Judge Lynch!

“Judge Lynch Holds Court!” My god, what an oxymoron, how could we let this happen?  No, how could we have done it? We just killed a half million men, for what, to give the lie to our lives?

            Judge William F. Parrett, Jr., stared incredulously at the huge headline in the Mt. Vernon, Indiana, Western Star weekly newspaper of Thursday, October 17, 1878.

            Could it be true that in the early morning of Saturday, October 12, “two to three hundred of Mt. Vernon’s best men,” right outside his beautiful new courthouse, had broken into the old jail and desecrated the huge locust trees outside his courtroom windows?

            The next day the four young Negroes were still hanging there to be seen by all.  If Parrett had walked his family their normal route by the Posey Circuit Courthouse on their way to church October 13^th, they would have passed within a few feet of the bodies.  The judge had kept his family home that morning by claiming he was expecting William Gudgel, the prosecuting attorney, to come by and ask the judge to impanel an emergency grand jury.  “A reminder to others”, the news article said in reference to the “strange fruit” left hanging on the courthouse campus.

            A reminder to whom of what, Parrett wondered. Was the irony lost on “others” or on himself?

            And what of these “best men” who allegedly overpowered Deputy Sheriff Ed Hayes and his deputies then butchered old Dan Harrison with the knives and swords they had carried not long ago in the great struggle for Harrison’s civil rights?

            In the jailhouse privy, they stuffed his body parts in the privy.  Sweet Jesus, how could the Harrison family maintain any other memory? And what of young Dan Harrison who allegedly started this debacle by joining in the rape of those white women on Monday, October 7?  What’s left for his widowed mother and his seven siblings to mourn over?

            Editor John Leffel’s account obliquely referred to young Dan’s “escape”, but Leffel knew Dan had been hunted down trying to hide in the coal car of the Evansville & Crawfordsville Railroad.

            Leffel had told Judge Parrett how several of their mutual friends led by one of Posey County’s wealthiest businessmen had flushed young Dan Harrison out of the false cistern under Robin Hill Manor near the railroad tracks.

            Dan then ran towards the crossing at the Lower New Harmony Plank Road where the train had to slow down to watch for carriage traffic.

            The vigilantes saw him hop the train.  They boarded the train and ordered the frightened engineer at gunpoint to hold the train while they searched for Harrison.

            When they found him trying to hide under the coal, they ordered the coal stoker to open the fire door to the engine. The men then threw the struggling young Daniel Harrison into the fire.