great crowd collected after nightfall, stormed her door, found
seven slaves chained and bearing marks of inhuman treatment, and gutted
the house. The woman herself had fled at the first alarm, and made her way
eventually to Paris.[41] Had she been brought before a modern court it may
be doubted whether she would have been committed to a penitentiary or to
a lunatic asylum. At the hands of the mob, however, her shrift would
presumably have been short and sure.

[Footnote 38: For examples of these see above, pp. 460-463.]

[Footnote 39: _Calendar of Virginia State Papers_, V, 328.]

[Footnote 40: _Southern Banner_ (Athens, Ga.), June 14, 1860. Other
instances, gleaned mostly from _Niles' Register_ and the _Liberator_, are
given in J.E. Cutler, _Lynch Law_ (New York, 1905), pp. 90-136.]

[Footnote 41: Harriett Martineau, _Retrospect of Western Travel_ (London,
1838), I, 262-267; V. Debouchel, _Histoire de la Louisiane_ (New Orleans,
1841), p. 155; Alcee Fortier, _History of Louisiana_, III, 223.]

The violence of city mobs is a thing peculiar to no time or place. Rural
Southern lynch law in that period, however, was in large part a special
product of the sparseness of population and the resulting weakness of legal
machinery, for as Olmsted justly remarked in the middle 'fifties, the whole
South was virtually still in a frontier condition.[42] In _post bellum_
decades, on the other hand, an increase of racial antipathy has offset the
effect of the densification of settlement and has abnormally prolonged the
liability to the lynching impulse.

[Footnote 42: F.L. Olmsted, _Journey in the Back Country_, p. 413.]

While the records have no parallel for Madame Lalaurie in her systematic
and wholesale torture of slaves, there were thousands of masters and
mistresses as tolerant and kindly as she was fiendish; and these were
virtually without restraint of public authority in their benevolent rule.
Lawmakers and magistrates by personal status in their own plantation
provinces, they ruled with a large degree of consent and cooperation by the
governed, for indeed no other course was feasible in the long run by men
and women of normal type. Concessions and friendly services beyond the
countenance and contemplation of the statutes were habitual with those
whose name was legion. The law, for example, conceded no property rights
to the slaves, and some statutes forbade specifically their possession
of horses, but the following chara