The lynch-law procedure of the fifties that was most commonly mentioned and described in the newspapers and periodicals was that that prevailed in the western part of the United States. Bodies of citizens, organized secretly or openly under the names of “vigilance committees,” “vigilance societies,” “vigilantes,” “regulators,” “law-and-order men,” “Citizens’ Associations,” &c., punished with summary severity horse-thieves, cattle-thieves, highway robbers, counterfeiters, burglars, and swindlers, as well as murderers. Certain rude forms of trial were generally observed, acquittals were rare but not entirely unknown, and the punishment was usually death by hanging. The frequency with which lynch-law was resorted to at this time is to be referred, both to the lack of a well established civil government, and to a doubt on the part of the people as to the adequacy of the ordinary legal machinery. It was the use of the word lynching in connection with these summary proceedings against white men of desperate character, the criminals of the frontier region west of the Mississippi, during the period of settlement, that first gave to it its modern meaning of putting to death. After the Civil War, when the Southern States were being reconstructed and the whites were threatened with negro domination, summary practices were adopted against the negroes. The negro had ceased to be valuable as property and was looked upon as a dangerous political factor in the community; to take his life was thought to be the easiest and quickest way to dispose of him. The adoption of this plan in many parts of the South gave for the word lynching a new application. Since the Reconstruction Period, then, to lynch has generally meant to put to death. The infliction of any minor punishment without legal trial still constitutes lynch-law, but the simple term “lynching” usually implies capital punishment. It is in this sense that the term will be used throughout the remainder of this investigation. CHAPTER V THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD