Lynchers Don't Like Lead

by JOE JORDAN

1

TWENTY-SIX years ago, on February 9, 1920, a mob at Lexington, Kentucky, bent upon lynching a Negro who was on trial for murdering a white child, charged the Fayette County courthouse. The members of the mob, all white men, were fired upon and repulsed by white soldiers and white civil officers. Six men were killed and fifty or more were wounded. Of the hundreds of newspapers throughout the United States which hastened to praise Fayette County officials for their somewhat astonishing stand against mob violence, many pointed out, as did the Brooklyn Eagle in a typical comment, that the Lexington incident marked “the first time south of Mason and Dixon’s Line that any mob of this sort had actually met the volley fire of soldiers.”

At the time, a number of the writers of editorials indicated a cautious belief and hope that the “Second Battle of Lexington” might mark a turning point in the method of dealing with mobs. It now appears that they were right. In 1919, mobs had lynched eighty-three persons in the United States. That figure has not been approached since the Lexington mob was dealt with so vigorously. In 1944, there were only two lynchings in the entire country. To avoid the danger of selecting by chance two unusual years, it is safer to consider five-year averages. In the five years preceding 1920, mobs had lynched an average of sixty-one victims a year; in the live years preceding 1945, lynchings averaged fewer than four a year.

A decisive encounter between determined officers and a determined mob was bound to occur sometime. It occurred at Lexington, that February day in 1920, because the mob picked the wrong town for a lynching party. Fayette County had not seen a lynching in fifty years. It didn’t see one then, and it hasn’t seen one since. Thousands of outsiders flocked to Lexington on the day of the trial, and some Alabamians who arrived the day before, disclosed to reporters that they had made the long trip to have a part in the expected lynching. They misjudged the temper and underestimated the courage of the county officials, who had issued plain warnings that anyone attempting to take the prisoner from them would be killed.

Will Lockett, the Negro who was to be tried, had killed a ten-year-old white girl at South Elkhorn, in the southern section of Fayette County. It was a revolting crime. The child had been seized when she was walking to a country school less than 400 yards from her home. She had been dragged into a cornfield and there her skull had been crushed by repeated savage blows with a large rock. Her body, half hidden under a fodder shock, had been found after she failed to appear at school.

Lockett, a World War I veteran who still was wearing his Army uniform, had left a country store in the neighborhood shortly before the crime was committed, and was suspected immediately. He was found six hours later, six miles away. A doctor and two other civilians who captured him took him to Lexington hurriedly, for they feared a mob would form and they wanted to get him into the hands of the law.

At Lexington police headquarters, Lockett confessed promptly. He was removed to the county jail, but almost at once the officers decided it would be safer to take him to the state penitentiary at Frankfort. When he was led out of the jail, a crowd already was beginning to form in the street, but it was not large enough to menace the officers who had him in charge, and within an hour he was behind the walls of the Frankfort prison.

As news of the crime spread, the crowd in front of the jail increased, and by dark it numbered several hundred. Its members refused to accept the jailer’s statement that Lockett had been taken to Frankfort. There is a traditional procedure in such cases, and it was followed. The jailer consented to admit a committee to search the jail and inspect the prisoners. The committee, which included a farmer by whom Lockett had been employed, looked into the faces of all the frightened Negroes in the jail and went out to assure the crowd that Lockett was not there.

Of course, there have been many similar cases in which the wrong man has been identified and dragged out, but the Negroes in the Lexington jail were lucky that night. The mob then went to police headquarters, where a similar search was permitted. Convinced that Lockett had been taken to Frankfort, the mob’s leaders attempted to charter interurban electric cars for the trip to the state capital, but tractioncompany officials refused to accommodate them, and approximately three hundred men set out in automobiles.

The late Edwin P. Morrow, then Governor of Kentucky, was informed by telephone that the mob was on its way to Frankfort. He acted with characteristic vigor. One hundred special deputies, armed with shotguns and rifles, were sent to the penitentiary to reinforce the regular guards there. Governor Morrow took charge at the prison gate.

Meanwhile Sheriff Bain Moore of Franklin County had taken a force of men to the outskirts of Frankfort, on the Lexington Pike. He stopped the first cars in the caravan from Lexington, had them turned crosswise of the road to establish a blockade, and warned the mob members that they would meet certain death if they attempted to remove the prisoner from the penitentiary. Most of the men turned back. A few who got past the sheriff’s barricade were arrested on Governor Morrow’s order when they appeared at the prison gate.

