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The People versus Zephyr Davis: Law and Popular Justice in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Elizabeth Dale
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Shortly after 3 P.M. on February 27, 1888, Eddie Dwyer, one of the young employees at Greene's Boot Heel Factory in Chicago, began to clear empty sacks out of a closet in the rear of the factory so that coal could be loaded into the room. After pulling out roughly five sacks, Eddie called out that there seemed to be something else in the closet. Investigation established that the something else was the body of another employee, fourteen-year-old Maggie Gaughan, who had been missing all day and apparently had been hacked to death with the hatchet found beneath her body. Suspicion quickly centered on the factory foreman, a seventeen-year-old African American named Zephyr Davis, who was away from the factory on an errand at the time the body was discovered. That suspicion became certainty when Davis did not return from the errand, driven away, as he later admitted, by the crowds he saw gathered outside of Greene's when he returned.

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Articles
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Law and History Review , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 27 - 56
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1999

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References

1. Chicago Tribune, 27 February 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 28 February 1888, 3.

2. Chicago Tribune, 29 February 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 28 February 1888, 3; People v. Zephyr Davis, indictment number 21222a, term number 1158, Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, filed March 1, 1888. Cook County Court Records, Box 3a-32-b-48. See also Jury Verdict dated April 2, 1888, Cook County Court Records, Box 3a-32-b-48 and Chicago Tribune, 1 March 1888, 7.

3. Adler, Jeffrey S., “‘My mother-in-law is to Blame, But I'll walk on her Neck yet’: Homicide in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago,” Journal of Social History 31 (Winter 1997): 253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Gary, Joseph E., “The Chicago Anarchists of 1886: The Crime, the Trial, and the Punishment,” The Century Magazine 45 (April 1893): 803.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., 809.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 836.

8. “‘The law,’ he wrote, ‘is common sense.’” Ibid., 802, 836.

9. Smith, Carl, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Disbelief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Avrich, Paul, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; McConnell, Samuel P., “The Chicago Bomb Case: Personal Recollections of an American Tragedy,” Harpers Magazine 166 (May 1934): 730, 735Google Scholar; Masters, Edgar Lee, The Tale of Chicago (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1933), 216.Google Scholar

10. It also offers an alternative to those histories that argue that over the course of the nineteenth century, criminal law became increasingly institutionalized and popular influence on criminal law declined. See, e.g., Steinberg, Allen, The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Friedman, Lawrence M., Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993).Google Scholar

11. Chicago Times, 28 February 1888, 3; Chicago Times, 29 February 1888, 1. Compare the account of the relationship between vigilante activity and law in San Francisco. Ethington, Philip J., The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 104–5.Google Scholar

12. Chicago Tribune, 29 February 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 29 February 1888, 1; Chicago Inter-Ocean, 29 February 1888, 2.

13. Chicago Tribune, 29 February 1888, 1; Chicago Inter-Ocean, 29 February 1888, 2; Chicago Times, 29 February 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 1 March 1888, 5.

14. But compare Friedman, Lawrence, A History of American Law, 2d ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 579–80.Google Scholar Interestingly, although he generally tied mob action to an earlier period, Ethington found hints of its continued influence in San Francisco after 1890. See Ethington, Public City, 405, quoting Isaac Milliken in 1898 to the effect that “There is no city in the union with a quarter of a million people… which would not be better for a little judicious hanging.” See also the evidence of calls for a lynching in 1881 during the trial of President Garfield's assassin. Rosenberg, Charles E., The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and the Gilded Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 120.Google Scholar

15. Smith, Urban Disorder, 51-57, 110; Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 218-19; Masters. Tale of Chicago, 182-83.

16. Chicago Times, 29 February 1888, 1 (account of a near lynching at Randolph street); Chicago Tribune, 29 February 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 29 February 1888, 1; Chicago Inter-Ocean, 29 February 1888, 2.

17. For some examples of its general hostility to mob action, see Chicago Daily News, 15 July 1886, 2; ibid., 2 August 1886, 2.

