We still have in
reserve for the election a weapon which this affair will only render
more effective. What became of the piece in the negro paper?"
"I have it here," answered Carteret. "I was just about to use it as the
text for an editorial."
"Save it awhile longer," responded the general. "This crime itself will
give you text enough for a four-volume work."
When this conference ended, Carteret immediately put into press an extra
edition of the Morning Chronicle, which was soon upon the streets,
giving details of the crime, which was characterized as an atrocious
assault upon a defenseless old lady, whose age and sex would have
protected her from harm at the hands of any one but a brute in the
lowest human form. This event, the Chronicle suggested, had only
confirmed the opinion, which had been of late growing upon the white
people, that drastic efforts were necessary to protect the white women
of the South against brutal, lascivious, and murderous assaults at the
hands of negro men. It was only another significant example of the
results which might have been foreseen from the application of a false
and pernicious political theory, by which ignorance, clothed in a little
brief authority, was sought to be exalted over knowledge, vice over
virtue, an inferior and degraded race above the heaven-crowned
Anglo-Saxon. If an outraged people, justly infuriated, and impatient of
the slow processes of the courts, should assert their inherent
sovereignty, which the law after all was merely intended to embody, and
should choose, in obedience to the higher law, to set aside,
temporarily, the ordinary judicial procedure, it would serve as a
warning and an example to the vicious elements of the community, of the
swift and terrible punishment which would fall, like the judgment of
God, upon any one who laid sacrilegious hands upon white womanhood.
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