The crime was committed and Lockett was arrested on Wednesday, February 4. A Fayette County grand jury indicted Lockett the next day on a murder charge, and his trial was set for the following Monday, only five days after the slaying.

Everybody realized that a serious situation could develop when Lockett was returned to Lexington for the trial. Circuit Judge Charles Kerr and County Judge Frank A. Bullock — in Kentucky the county judge is the administrative head of the county government — conferred with other county officials, with Mayor Thomas C. Bradley of Lexington, and with Governor Morrow. It was decided that there would be no running away from the issue by postponing the trial to a secret date or ordering a change of venue. Governor Morrow promised a company of state troops from Campbell County, in northern Kentucky.

It was admitted that the public did not have so much respect for “Home Guards" as for Regular Army soldiers, and the officials looked longingly toward Camp Taylor, less than a hundred miles away, where the crack First Division Regulars, veterans of World War I, were stationed. The Governor could not obtain Federal troops, however, without certifying that a state of lawlessness existed with which the state authority was unable to cope.

2

IN THE interval between Lockett’s arrest and his trial, the Lexington newspapers pleaded for peace and order. Negro organizations adopted resolutions “condemning the horrible outrage” and demanding that the guilty member of their race “be punished promptly and adequately.”A group of South Elkhorn residents met Saturday afternoon at the courthouse and issued an appeal by T. L. Hardman, brother of the slain girl, which was carried in both Lexington newspapers Sunday morning.

“As a brother of Geneva Hardman, who was murdered by Will Lockett, and as a representative of her family,” he said, “I request all of our friends and all those who sympathize with us not to indulge in any violence or create any disturbance when he is brought here for trial. The authorities have acted promptly, the man is under arrest, he has been indicted promptly and his trial fixed for Monday. I feel sure that a prompt and speedy trial will take place and that any jury impaneled will find him guilty and punish him adequately for the horrible crime he has committed. . . . I would hate to see the life of any other person endangered as the result of violence by reason of conflict over a brute like this, and I therefore urge all citizens, for the good name of the county and in the interest of law and order, to do nothing to interfere with the orderly processes of the law.”

In an editorial headed, “Let the Law Take Its Course,” the Lexington Leader commented: “If this bereaved brother can assume such an attitude at this time, certainly those who sympathize so deeply with him can afford to await calmly the verdict of the jury. . . . The people of Fayette County can afford to let the law take its course in this case. They cannot afford to incur the just criticism of the people of the nation which would follow a resort to mob rule.” The Lexington Herald advanced similar arguments. Sunday morning the congregation of the South Elkhorn Christian Church, composed entirely of neighbors of the murdered child, adopted a resolution calling for orderly administration of the law. Every effort was being made to prepare the public for the crisis expected on Monday.

These appeals appeared to have had the desired effect in Fayette County itself. In a news story the day before the trial, the Herald reported: “Indignation on the part of the citizens last night turned into determination that the law should take its course.” The Leader found that “the mob spirit, which was prevalent immediately after the atrocity was committed, has died down and has been replaced by a willingness to let the law take its course.”The Leader added, however, that there had been “reports that other counties would send delegations here to ‘get’ Lockett.”

Both newspapers repeatedly assured the public that there could be but one outcome of the trial — speedy conviction and a death sentence. Said a Leader news story: “It is anticipated that if Lockett is sentenced to be electrocuted, as it is generally believed he will be, the same military protection will be given him while he is on his way to the penitentiary where the electrocution will take place. . . . It is thought the trial will be a speedy one. After the jury is chosen, the actual trial ought to be over in a very short time.” Thus it was hoped to make clear to the public that the issue was not whether Lockett would be punished, but whether the punishment would be carried out lawfully or by a mob.

Adjutant General J. M. Deweese, who was to be in charge of the state troops, issued a brief, forceful warning: “The responsibility for any bloodshed at this trial will rest on those who disregard their duty as citizens and attempt to take the law out of the hands of the constituted authorities.” Fayette County Sheriff J. Waller Rodes, who had hurried home from a business trip to Texas to take charge of the county’s defense measures, said, “Under no circumstances will the prisoner be taken away from the guards.”

At one o’clock Monday morning, the day of the trial, police began stretching steel cables in the empty streets, to keep spectators at a distance from the courthouse. The lines were no more than boundary markers, since it would be easy enough to slip through them. At 3.45 A.M., a special train arrived from Frankfort, bringing Sheriff Rodes, General Deweese, the prisoner, and the state troops. The train stopped before it reached Union Station, and the soldiers marched two blocks with their prisoner and entered the courthouse without incident.