18. Chicago Daily News, 15 July 1885, 1 (fourteen-year-old girl assaulted, lynching un-successful); Chicago Daily News, 24 November 1886, 1 (attempted criminal assault on girl leads to the lynching of three); Chicago Daily News, 14 May 1886, 2 (lynching of man who killed ex-girlfriend); Chicago Daily News, 7 February 1884, 1 (father of girl who was assaulted shot man who assaulted her); Chicago Daily News, 21 October 1885, 2 (lynch mob successfully removed man suspected of assaulting two elderly ladies from Winchester, Illinois, jail and hanged him). For the Daily News's political perspective, see Pierce, Bessie Louise, A History of Chicago, vol. 3, The Rise of the Modern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 415–16.Google Scholar

19. Chicago Daily News, 29 December 1886, 2.

20. Chicago Daily News, 10 January 1887, 2.

21. For a discussion of the relationship between lynching and other types of mob action, see Cutler, James Elbert, Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1905, reprint 1969)Google Scholar, passim.

22. Chicago Daily News, 15 August 1885, 1. For similar sentiments, see ibid., 7 November 1885, 2 (article on crowd that beat a man suspected of wife beating in Tennessee).

23. Chicago Daily News, 18 October 1886, 1.

24. Ibid., 5 November 1886, 1.

25. Ibid., 10 June 1886, 1.

26. Ibid. This was a typical argument. See, generally, the discussion in Cutler, Lynch-Law.

27. Chicago Daily News, 16 January 1886, 1. In other cases, the paper indicated it accepted that some murders were justified as personal acts of popular justice. Thus, the paper expressed sympathy and called for leniency for a young African American woman accused of killing her father. Her defense was that her father had beaten her mother repeatedly. Chicago Daily News, 9 November 1885, 1; ibid., 15 July 1886, 2 (denouncing lynching in Jacksonville); ibid., 28 April 1886, 4 (denouncing a lynching in Springfield, Missouri); ibid., 19 November 1886, 2 (article on “wholesale slaughter” of blacks in Mississippi); ibid., 11 September 1885, 1 (regulators). For articles denouncing attacks on Chinese workers, see ibid., 5 September 1885, 2; ibid., 10 September 1885, 2; ibid., 11 February 1886, 2.

28. Pierce, A History of Chicago, 415.

29. On the Times's sensationalism, see ibid., 413.

30. Chicago Times, 28 February 1888, 1.

31. Ibid., 29 February 1888, 1.

32. Chicago Herald, 29 February 1888, 3. On its politics, see Pierce, A History of Chicago, 413-14.

33. Chicago Herald, 5 March 1888, 1.

34. Ibid., 29 February 1888, 1.

35. E.g., Chicago Tribune, 1 May 1887, 15. On the Tribune's, politics, see Pierce, A History of Chicago, 411. On its role in keeping statistics, see Williamson, Joel, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 529–30 n.13.Google Scholar

36. Chicago Tribune, 1 July 1887, 1.

37. Ibid., 1 May 1887, 15 (article on lynching of three African Americans where crimes attributed to them had gone on for quite some time without arrests); ibid., 4 May 1887, 4 (editorial on charges of police brutality); ibid., 1 July 1887, 5 (protest group sought rezoning of houses of prostitution). Pierce, A History of Chicago, 411. For the idea that police brutality is a form of extralegal justice, see Friedman, A History of American Law, 579; Masters, Tale of Chicago, 212.

38. Chicago Inter-Ocean, 31 March 1888, 1.

39. See the reports sited in note 18 above. Consider also the Labor Enquirer (a Chicago-based socialist weekly), 11 February 1888, 2 (mocking the claim that Matthias Busch, a former scab accused of murdering his wife, deserved a fair trial because he was law abiding).

