It cannot be said, however, that these cases of the infliction of capital punishment upon negroes without process of law were anything more than sporadic and isolated cases. They were scarcely more than local in their influence. The most important thing brought to light by the above comparison of the two ten-year periods is the tendency, in the later period, toward less reliance on legal procedure and toward greater readiness on the part of the people to take matters into their own hands. The newspapers in the fifties not only frequently excused summary procedure but often openly advocated it. One instance only will be cited and it is from a southern newspaper. In 1856, a Mr. Pearce, residing in Morgan County, Georgia, attempted to give one of his negroes a flogging for some misdemeanor. The negro picked up an ax and at one blow split his master’s head open. He then fled. While he was still at large the Madison Messenger printed the following: “Beyond doubt he will be captured before many hours. If he is, although we admire submission to the course pointed out by the law of the land, in this case so much of the brute has been manifested, we should be glad to see our citizens rise _en masse_, and avail themselves of Lynch law, and hang the rascal without court or jury.”[191] The preceding paragraphs have made it clear that negroes occasionally suffered death under lynch-law previous to the Civil War. It was not common, however, to characterize the summary hanging of negroes as lynching. Such occurrences were neither common nor general enough to give to the verb lynch its modern meaning, even though they had been always designated as lynchings. It was with reference to the lawless proceedings which took place in the western and southwestern portions of the United States in the fifties that the term lynch was first used in its modern sense. The vigilance committees which were then common in that section of the country often hung desperadoes and horse-thieves, and frequently when such persons were thus executed they were said to have been lynched. A paragraph in the Liberator, November 9, 1860 (p. 179), has the heading: “Four men Lynched in Texas.” The paragraph contains a clipping from a Texas paper describing the circumstances under which four men were found one morning hung in the public square of a town in Navarro County, and refers to the “many accounts of lynchings in Texas.”