By seven o’clock, a crowd had begun to form on Main Street, in front of the courthouse. It grew rapidly. The trial had been set for nine o’clock. When that hour approached, there were immense crowds on the Main Street and Short Street sides of the building, but officers kept everyone outside the cables except officials, prospective jurors, newsmen, and just enough spectators to fill the courtroom.

The approach to the main entrance of the courthouse is by broad flights of stone steps which lead to the second floor. All ground-floor entrances had been barred. The first flight of front steps ends at a level landing which runs off to the right and left to connect with walks from Upper Street and Cheapside, at an elevation higher than the Main Street sidewalk and the front lawn. Soldiers were stationed behind the stone parapet around the front of this landing. A machine gun had been set up on the landing. At the top of the highest flight of steps, just inside the wide front doors, were more soldiers with rifles and deputies with shotguns. Soldiers also had been stationed in various offices in the building, at open windows commanding the steps.

The defense setup appeared to be adequate. Men attempting to reach the front doors would have to get through the cable barrier (which would not be difficult, but would separate them from the crowd), then cross a bare, level space approaching the steps, and mount the steps in the face of fire from the protected soldiers, who had been posted in positions that would enable them to sweep the steps with rifle and machinegun fire. That it would be the height of folly to attempt to storm such a position, any man of judgment could see — but mobs are not made up of men of judgment.

The crowd that surrounded the courthouse square was estimated by some observers to number 8000 to 10,000. Such guesses usually are high. A conservative estimate would be 5000 to 6000. Of these, comparatively few were there with any serious idea of attempting to take the prisoner out of the courthouse. Most of them had come out of curiosity, half hoping, perhaps, that they would see fighting. University of Kentucky students (I was one of them) had left the campus in droves, flocking to the downtown district to share in the excitement, in spite of repeated warnings for all peaceful citizens to stay out of the danger zone. The authorities had pointed out that spectators would be in as much danger as participants if a battle developed. Many lookers-on were in a nervously jovial mood, exchanging jokes about how fast they would run if shooting started.

Presently people began to point out a man with a coil of rope over his left shoulder. He pushed his way forward to the cable, at a point directly in front of the steps. In addition to the ones who appeared to be in his party, other grim-faced men began sifting through the crowd and gathering around him. The merely curious spectators who happened to be in that vicinity dropped back and were replaced by additional angry, cursing men who “meant business.”

Thus the nucleus of the mob was formed. It appeared to be unplanned, this concentration. Naturally, the ones who actually considered rushing the courthouse would gather at the spot from which the charge would have to start, and as they got together and bolstered one another’s courage, perhaps no one of them wanted to appear cowardly before his fellows and so they all persuaded themselves that the thing could be done, that the civil officers and soldiers would not dare shoot white men to protect a Negro murderer.

The courthouse clock struck nine times. Everybody realized that if anything was to be done, it would have to be done soon. The threats and cursing became louder up near the barrier, while those in the background ceased their joking, suddenly aware that the situation might turn dangerous after all.

3

INSIDE the courthouse, as we were to learn later from the newspapers, the trial started promptly. Judge Kerr was on the bench. Every seat in the courtroom was filled, but no one was allowed to stand in the spectators’ section, behind the rail. In front of the rail, in the space reserved for jurors, attorneys, and court officials, a few men were standing, among them County Judge Bullock. Lockett sat at the defense table, surrounded by four deputies. The bailiff rapped for order, pounding his gavel on a desk across which he had laid an automatic shotgun.

As had been predicted, the trial proceeded with a minimum of delay. A jury was selected quickly. The only question asked each prospective juror was whether he had any conscientious scruples against the death penalty. The court had appointed two leading members of the bar as defense counsel, George R. Hunt and Colonel Samuel M. Wilson. Mr. Hunt filed a demurrer to the indictment, explaining that he was doing it “as a matter of form,” but that the indictment appeared to be properly drawn.

Asked whether he wished to plead guilty or not guilty, Lockett mumbled a reply inaudible to the spectators. “Defendant pleads guilty, your Honor,” the clerk announced.

Only one witness testified, a man who established the fact of the child’s death and told of finding her with a heavy stone on her face. The defendant did not take the stand. Colonel Wilson read Lockett’s honorable discharge from the Army, which stated that his character was “very good,” and then read a statement in which the defendant asked for a life sentence. “I know I do not deserve mercy,” it said, “but I am sorry I committed the crime and I would give anything if the little girl could be brought back to life.”