40. Chicago Tribune, 28 February 1888, 1; Chicago Herald, 28 February 1888, 2; Chicago Times, 28 February 1888, 3.

41. Chicago Herald, 28 February 1888, 2; Chicago Times, 28 February 1888, 3. See also Chicago Tribune, 28 February 1888, 1 and Indictment 21222A, People v. Zephyr Davis, Cook County Court Records, box 3A-32-B-48. For the prosecutor's statement, see Chicago Herald, 31 March 1888, 5. For another study of the way in which the public can define, and redefine, a legal concept, see Grossberg, Michael, A Judgment for Solomon: The d'Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42. E.g., Chicago Daily News, 26 November 1886, 1; Chicago Daily News, 21 December 1886, 1; Chicago Tribune, 3 May 1887, 4. In contrast to the Daily News, which tended to condemn the entire criminal justice system from police officer to judge, the Tribune did not inevitably condemn the police. Chicago Tribune, 2 May 1887, 10. At other times, however, even the Tribune blamed the parts of the system. Chicago Tribune, 12 April 1884, 4. Chicago Herald, 29 February 1888, 1. Compare the similar arguments expressed only two years before, when the “prevailing sentiment,” in the words of one historian of the Haymarket case, was “Hang them first and try them afterwards.” Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 218. Chicago Inter-Ocean, 29 February 1888, 2; Chicago Tribune, 28 March 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 4 April 1888, 4 (editorial).

43. Chicago Daily News, 3 July 1886, 4 (law being mocked in Chicago); ibid., 15 March 1886, 2 (failure to enforce liquor laws); see also Masters, Tale of Chicago, 280 (discussing the general sense that the courts were corrupt); Chicago Daily News, 13 November 1886, 2 (attacking judge for creating a loophole). Sometimes this turned into an attack on lawyers. See Chicago Daily News, 1 March 1886, 2; Chicago Tribune, 12 April 1888, 4 (editorial on legal system); Chicago Herald, 13 May 1888, 4 (editorial on law's delay) and note the letter to the editor of that same paper on that same subject, 2 March 1888, 4. Nor was this limited to the newspapers. See Chicago Daily News, 2 March 1886, 1 (reporting an attack on lawyers by an evangelist). For further evidence that this was a general problem, and not one limited to the Davis case, see the discussion in Masters, Tale of Chicago, 241 (noting the way requirements of law were ignored by those who called for strict enforcement in other areas).

44. For examples of this reaction during Haymarket, see Chicago Daily News, 4 August 1886, 2; Masters, Tale of Chicago, 241, 279-80. Compare Chicago Daily News, 23 December 1885, 2 (article condemning nonenforcement of criminal laws) with Chicago Daily News, 13 November 1886, 2 (article condemning judge for a strict reading of a law in a criminal case).

45. Chicago Times, 1 March 1888, 5; Chicago Daily News, 29 February 1888, 1; Chicago Tribune, 2 March 1888, 4 (editorial); Western Appeal, 10 March 1888, 1. For a sarcastic account of this meeting, see Chicago Tribune, 7 March 1888, 1, and Chicago Herald, 7 March 1888, 3. The African-American press in Chicago mounted a campaign to defeat the coroner in the next election but failed to do so. Western Appeal, 22 September 1888, 1; Chicago Tribune, 5 March 1888, 3, and 2 April 1888, 3. On the Assembly, see Nelson, Bruce, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago's Anarchists, 1870–1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 40–44Google Scholar; Wade, Louise Carroll, Chicago's Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 234Google Scholar; Chicago Tribune, 24 March 1888, 7 (article on hearing against Greene's factory), and 28 March 1888, 7 (article on hearing); Chicago Times, 28 March 1888, 6 (the same). The Chicago Times had earlier expressed keen approval of the coroner jury's verdict (1 March 1888, 5).

46. On juries, see, e.g., Chicago Daily News, 4 January 1886, 2 (article and editorial on the same page). For other, informal group activities, see Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, 40-44 (meetings between rival workers groups); Masters, Tale of Chicago, 212 (worker's group's protest meetings); Sawislak, Smoldering City, 236-40 (rival meetings on saloon closing laws); Elizabeth Dale, “‘Social Equality Does Not Exist among Themselves, Nor among Us’: Baylies vs Curry and Civil Rights in Chicago, 1888,” American Historical Review 102 (April 1997): 311, 315-16 (African-American protest meetings).

