For more than a century the principle laid down by the legislature of Virginia has been appealed to as a justification for recourse to lynch-law. In Revolutionary times it was held that the immediate urgency and imminent danger of the situation justified the summary and extra-legal measures that were taken to suppress conspiracies against American patriots. On the frontier it was urged that the imminence of the danger warranted summary procedure against desperadoes and marauders, at first merely whipping and banishment, later hanging and summary execution. In the time of the anti-slavery agitation circumstances had arisen under which measures, though not strictly warranted by law, were held to be justifiable from the nature of the offense. In the opinion of the slave-holder summary treatment in the form of flogging, tarring and feathering, and banishing the abolitionist was wholly justifiable. The doctrine that “when the law is inefficient to take hold of a man the people should” was again and again referred to in support of the summary punishment of the abolitionists. Hidden away in Judge Lawless’s charge to the St. Louis grand jury is the same principle.[223] If the lawless violence was the work of the “many,” if it was committed by a representative number of the citizens while in a state of frenzy and excitement, it must be considered beyond the reach of human law. In 1839, W. E. Channing stated the principle in the following words: “Undoubtedly there may be crimes, so unnatural, so terrible to a community, that a people may be forgiven, if, deeming the usual forms of justice too slow, they assume the perilous office of inflicting speedy punishment.... There is, indeed, as I have intimated, one case where popular commotion does comparatively little harm, I mean that which is excited by some daring crime, which the laws sternly forbid, and which sends an electric thrill of horror through a virtuous community. In such a case, the public without law do the work of law, and enforce those natural, eternal principles of right, on which all legislation should rest.”[224] Governor Lynch, of Mississippi, in his message to the State legislature in 1836, used the following language with reference to the hanging of the Vicksburg gamblers: “However we may regret the occasion, we are constrained to admit that necessity will sometimes prompt a summary mode of trial and punishment unknown to the law.”[225] A few years later Captain Marryat wrote: