In reviewing the conduct of the then Governor of Mississippi, McWillie, it is not charity, nor warranted by correct inductive reasoning, to suppose that he intended to assist the Wages and Copeland Clan by giving his approval for the rendition of the defendant as a “fugitive from justice,” at the time he was an acting Sheriff for one of the counties of the State. It is, perhaps, better to suspect the Governor’s ignorance or want of the proper information, than to charge him with evil designs. Had he known at the time the desperate character of Shoemake, one of the clan, and the authorized agent to make the arrest; had he known that the defendant knew nothing of the names prior to the confessions, and, of course, could have had no interest nor malicious motive to misrepresent, with the fact of locating the Three Distinguished at the risk of protracted trouble and a ruinous expense, furnishing a strong inference of the truth of all as to the names inserted; had he known that Copeland himself, on the scaffold in the last moments of earthly existence, acknowledged publicly and before living witnesses the truth of the whole of his confessions; had he known and reflected that the full publication of them must have, not only a direct and powerful tendency to disorganize the remnant of the clan, but also to prevent future associations of a similar character; had he known the full extent of the horrors, for years, perpetrated by this clan, and that numbers still living, from experience, can vouch for many of the facts as narrated in the confessions; had he known that an offense committed in one State or county, and the injury sustained inflicted in another State or county, the case may be tried in either, which gave him the right to use his discretion; had he known and reflected that the conflict must be between prosecutors—revengeful and experienced, wealthy and powerful, from another State, against youth—against an humble but honest citizen of his own State; had he known all these circumstances and maturely considered them, censure could not be too severely applied for his approving the rendition of the defendant as “a fugitive from justice.” Who ever before heard of any person being dragged from one State to another as a malefactor on a charge of _libel_? However, if he, without design, gave assistance to the clan in the shape of an unmerited expense and injury to the defendant, it is nevertheless true that he also, without design, was instrumental in laying the foundation for a more distant triumph in behalf of justice.