For a variety of accounts of such gatherings, see, generally, Western Appeal, 15 February 1890, 1 (public debate on civil rights law); Chicago Daily News, 4 February 1886, 1 (sermon attacking law); Chicago Tribune, 6 July 1885, 8 (sermon on the meaning of law); Chicago Daily News, 5 February 1886, 2 (brief editorial on sermon the day before); Chicago Tribune, 12 April 1888,4 (bar association meeting in defense of law); Chicago Daily News, 10 March 1884, 4 (lecture on the failures of civil rights); Chicago Tribune, 2 March 1888, 4 (editorial refers to calls for child labor laws by Chicago's Ethical Culture Society); Chicago Daily News, 1 February 1884, 1 (African-American community holds protest meeting concerning civil rights laws, and their nonenforcement in the south); Sawislak, Smoldering City, 227-28 (ethnically diverse Committee of Twenty-five debates law enforcement); ibid., 229-30 (formation of Committee of Seventy, which called for strict enforcement of “their moral and civic vision”); Chicago Daily News, 25 December 1886, 3 (Citizens Association recommends reform of County Board); Chicago Daily News, 18 January 1887, 1 (Citizens Association questions safety features of Chicago theaters, proposes to personally inspect them all); Chicago Tribune, 1 July 1887, 5 (neighborhood gathering of people at Butterfield and Dearborn forces city to enforce laws against houses of prostitution in neighborhood).

47. Compare the discussions in Sawislak, Smoldering City, ch. 5, and Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, ch. 8. See also the discussion in Masters, Tale of Chicago, 193-94. There is reason to think that their ideological motivations may have been very different. One may see a lingering sense of civic republicanism in some of these gatherings, and a liberal notion of rights in others. At the same time, in the case of some of the ethnic or socialist groups, the influence was European political tradition. To get some sense of the ideological influences, compare the discussions of public activity in Ryan, Mary P., Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar, and Ethington, The Public City, with the discussions of particular group activities in Chicago in Sawislak, Smoldering City, Smith, Urban Disorder, and Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs.

48. Chicago Daily News, 23 October 1884, 2 (reacting to an article in the North American Review); ibid., 16 December 1886, 2 (reacting to article in the Chicago-based Arbeiter Zeitung); ibid., 11 September 1885, 2 (reacting to an editorial in the Chicago Inter-Ocean). Weekly ethnic presses also participated in this sort of debate. Thus the Chicago-based Catholic Home carried articles challenging stories in national and local papers. See Catholic Home, 18 August 1888,4 (discussing article in Boston Republic); ibid., 17 November 1888, 4 (attacking an article in the Chicago Tribune); ibid., 24 November 1888, 4 (the same). A similar pattern existed within the Chicago African-American press. See Dale, “‘Social Equality,’” 317 and n.20; Chicago Tribune, 7 March 1888, 1 (article on African-American protest meeting), and ibid., 12 April 1888, 4 (editorial on bar association meeting on criminal justice). For a similar argument, see Ryan, Civic Wars, 13. For the different types of papers, see Pierce, A History of Chicago, 408-19 (newspapers in general), 255-61 (ethnic and labor papers).

49. Chicago Tribune, 2 March 1888, 4 (editorial).

50. For the idea of toleration set forth in the context of interracial relationships in the South, see Hodes, Martha, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).Google Scholar For some indication of Chicago's views, see Chicago Daily News, 15 February 1884, 2 (editorial on the marriage of Frederick Douglass to a white woman); ibid., 26 January 1884, 6 (article interviewing an African American on the subject of Douglass's marriage); ibid., 21 April 1884, 1 (article on William Moore, an African-American man who lived with a white woman); ibid, 17 January 1885, 1 (article on African-American man who was married to a white woman). Consider also the discussion in Luker, Ralph, Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 174Google Scholar (discussing the Manassas Society, a Chicago group for interracial couples). For more views on general interaction of the races in this period, see Gatewood, Willard, Artistocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990)Google Scholar, passim, and Dale, “‘Social Equality.’”

51. E.g., Western Appeal, 11 June 1887, 2. On lynching and interracial sex, see Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993)Google Scholar, 69 fig. 4; Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 172-73. On general interracial relations, see Dale, “Social Equality,” 317-18, 322, and passim.