Colonel John R. Allen, Commonwealth’s Attorney, made a brief prosecution argument to the jury. “In all the history of crime in the United States,” he said, “there has been none to equal this in cruelty. In the name of the law, and of the little girl who was murdered, I ask you to act quickly, and suggest that you return a verdict without leaving the jury box.”

While this was taking place in the courtroom, the crowd in the street became more restive. A deputy sheriff engaged in a brief fist fight with a man who had crawled under the cable barrier, and the man was dragged away by two policemen. A newsreel cameraman had been admitted to a cleared space on the lawn and had set up his camera near the equestrian statue of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan. He had taken pictures of the soldiers and the crowd, but apparently he wanted something showing action or emotion. “ Shake your fists and yell!” he called out to the nearest spectators. They obligingly did so.

The people who shook their fists and yelled to please the cameraman were just outside the cable barrier, but they were a hundred feet or so east of the nucleus of the real mob. Their action, however, was like a spark in the highly charged atmosphere. It was answered by a roar from the mob — a savage, bestial roar. I was not to hear anything like it again until the radio carried to America the roars with which a Nazi mob responded to an impassioned harangue by Hitler on the eve of Munich.

Men in the forefront of the mob hoisted the cables and went under them quickly, as if the shouts had been a signal. The man with the rope was among the leaders.

General Deweese had taken a stand in an open space at the approach to the first flight of steps. His men had orders not to shoot unless he fired his revolver twice into the air. As the leaders of the charge approached the General, he backed about twenty steps, pistol in hand. When they reached him, he grappled with two of them, and struck one over the head with the pistol. The others surged around him and in a moment had mounted the first flight of steps and reached the landing. They bowled over a machine gunner and kicked his gun aside.

Deweese fired the two signal shots, and a withering volley was discharged. Men piled up on the steps, some wounded, others dropping to escape the bullets. A dozen or more who had passed the landing before the firing began rushed on up the remaining steps to the front doors, but turned back and ran when the soldiers and deputies who had been stationed inside the doors surged out with rifles and shotguns pointed at them.

The one burst of firing, which lasted only a few seconds, had halted the mob, and the soldiers held their fire. Some witnesses estimated that as many as fifty shots had been fired by members of the mob at the defenders of the courthouse; others denied it. That there was some firing from the mob was certain, for three policemen and one soldier were wounded, and today there are still chipped places where bullets struck the stone front of the courthouse.

All the merely curious spectators — except the ones who had been hit — broke and ran as soon as the firing started. The action-seeking cameraman, lugging his camera, tripod and all, sped past many of them before they reached Limestone Street, a block east. (For some strange reason, almost everyone ran east, even those who had been standing west of the steps.) The number of spectators hit never was determined accurately. Some of t he soldiers said later that they had fired over the heads of the mob leaders who were mounting the steps. Their bullets went into the crowd or shattered store windows across the street. At least one man was fatally injured, who had been standing backed up against a store front on the opposite side of Main Street. A woman clerk inside a store was struck in the ankle by a bullet.

Of those who had fallen on the steps, the uninjured and slightly injured crawled away, and the others were carried away. One man was taken to a doctor’s office near-by and died there within a few minutes. Four others died at hospitals before midnight. The sixth victim died several days later.

Twenty-one wounded persons were treated at hospitals. The newspapers said “scores” were treated at drugstores for less serious injuries, such as being peppered by nearly spent buckshot or being knocked down and trampled. Fearing prosecution, several members of the mob who were shot were reported to have been taken home by friends. Avoiding hospitals, they were treated by their physicians, and no reports were made. That as many as fifty were wounded appears to be a conservative estimate.

4

IN THE courtroom, Colonel Allen was making the closing statement to the jury when the crowd’s roar was heard, followed by firing. “It’s started!” several spectators shouted, leaping to their feet. Deputies pointed pistols and commanded them to sit down. The trial proceeded.

The jurors quickly reached the expected verdict — death. Lockett was called around and Judge Kerr stood to pronounce sentence. At that moment an excited man ran into the courtroom and shouted, “Judge, you better let ‘em have the nigger! They’re going to tear the courthouse down if you don’t!”

