his life, although later his name for the opponents of slavery became one to conjure with. The mob that attacked the warehouse in the little town of Alton did not know that it was making history, and when quiet had been restored in the community the issues were too great to be understood by the State officials. The law had been broken, they knew, and something had to be done, and the mountain labored and brought forth a mouse. They read like pages of opera bouffe-the trials of Winthrop S. Gilman (p. 528) and John Solomon (p. 589). The owner of the warehouse in which the printing press was stored, awaiting its delivery to the owner, is indicted with his friends who helped him. to defend it from the mob, for the crime of riot. The Attorney General of the State appears and gravely argues that the Illinois statutes had repealed the common-law right of self-defense. The jury renders a verdict of acquittal, and then the leaders of the mob, who had set fire to the warehouse, destroyed the printing press and murdered the owner, are indicted for riot also. The jury, to keep things even, acquit the rioters. The first trial was a shameful insult to justice, the second was an impudent farce. In an address to a St. Louis audience in 1888, Mr. Thomas Dimmock, who was a personal witness of much of the happenings in 1838, and who many years afterwards preserved the bones of Lovejoy and had them removed to another place, said: The City of Alton has set apart a well located and spacious lot in the cemetery and an association has been organized and duly incorporated to erect a suitable monument. I have no doubt there will be sooner or later a monument worthy of the man and his deeds; but I do not expect to see it. My only desire is to make the surroundings of the present grave a little more attractive. When it is I shall feel that I have paid my share of the debt the country owes to Lovejoy. Mr. Dimmock's hope and prophecy have been realized, for over the ashes of the murdered editor in the Alton City Cemetery there is now a public monument, erected at the joint cost of the city and the State of Illinois to the man who, in spite of threats and menaces of death, could calmly reply to his persecutors: "As long as I am an American citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write and to publish whatever I please on any subject, being amenable to the laws of iny country for the same." There is little doubt that, except among a small number of fanatical Abolitionists, the murder of Lovejoy called forth at the time little sympathy throughout the Union. His defense of freedom of speech was forgotten; and he was regarded almost everywhere as a disturber of the public peace and as one whose writings were threatening to break asunder the friendly relations existing between North and South. When the news reached Boston, at an indignation meeting called in Faneuil Hall by negro sympathizers, the Attorney General of Massachusetts compared the Alton Riot with the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, and declared that Lovejoy had "died as the fool dieth." But in the sixteen years that had gone by when Anthony Burns (p. 645) was brought before the Federal Court as a fugitive slave, the opposition to slavery had greatly increased, especially in New England. When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which gave the slave-owner a right to follow his property into a free State and required the United States Courts to enforce his rights, the act was denounced by thousands of people throughout the North who believed that a 3 Schouler, Hist. U. S. 300. man held in bondage for no crime, but simply on account of the accident of his birth and the color of his skin, had a right to escape if he could. Among these thousands who would lift no hand to aid the slaveowner were some who were ready to resist the law with force and arms. Among them were men like Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker, the first of whom, in public addresses, and the other in sermons filled with philippies against the Federal Judges and with very bad law, advised resistance to the hated statutes.* And when they, at the Faneuil Hall meeting, by their violent harangues incited the attack on the Court House and the killing of the United States Marshal, Batchelder, were they not legally as guilty of murder as were those Chicago anarchists who, thirty-two years later, were hanged for a precisely similar revolt against the laws of the land?5 Amiability and politeness, amongst the middle and lower classes, did not generally prevail in the good old days of yore, and the free use of the tongue gave rise to feuds and riots to an extent which it is difficult for us at the present day to realize. A scolding woman was treated as a high offender against the public peace and the authorities took care that a special and a very 4 In a sermon on the "Function and Place of Conscience in Relation to the Laws of Man," preached on September 22, 1850, he said: "If a man falls into the water and is in danger of drowning, it is the natural duty of the bystanders to aid in pulling him out even at the risk of wetting their garments. We should think a man a coward who could swim and would not save a drowning girl, for fear of spoiling his coat. He would be indictable at common law." He was doubtless correct as to "natural duty," but any one-year law student would have told him that he was wrong as to the common law. 5 See the Trial of Parsons, Spies, Fischer, Engel and others, 9 Am. St. Tr. efficient form of punishment should be found for such kinds of transgression. This was the ducking-stool. A Frenchman who traveled in England, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, gives this good description of punishment in that country of the scolding female: "They fasten an arm-chair to the end of two beams twelve or fifteen feet long, and parallel to each other, so that these two pieces of wood with their two ends embrace the chair which hangs upon them upon a sort of axle, by which means it plays freely and always remains in the natural horizontal position in which the chair should be that a person may sit conveniently in it whether you raise it or let it down. They set up a post on the bank of a pond or river and over this post they lay, almost in equilibro, the two pieces of wood, at one end of which the chair hangs just over the water. They place the woman in this chair and so plunge her into the water, as often as the sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate heat." And at the close of the eighteenth century an English poet wrote in praise of the ducking-stool the following lines: "There stands my friend in yonder pool, An engine called the ducking-stool, By legal power commanded down The joy and terror of the town. If jarring females kindle strife, To drive the house with horrid din, She mounts again and rages more So throwing water on the fire Will make it but burn up the higher: 6 Andrews "Bygone Punishments." If so, my friend, pray let her take And rather than your patience lose, That good old Tory, Dr. Samuel Johnson, quite approved of it. When the Quakeress, Mrs. Knowles, complained that much more liberty was allowed to men than to women, the doctor replied: "Why, madam, women have all the liberty they should wish to have. We have all the labor and danger, and the women all the advantage. And we have different modes of restraining evil. Stocks for the men, a ducking-stool for women, and a pound for beasts." The punishment of the ducking-stool gradually went out of vogue in England-as such things often do in that country without any express statutory repeal. About the time of the American Revolution it was in full play in most parts of England, but the last recorded use of it occurred at Leominster in 1809, when one Jenny Pipes was paraded through the town on the ducking-stool and ducked in the water by order of the magistrates. The old instrument of torture is still preserved in the village church, and the editor has himself seen another which is shown to visitors to the Church of St. Mary at Warwick. Whether had the jury convicted them, the New York Judge would have sentenced the women, Greenwault and Moody (p. 710), to the ducking-stool, is a question which will forever remain unanswered; but that the offense was still recognized in New York, the Court had decided in the face of the protest of the counsel for the prisoners. It seems clear that the commonlaw crime of scolding and its penalty as well were |