52. The attorneys were Edward Morris and his occasional partner, Frederick McGhee. For stories on their activism, see Western Appeal, 10 March 1888, 1; ibid, 30 November 1889, 1; ibid., 8 February 1890, 1; Chicago Daily News, 24 February 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 6 March 1888, 5; Chicago Tribune, 20 March 1888, 6.

53. Chicago Herald, 6 March 1888, 5; Chicago Daily News, 28 February 1888, 1; Chicago Daily News, 2 March 1888, 1; Chicago Inter-Ocean, 6 March 1888, 7; Chicago InterOcean, 4 April 1888,4.

54. E.g., Grossberg, Judgment for Solomon; Hartog, Hendrik, “Lawyering, Husbands' Rights, and ‘the Unwritten Law’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 84 (June 1997): 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dale, “‘Social Equality.’”

55. But compare Grossberg, Judgment for Solomon, 169-70, and chapter 5.

56. See Ethington, Public City, 15-16; Habermas, Jurgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 27–31Google Scholar, and passim.

In applying Habermas's theory of the public sphere to nineteenth-century urban affairs, these studies self-consciously modify his original notion of the public sphere, which he placed in opposition to the civil state that arose in Europe with the fall of absolutism. Hamm, Richard F., Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1995), 6–9Google Scholar; Habermas, Public Sphere, 14-26 and passim. Given that emphasis, although purists may quarrel with the idea of equating the state with a smaller unit of government, the objection arguably puts form above substance. The power of the national government over people's lives increased over the course of the nineteenth century, ultimately giving rise to the creation of the administrative state that Habermas defined as the end of the public sphere. But in the late nineteenth-century United States, local, not national government constituted the state that governed people's lives and work. Habermas, Public Sphere, 178-79; Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For much of the nineteenth century, local government was all that most people knew. It was the sovereign in the area of criminal law. At the same time, in other areas such as regulation of work, economy, and other aspects of everyday life, the state and local governments retained their police powers and hence their authority over the lives of those who lived within their borders. Skowronek, New American State, 23. In light of that coercive authority, it seems consistent with Habermas's idea, if not precisely his Eurocentric description, of the public sphere, to juxtapose it to the state and local governments in the late nineteenth-century United States.

57. To quote Habermas, it existed so that people could engage public authorities in “a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” Habermas, Public Sphere, 27. See also the discussion in Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment.

58. Chicago Tribune, 16 March 1888, 8; Chicago Daily News, 28 March 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 29 March 1888, 4; Chicago Tribune, 30 March 1888, 1; Chicago Daily News, 30 March 1888, 1.

59. Chicago Inter-Ocean, 29 March 1888, 3; Chicago Tribune, 29 March 1888, 3; Chicago Daily News, 29 March 1888, 1.

60. Chicago Daily News, 29 March 1888, 1.

61. Chicago Daily News, 29 March 1888, 1; Chicago Inter-Ocean, 30 March 1888, 7; Chicago Tribune, 30 March 1888, 9. McConnell, “The Chicago Bomb Case,” 723; Master, Tale of Chicago, 217; Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 264-27.

62. Chicago Inter-Ocean, 31 March 1888, 6; Chicago Daily News, 30 March 1888, 1.

63. Chicago Tribune, 30 March 1888, 9.

64. Chicago Daily News, 19 March 1888, 1; Chicago Tribune, 20 March 1888, 6; Chicago Times, 29 March 1888,4; Chicago Daily News, 2 April 1888, 1; Chicago Inter-Ocean, 4 April 1888, 4.

65. Chicago Times, 1 April 1888, 1; Chicago Daily News, 2 April 1888, 1. The statute creating the insanity defense in Illinois was Illinois Revised Statutes ch. 38 par. 284 sec. 12.

66. Chicago Daily News, 2 April 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 29 April 1888, 3; Chicago Daily News, 28 March 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 29 March 1888, 3. Compare the similar arguments made in the case involving President Garfield's assassin. Rosenberg, Trial of the Assassin Guiteau, 98-99.

