was made for the prisoner.  He was stripped naked, his clothing literally torn from his body, and his shirt was tied around his loins.  Some one declared the rope was a “white man’s death,” and a log-chain, nearly a hundred feet in length, weighing over one hundred pounds, was placed round Miller’s neck and body, and he was led and dragged through the streets of the village in that condition followed by thousands of people.  He fainted from exhaustion several times, but was supported to the platform where they first intended burning him.

The chain was hooked around his neck, a man climbed the telegraph pole and the other end of the chain was passed up to him and made fast to the cross-arm.  Others brought a long forked stick which Miller was made to straddle.  By this means he was raised several feet from the ground and then let fall.  The first fall broke his neck, but he was raised in this way and let fall a second time.  Numberless shots were fired into the dangling body, for most of that crowd were heavily armed, and had been drinking all day.

Miller’s body hung thus exposed from three to five o’clock, during which time, several photographs of him as he hung dangling at the end of the chain were taken, and his toes and fingers were cut off.  His body was taken down, placed on the platform, the torch applied, and in a few moments there was nothing left of C.J.  Miller save a few bones and ashes.  Thus perished another of the many victims of Lynch Law, but it is the honest and sober belief of many who witnessed the scene that an innocent man has been barbarously and shockingly put to death in the glare of the nineteenth-century civilization, by those who profess to believe in Christianity, law and order.

5

LYNCHED FOR ANYTHING OR NOTHING

(Lynched for Wife Beating)

In nearly all communities wife beating is punishable with a fine, and in no community is it made a felony.  Dave Jackson, of Abita, La., was a colored man who had beaten his wife.  He had not killed her, nor seriously wounded her, but as Louisiana lynchers had not filled out their quota of crimes, his case was deemed of sufficient importance to apply the method of that barbarous people.  He was in the custody of the officials, but the mob went to the jail and took him out in front of the prison and hanged him by the neck until he was dead.  This was in Nov. 1893.

HANGED FOR STEALING HOGS

Details are very meagre of a lynching which occurred near Knox Point, La., on the twenty-fourth of October, 1893.  Upon one point, however, there was no uncertainty, and that is, that the persons lynched were Negroes.  It was claimed that they had been stealing hogs, but even this claim had not been subjected to the investigation of a court.  That matter was not considered necessary.  A few of the neighbors who had lost hogs suspected these men were responsible for their loss, and made up their minds to furnish an example for others to be warned by.  The two men were secured by a mob and hanged.