The Mob is Not a Court of Law
An editorial reflection on the recent lynching of Bill at Colfax, arguing that a community’s failure to maintain a just legal system does not justify vigilante violence.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The lynching of Bill at Colfax on the 1st inst. was a most deplorable affair. The press generally has not disguised the opinion that the failure to convict Bill of murder, or at least of manslaughter, was a gross miscarriage of justice. But lynching Bill does not mend the matter in the least. The fact of the guilt or innocence of the party lynched by a mob does not figure in the case at all. When a people grow so indifferent to their duty to see to it that men are chosen who are good and vigorous men and who have high integrity, they must expect just such verdicts as were rendered in the Bill case. The trouble is that many of our sheriffs are worthless men, and many of our prosecuting officers lack either brains or integrity; they are mere political 'Cheap Johns.' To murder a helpless prisoner who is in the hands of the legal and judicial machinery of our own deliberate devisement is an act of mimic barbarism and boyish folly; it indicts our civilization as unfit for free government. It does no possible good, but does immense harm. It gratifies the feeling of personal vindictiveness that some men mistake for justice.
“To murder a helpless prisoner who is in the hands of the legal and judicial machinery of our own deliberate devisement is an act of mimic barbarism and boyish folly.”
This 1894 editorial grapples with the 'mob rule' that defined much of the frontier era, reflecting a desperate civic struggle to believe in the rule of law over vigilante violence. It echoes modern debates about the collapse of faith in institutional justice, where public frustration with systemic failure leads to demands for non-procedural 'justice.'
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