67. On the insanity defense in the Busch case, Chicago Tribune, 1 May 1888, 4. On public reaction to the defense in the trial of Garfield's assassin, Rosenberg, Trial of the Assassin Guiteau, passim.

68. Chicago Daily News, 2 April 1888, 1.

69. Chicago Tribune, 8 April 1888, 9.

70. Chicago Times, 3 April 1888, 8.

71. Needless to say, this was not what the law provided about insanity. See Illinois Revised Statutes ch. 38 par. 284 sec. 12.

72. But even that transgression was sanctioned by Illinois law, which specifically provided that “jurors in all criminal cases are judges of the law and fact.” The Illinois Supreme Court had long read that statute to permit jurors to ignore their instructions where they concluded that they were “better qualified to judge the law than the court,” and had, ironically enough, reaffirmed that interpretation only months before, while deciding the appeal of the Haymarket defendants. Spies et al. v. Illinois, 122 Ill. 1, 252-53 (1887). Although a similar instruction was neither offered, nor given in the Davis case, the statute establishes that the outcome of the trial was, therefore, not only an example of popular will replacing formal law, it was, incongruous as the statement sounds, legitimately so.

73. Chicago Tribune, 12 April 1888, 4 (editorial). See also Chicago Times, 4 April 1888, 4.

74. Chicago Tribune, 12 April 1888, 4.

75. Chicago Tribune, 1 May 1888, 4.

76. Chicago Tribune, 13 May 1888, 17. The Chicago Times made a similar point, also using the Davis case as an example. Chicago Times, 4 April 1888, 4 (editorial).

77. Chicago Daily News, 8 May 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 12 May 1888, 4 (praising governor for refusing to grant the petition).

78. Chicago Tribune, 14 May 1888, 4 (editorial).

79. William Shakespeare, Macbeth 1.4.7. The Chicago Daily News made almost precisely that point in that very language. Chicago Daily News, 12 May 1888, 1. But see Chicago Herald, 13 May 1888, 17, noting that the crowd took away from the solemnity of the occasion, but tending to dismiss the scaffold scene as pathetic. The paper made it clear that Davis showed neither the “bravery of the hardened criminal nor manly courage, [but]… the brutish stupor of dense ignorance.”

80. Chicago Tribune, 4 April 1888, 8; Chicago Daily News, 13 April 1888, 1; Chicago Tribune, 14 April 1888,8; Western Appeal, 28 April 1888, 1; Chicago Daily News, 7 May 1888, 1; Chicago Times, 10 May 1888, 3; Chicago Daily News, 10 May 1888, 1; Chicago Tribune, 13 May 1888, 10. For the tradition of execution sermons, see Masur, Louis, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Williams, Daniel E., compiler, Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives (Madison: Madison House, 1993).Google Scholar

81. For criticisms of Habermas's theory on these lines, see Ryan, Mary P., “Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth Century America,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, Craig (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 259–88Google Scholar, and Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” ibid., 30, 307-19; Mary Ryan, Civic Wars.

82. On Chicago's African-American community's political activity, see, e.g., Western Appeal, 25 February 1888, 1 (article on interstate commerce commission ruling regarding segregated seating); Chicago Daily News, 1 February 1884, 1 (meeting of Chicago African Americans); Chicago Daily News, 10 October 1884, 1 (noting that an African American would bring a suit to challenge a violation of the state civil rights law); Chicago Daily News, 15 March 1886, 1 (article on suit won by African American under civil rights law). See, generally, Spear, Allan, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963)Google Scholar and Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 119-23. For women's organizations and the WCTU in particular, see Pierce, A History of Chicago, 456-59; for ethnic and labor organizations, ibid., 297-99; ibid., 48-50 (African-American papers and activism); ibid., 255-61 (ethnic and labor papers); Smith, Urban Disorder, passim; and Nelson, Beyond the Martyrs, passim.

83. It may also help supply an answer to another historical conundrum—the question of Northern nonreaction to tales of lynching from the South. If popular justice was perceived to be legitimate, at least on some occasions, then one might expect that lynching might not provoke much outrage.