The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills
The people of Cottontown, hot and revengeful, now that their living
was burned; hill dwellers who sympathized with them, and coming in,
were eager for any excitement; the unlawful element which infests
every town--all were there, the idle, the ignorant, the vicious.
And a little viciousness goes a long way.
There had been so many lynchings in the South that it had ceased to
be a crime--for crime, the weed, cultivated--grows into a flower to
those who do the tending.
Many of the lynchings, it is true, were honest--the frenzy of
outraged humanity to avenge a terrible crime which the law, in its
delay, often had let go unpunished. The laxity of the law, the
unscrupulousness of its lawyers, their shrewdness in clearing
criminals if the fee was forthcoming, the hundreds of technicalities
thrown around criminals, the narrowness of supreme courts in
reversing on these technicalities. All these had thrown the law back
to its source--the people. And they had taken it in their own hands.
In violent hands, but deadly sure and retributory.
If there was ever an excuse for lynching, the South was entitled to
it. For the crime was the result of the sudden emancipation of
ignorant slaves, who, backed by the bayonets of their liberators, and
attributing a far greater importance to their elevation than was
warranted, perpetuated an unnameable crime as part of their system of
revenge for years of slavery. And the South arose to the terribleness
of the crime and met it with the rifle, the torch and the rope.
Why should it be wondered at? Why should the South be singled out
for blame? Is it not a fact that for years in every newly settled
western state lynch-law has been the unchallenged, unanimous verdict
for a horse thief? And is not the honor of a white woman more than
the hide of a broncho?
But from an honest, well intentioned frenzy of justice outraged to
any pretext is an easy step. From the quick lynching of the rapist
and murderer--to be sure that the lawyers and courts did not acquit
them--was one step. To hang a half crazy old woman for burning a mill
was another, and the natural consequence of the first.
And so these people flocked to the burning--they who had helped lynch
before--the negro-haters, who had never owned a negro and had no
sympathy--no sentiment for them. It is they who lynch in the South,
who lynch and defy the law.
The great mill was in ruins--its tall black smokestacks alone stood
amid its smoking, twisted mass of steel and ashes--a rough,
blackened, but fitting monument of its own infamy.
They gathered around it--the disorderly, the vicious, the lynchers of
the Tennessee Valley.
Fitful flashes of flame now and then burst out amid the ruins,
silhouetting the shadows of the lynchers into fierce giant forms with
frenzied faces from which came first murmurs and finally shouts of:
"_Lynch her! Lynch her!_"
Above, in the still air of the night, yet hung the pall of the black
smoke-cloud, from whose heart had come the torch which had cost capital
its money, and the mill people their living.
They were not long acting. Mammy Maria had flown to the little
cottage--a crazy, hysterical creature--a wreck of herself--over-worked
in body and mind, and frenzied between the deed and the promptings of a
blind superstitious religion.
Lily hung to her neck sobbing, and the old woman in her pitiful fright
was brought back partly to reason in the great love of her life for the
little child. Even in her feebleness she was soothing her pet.
There were oaths, curses and trampling of many feet as they rushed in
and seized her. Lily, screaming, was held by rough arms while they
dragged the old nurse away.
Into a wood nearby they took her, the rope was thrown over a limb, the
noose placed around her neck.
"Pray, you old witch--we will give you five minutes to pray."
The old woman fell on her knees, but instead of praying for herself,
she prayed for her executioners.
They jeered--they laughed. One struck her with a stick, but she only
prayed for them the more.
"String her up," they shouted--"her time's up!"
"Stand back there!"
The words rang out even above the noise of the crowd. Then a man,
with the long blue deadly barrel of the Colt forty-four, pushed his
way through them--his face pale, his fine mouth set firm and close,
and the splendid courage of many generations of Conways shining in
his eyes.
"_Stand back!_--" and he said it in the old commanding way--the old
way which courage has ever had in the crises of the world.
"O Marse Ned!--I knowed you'd come!"
He had cut the rope and the old woman sat on the ground clasping his
feet.
For a moment he stood over her, his pale calm face showing the
splendor of determination in the glory of his manhood restored. For a
moment the very beauty of it stopped them--this man, this former sot
and drunkard, this old soldier arising from the ashes of his buried
past, a beautiful statue of courage cut out of the marble of manhood.
The moral beauty of it--this man defending with his life the old
negro--struck even through the swine of them.
They ceased, and a silence fell, so painful that it hurt in its very
uncanniness.
Then Edward Conway said very clearly, very slowly, but with a fitful
nervous ring in his voice: "Go back to your homes! Would you hang
this poor old woman without a trial? Can you not see that she has
lost her mind and is not responsible for her acts? Let the law
decide. Shall not her life of unselfishness and good deeds be put
against this one insane act of her old age? Go back to your homes!
Some of you are my friends, some my neighbors--I ask you for her but
a fair trial before the law."
They listened for a moment and then burst into jeers, hoots, and
hisses:
"Hang her, now! That's the way all lawyers talk!"
And one shouted above the rest: "He's put up a plea of insanity
a-ready. Hang her, now!"
Edward Conway flashed hot through his paleness and he placed himself
before the bowed and moaning form while the crowd in front of him
surged and shouted and called for a rope.
