Just as the door was burst open, Dr. H. S. Bodley, a highly respected citizen, was shot and instantly killed by the gamblers. Greatly incensed at this, the crowd rushed into the building and dragged out the inmates, one of whom had been seriously wounded, hurried them without ceremony to the common gallows and hanged them. Five gamblers were thus executed at this time and their bodies left suspended for twenty-four hours.[146] About the time of the Vicksburg affair suspicion was aroused in Madison County, Mississippi, that the Murrell gang had organized the blacks for an insurrection.[147] “Two individuals, by name Cotton and Saunders, both of them steam doctors by profession,” were thought to be prominently connected with the scheme. A “committee of investigation” was appointed by a mass-meeting of the citizens and as a result of the investigation the two “steam doctors” and three other white men were hanged, and also several negroes, “some ten or fifteen,” without any process at law.[148] J. H. Ingraham, writing of conditions in Mississippi at about this time, after describing a “chain gang” of negroes, uses the following language: “In Natchez, negro criminals only are thus honored—a coat of tar and feathers’ being applied to those white men who may require some kind of discipline not provided by the courts of justice. This last summary process of popular justice, or more properly excitement, termed ‘Lynch’s law’, I believe, from its originator, is too much in vogue in this state. In the resentment of public as well as private wrongs, individuals have long been in the habit of forestalling and improving upon the decisions of the courts, by taking the execution of the laws into their own hands.... The want of a penitentiary has had a tendency to keep this custom alive in this state longer than it would otherwise have existed. When an individual is guilty of any offence, which renders him amenable to the laws, he must either be acquitted altogether or suffer death.”[149] Lynch-law was also known in the eastern states at this time. Not only were there mobs which dealt summarily with offenders, as in the year 1831, but their proceedings were known by a different name. It was now no longer simply “mobs” and “mobocracy,” but “Lynch’s law,” and “Judge Lynch’s court” as well. The Boston Daily Advertiser in July, 1835, gave expression to the following, under the heading “Lynch’s Law”: “We have had occasion of late to advert to the use of this term in our paper, as indicating punishments, wantonly and in disregard of law, applied in certain portions of our country to individuals suspected or guilty of crime.”[150] On the night of September 10, 1835, a gallows was erected in Brighton Street, Boston, in front of Mr. Garrison’s house, with two ropes suspended therefrom. On the crossbar was the inscription “Judge Lynch’s law.”[151]