girl near Enterprise, Miss., had to go through a lonely swamp to her home from work. She got a negro man to go with her for protection. Her dead body was found and her would-be protector was a fugitive, while outraged negroes, to protect their race from the great crime even among themselves, scoured