Again the deputies pointed their pistols and Colonel Allen — not an honorary but a military colonel, to whom it would be no new experience to be under fire — calmly counseled the crowd in the courtroom to remain seated. Judge Kerr as calmly proceeded with the sentencing, specifying that Lockett should die March 11 in the electric chair at Eddyville Penitentiary and concluding, “May the God of All Mercy have mercy on your soul.”

Down in the street, as soon as the first shock was over and the mob members grasped the unbelievable fact that the officers and soldiers actually had fired upon them, had wounded many, and probably had killed a number of them, a cry for vengeance went up. Now they wanted not the prisoner alone, but the men who had stood up against them. Crowds broke for the pawnshops, seeking weapons. Several farsighted pawnbrokers had had their places locked all day, the doors barred and the windows shuttered.

Two shops were open. Joe Rosenberg later reported to police that “forty or fifty” pistols had been taken from his shop; Harry Skuller said he had been robbed of “fifty or sixty” weapons. Boxes of cartridges were picked up along with the pistols. (Later, the two pawnbrokers wasted money on newspaper advertisements appealing for the return of their property. Not a single one of the “borrowed” weapons ever was recovered.)

The shooting had cleared out all the idlers, and the surly crowd that milled around in front of the courthouse was now composed exclusively of those who “meant business.” As the news spread, more and more armed men arrived and the situation, to all appearances, was worse than it had been before the shooting. There were reports that dynamite had been sent for, that the courthouse would be blown up, that a special train loaded with mountaineers from eastern Kentucky was on the way to Lexington.

Unknown to the mob was the fact that Governor Morrow had decided he now could certify truthfully to Federal authorities that there existed a state of lawlessness with which the state authority was unable to cope. The First Division Regulars had entrained at Camp Taylor and were on their way to Lexington.

The shooting had begun at 9.28 A.M. Then came the raids on pawnshops and the arrival of reinforcements for the mob. During the succeeding hours, one of the Leader’s numerous extra editions related, “The courthouse was besieged by increasing numbers of armed men, who displayed an increasingly threatening attitude.” By General Deweese’s order, Judge Kerr, Judge Bullock, and other county officials remained inside the building, for by that time they were as much the objects of the mob’s wrath as the prisoner himself. Lockett sat in a prisoners’ lockup adjacent to the courtroom, handcuffed, with his head bowed. He had taken little apparent interest in the trial, and barely had raised his head when he heard the firing outside the building.

As the day wore on, tension increased minute by minute and the besieging force steadily grew larger, but the leaders of the mob bided their time. There were reports that they were waiting for dynamite, that they were waiting for reinforcements, that they were waiting for darkness so they could shoot out the street lights and overwhelm the defenders of the building. The strain was beginning to tell on the “Home Guards,” many of whom were teen-age boys whose previous military experience had been confined to drilling one night a week in a National Guard armory. They looked frightened.

Finally, at 3.20 P.M., the special train from Camp Taylor steamed through the yards and stopped at Mill and Water Streets, only two blocks from the courthouse, but out of sight of the mob. Out of the coaches poured streams of battle-hardened veterans, who quickly fell in and marched north on Mill Street with bayonets fixed. Leading them was a color guard bearing the United States flag, a banner which in the sixties often had been carried into Lexington to the accompaniment of despairing groans from the town’s leading citizens.

Lexington during the War Between the States had been a Confederate stronghold in a border state. It had been captured and recaptured, and had lived alternately under the United States and Confederate States flags. Now it was being occupied again, but there were no groans that day from the leading citizens as the Regulars executed a smart turn into Main Street and bore down upon the mob, with the Stars and Stripes at the head of the column. Indeed, one of the beleaguered county officials peering out of the courthouse windows — a man who, like most of us Kentuckians, had been taught from childhood to take pride in being an Unreconstructed Rebel — laughingly admitted later that he had been somewhat astonished to hear himself shouting, “That’s the prettiest flag I ever saw!”

The soldiers moved steadily east on Main Street and swept the mob before them. No shots were fired from either side. Here and there an occasional inflamed individual attempted to put up an argument and was cracked over the head with a rifle butt; now and then a sullen straggler was hurried along by a light prick with a bayonet point. But for the most part the men who had been so bloodthirsty instantly lost interest in fighting and took to their heels. Magically, within five minutes, all streets approaching the courthouse had been cleared. Khaki-clad sharpshooters looked over the eaves of all structures in sight of the county building.

