The Dynamite Murder of Tacoma: A Mob’s Verdict
In the early hours of January 1890, a Tacoma man was dragged from jail and hanged by a vigilante mob for blowing up a house and killing a sleeping family. The Seattle press offers a chilling reflection on whether such 'swift justice' is ever truly justified.
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.
It is questionable whether resort to lynch law is ever justifiable, but it would be difficult to say anything in condemnation of the lynching of the dynamiter at Tacoma yesterday.
From all accounts it appears that the crime of this man was in every way as diabolical as one as was ever demonstrated in a civilized community. It is difficult to conceive of a worse deed than that of blowing up a house containing a sleeping family in the dead hour of night. Certainly the desire to punish the wretch who would do such a thing at once and without resort to the slow process of the law is too strong for ordinary men to resist.
Still, it would have been the same old King county justice if the wretch had been resisted and if the great big criminal had received his punishment at the hands of the state authorities.
This 1890 account of vigilante justice in Tacoma highlights a time when extralegal violence was often framed as 'justice' by the press, particularly for crimes against domestic sanctity. Today, we view such mob actions not as righteous retribution but as a failure of civic institutions and a violation of due process, underscoring the critical importance of rule-of-law protections even in the face of heinous crimes.
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