writhings of the negro after the fagots were lighted; and, finally, the rekindling of the latter, in order to burn down the scaffold and cremate the lifeless body of Smith, now seen to be leaning over, having parted company with the stake to which he was originally fastened.
In these pictures attention is especially invited to the large size and marked coolness and quietness of the mob; its typically Texan composition; and the methodical manner in which they are conducting the execution. It is said that the victim screamed and howled at a terrible rate, and that all this, from start to finish, was recorded by a graphophone, and that this has been used at various exhibitions to illustrate a full set of biographic pictures which were made at the same time. So far as I am concerned, however, all this is mere hear-say, and I have never seen any such exhibition, though I have friends who tell me that they have. Possibly this may have been accomplished at some other lynching, and not at Henry Smith's; in any event, it matters but little, as cold-blooded as such a procedure would be. It is said that the man begged the crowd to kill him, — to shoot him, a dozen times before the burning fagots caused his death. (See Appendix, Note 5, p. 232.)
With respect to lynching, Thomas, in his work on The American Negro, says: "It is not the number of negroes lynched that makes such acts execrable, for the annual summary executions are less than two hundred, but the fact that such lawless methods deny to the accused the exercise of his highest privilege,— a free and impartial trial before a legally-constituted tribunal. Were this phase of lawlessness directed
