cuous existence on a small pension, in the other
abruptly finishes his career by being hung for horse-stealing.

In the backwoods the lawless led lives of abandoned wickedness; they
hated good for good's sake, and did their utmost to destroy it. Where
the bad element was large, gangs of horse thieves, highwaymen, and other
criminals often united with the uncontrollable young men of vicious
tastes who were given to gambling, fighting, and the like. They then
formed half-secret organizations, often of great extent and with wide
ramifications; and if they could control a community they established a
reign of terror, driving out both ministers and magistrates, and killing
without scruple those who interfered with them. The good men in such a
case banded themselves together as regulators and put down the wicked
with ruthless severity, by the exercise of lynch law, shooting and
hanging the worst off-hand.[55]

Jails were scarce in the wilderness, and often were entirely wanting in
a district, which, indeed, was quite likely to lack legal officers also.
If punishment was inflicted at all it was apt to be severe, and took the
form of death or whipping. An impromptu jury of neighbors decided with a
rough and ready sense of fair play and justice what punishment the crime
demanded, and then saw to the execution of their own decree. Whipping
was the usual reward of theft. Occasionally torture was resorted to, but
not often; and to their honor be it said, the backwoodsmen were
horrified at the treatment accorded both to black slaves and to white
convict servants in the lowlands.[56]

They were superstitious, of course, believing in witchcraft, and signs
and omens; and it may be noted that their superstition showed a singular
mixture of old-world survivals and of practices borrowed from the
savages or evolved by the very force of their strange surroundings. At
the bottom they were deeply religious in their tendencies; and although
ministers and meeting-houses were rare, yet the backwoods cabins often
contained Bibles, and the mothers used to instil into the minds of their
children reverence for Sunday,[57] while many even of the hunters
refused to hunt on that day.[58] Those of them who knew the right
honestly tried to live up to it, in spite of the manifold temptations to
backsliding offered by their lives of hard and fierce contention.[59]
But Calvinism, though more congenial to them than Episcopacy, and
infinitely more so than C