He felt some one touch his arm and turned to find the sheriff by his
side--one of those disreputables who infested the South after the
war, holding office by the votes of the negroes.
"Better let 'em have her,--it ain't worth the while. You'll hafter
kill, or be killed."
"You scallawag!" said Conway, now purple with anger--"is that the way
you respect your sworn oath? And you have been here and seen all this
and not raised your hand?"
"Do you think I'm fool enuff to tackle that crowd of hillbillies?
They've got the devil in them--fur they've got a devil leadin'
'em--Jud Carpenter. Better let 'em have her--they'll kill you. We've
got a good excuse--overpowered--don't you see?"
"Overpowered? That's the way all cowards talk," said Conway. "Do one
thing for me," he said quickly--"tell them you have appointed me your
deputy. If you do not--I'll fall back on the law of riots and appoint
myself."
"Gentlemen," said the sheriff, turning to the crowd, and speaking
half-shamedly--"Gentlemen, it's better an' I hopes you all will go
home. We don't wanter hurt nobody. I app'ints Major Conway my deputy
to take the prisoner to jail. Now the blood be on yo' own heads.
I've sed my say."
A perfect storm of jeers met this. They surged forward to seize her,
while the sheriff half frightened, half undecided, got behind Conway
and said:--"It's up to you--I've done all I cu'd."
"Go back to your homes, men"--shouted Conway--"I am the sheriff here
now, and I swear to you by the living God it means I am a Conway
again, and the man who lays a hand on this old woman is as good as
dead in his tracks!"
For an instant they surged around him cursing and shouting; but he
stood up straight and terribly silent; only his keen grey eyes
glanced down to the barrel of his pistol and he stood nervously
fingering the small blue hammer with his thumb and measuring the
distance between himself and the nearest ruffian who stood on the
outskirts of the mob shaking a pistol in Conway's face and shouting:
"Come on, men, we'll lynch her anyway!"
Then Conway acted quickly. He spoke a few words to the old nurse, and
as she backed off into the nearby wood, he covered the retreat. To
his relief he saw that the sheriff, now thoroughly ashamed, had hold
of the prisoner and was helping her along.
In the edge of the wood he felt safe--with the trees at his back.
And he took courage as he heard the sheriff say:
"If you kin hold 'em a little longer I'll soon have my buggy here and
we'll beat 'em to the jail."
But the mob guessed his plans, and the man who had been most
insolent in the front of the mob--a long-haired, narrow-chested
mountaineer--rushed up viciously.
Conway saw the gleam of his pistol as the man aimed and fired at the
prisoner. Instinctively he struck at the weapon and the ball intended
for the prisoner crushed spitefully into his left shoulder. He reeled
and the grim light of an aroused Conway flashed in his eyes as he
recovered himself, for a moment, shocked, blinded. Then he heard some
one say, as he felt the blood trickling down his arm and hand:
"Marse Ned! Oh, an' for po' ole Zion! Don't risk yo' life--let 'em
take me!"
Dimly he saw the mob rushing up; vaguely it came to him that it was
kill or be killed. Vaguely, too, that it was the law--his law--and
every other man's law--against lawlessness. Hazily, that he was the
law--its representative, its defender, and then clear as the blue
barrel in his hand,--all the dimness and uncertainty gone,--it came
to him, that thing that made him say: "I am a Conway again!"
Then his pistol leaped from the shadow by his side to the gray light
in front, and the man who had fired and was again taking aim at the
old woman died in his tracks with his mouth twisted forever into the
shape of an unspoken curse.
It was enough. Stricken, paralyzed, they fell back before such
courage--and Conway found himself backing off into the woods,
covering the retreat of the prisoner. Then afterward he felt the
motion of buggy wheels, and of a galloping drive, and the jail, and
he in the sheriff's room, the old prisoner safe for the time.
CHAPTER XXIII
DIED FOR THE LAW
And thus was begun that historical lynching in the Tennessee
Valley--a tragedy which well might have remained unwritten had it not
fallen into the woof of this story.
A white man had been killed for a negro--that was enough.
It is true the man was attempting to commit murder in the face of the
law of the land; and in attempting it had shot the representative of
the law. It is true, also, that he had no grievance, being one of
several hundred law-breakers bent on murder. This, too, made no
difference; they neither thought nor cared;--for mobs, being
headless, do not think; and being soulless, do not suffer.
They had failed only for lack of a leader.
But now they had a leader, and a mob with a leader is a dangerous
thing.
That leader was Richard Travis.
It was after midnight when he rode up on the scene. Before he
arrived, Jud Carpenter had aroused the mob to do its first fury, and
still held them, now doubly vengeful and shouting to be led against
the jail. But to storm a jail they needed a braver man than Jud
Carpenter. And they found him in Richard Travis--especially Richard
Travis in the terrible mood, the black despair which had come upon
him that night.
Why did he come? He could not say. In him had surged two great forces
that night--the force of evil and the force of good. Twice had the
good overcome--now it was the evil's turn, and like one hypnotized,
he was led on.
He sat his horse among them, pale and calm, but with a cruel instinct