Never did a city submit more happily to invading forces than Lexington surrendered that day to the United States troops. Martial law was declared, and the citizens marveled at the efficiency with which the soldiers took charge. Twelve patrols were organized and assigned headquarters. As darkness approached, soldiers began patrolling Negro districts, the tobaccowarehouse district, — which had been threatened because the sheriff and several other county officeholders were interested financially in the warehouses, — and the Union Station, to guard against the expected arrival of the mountaineers, which never came to pass.

Another place that needed guarding was the ROTC Armory at the University of Kentucky, which contained hundreds of rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Twice during the day, members of the mob had made unsuccessful attempts to enter it. Directly across Limestone Street from the campus was a fire-department station, which an Army captain selected as convenient headquarters for his patrol. To his request that the station be kept open all night, a surly fire-department captain replied that he intended to lock up the lower floor and retire with his men to the dormitory above. The fireman was arrested and hustled off to jail. The military was in charge, and before long that fact was impressed upon all citizens, whether or not they sympathized with the mob.

5

THE next day Brigadier General Francis C. Marshall, commanding the U. S. troops, summarized Monday’s events in a terse statement: “This community has set a fine example against Bolshevism and lawlessness and has killed several of its own citizens in upholding law and order.”

“Folly’s Harvest of Sorrow” was the heading over a Leader editorial the day after the riot. It said in part: “The folly of a few men, maddened for the moment by a spirit of revenge, seeking the life of a miserable creature at the very instant condemned to die for his crime, compelled the servants of the law to fire upon a mob in Lexington Monday morning. The majesty of the law was upheld, but at frightful cost.”

The Herald expressed sympathy for the families of the victims, but added that “there is pride that the law was protected, that the officers of the law observed their solemn oath both to execute and to defend the law.” It said the affair proved two facts: that the guilty would be punished surely and swiftly, and that “ he who attempts to violate the law goes to meet death.”

Jere Reagan, Chief of Police, commented: “There can be no question as to the absolute necessity of firing. Those who forced their way through the lines meant business. I am sorry innocent persons have been killed, but enough warning had been given.”

Further evidence that General Marshall was the law in Fayette County was given Thursday, when he directed Judge Kerr to summon a special grand jury to investigate the law violations that had occurred Monday, and to indict the guilty persons. The jury commissioners selected what was recognized immediately as a “hand-picked” grand jury, composed of citizens who would not hesitate to indict the mob members. A week later, this jury was discharged, since it appeared that any indictments the body voted probably would be thrown out of court because the names of the jurors had not been drawn by chance from the jury wheel in the usual manner.

A new jury was drawn from the wheel. It heard witnesses and reported that the members of the mob were “mostly from other counties than Fayette, who were there for the avowed purpose of rescuing the prisoner from the authorities.” It called the bloody riot “an unfortunate affair,” and concluded that it would be unwise to return indictments, since the subsequent trials “would only tend to aggravate an already tense situation.”

“Here we find a new principle injected into the processes of the law,” the Leader declared in a bitter editorial. “Officers of the law, instead of seeking to punish the guilty and acquit the innocent, must first determine whether the trials of men presumably guilty of serious crimes and misdemeanors would disturb the public mind and ‘tend to aggravate bitter feelings in the state.'” There the matter rested.

Lockett had been taken out of Lexington Tuesday night, under the protection of 400 soldiers. No attempt was made to sneak the prisoner out of town. The soldiers openly marched through the streets with him to the Union Station. Thirty-two officers and 472 soldiers remained in Lexington to maintain order. This force was reduced gradually until, on February 22, thirteen days after the riot, General Marshall proclaimed an end to martial rule, “law and order having been restored.”

Lockett died in the electric chair at Eddyville Penitentiary on March 11, in the presence of nineteen Fayette County witnesses, including two brothers of his victim. Three days before the execution, he confessed the slaying of four women, one in Indiana, one in Illinois, and two in Kentucky, all by choking. Thus the child he killed in Fayette County had been his fifth victim.

The Kentucky General Assembly, which was in session at Frankfort when the Lexington riot occurred, enacted a law changing the penalty for rape from death in the electric chair to public hanging in the county in which the crime had been committed. Presumably the theory was that the mob lust for vengeance would be appeased by a convenient outdoor hanging which all could witness. A number of revolting exhibitions were staged under this law. The type of persons attracted to such events enjoyed themselves so thoroughly and behaved so atrociously that the law was repealed. Any effort to appease the mob spirit probably was unnecessary, anyway; the Second Battle of Lexington appeared to have dampened Kentuckians’ ardor for lynching parties.