Negro
preacher whom Hose had accused of complicity in his crime, was hanged
near Palmetto. The nation stood aghast, for the recent events in Georgia
had shaken the very foundations of American civilization. Said the
_Charleston News and Courier_: "The chains which bound the citizen, Sam
Hose, to the stake at Newnan mean more for us and for his race than the
chains or bonds of slavery, which they supplanted. The flames that lit
the scene of his torture shed their baleful light throughout every
corner of our land, and exposed a state of things, actual and potential,
among us that should rouse the dullest mind to a sharp sense of our true
condition, and of our unchanged and unchangeable relations to the whole
race whom the tortured wretch represented."

Violence breeds violence, and two or three outstanding events are yet to
be recorded. On August 23, 1899, at Darien, Ga., hundreds of Negroes,
who for days had been aroused by rumors of a threatened lynching,
assembled at the ringing of the bell of a church opposite the jail and
by their presence prevented the removal of a prisoner. They were later
tried for insurrection and twenty-one sent to the convict farms for a
year. The general circumstances of the uprising excited great interest
throughout the country. In May, 1900, in Augusta, Ga., an unfortunate
street car incident resulted in the death of the aggressor, a young
white man named Whitney, and in the lynching of the colored man, Wilson,
who killed him. In this instance the victim was tortured and mutilated,
parts of his body and of the rope by which he was hanged being passed
around as souvenirs. A Negro organization at length recovered the body,
and so great was the excitement at the funeral that the coffin was not
allowed to be opened. Two months later, in New Orleans, there was a most
extraordinary occurrence, the same being important because the leading
figure was very frankly regarded by the Negroes as a hero and his fight
in his own defense a sign that the men of the race would not always be
shot down without some effort to protect themselves.

One night in July, an hour before midnight, two Negroes Robert Charles
and Leonard Pierce, who had recently come into the city from Mississippi
and whose movements had interested the police, were found by three
officers on the front steps of a house in Dryades Street. Being
questioned they replied that they had been in the town two or three days
and had secured work. I