Thomas Butler Gunn Diaries: Volume 15, page 28 with photograph, January 1-4, 1861

Regarding John Mitchel's tale of assisting with the lynching of an abolitionist. Transcription: 21 The Lynching of an Abolitionist. photograph (The Mills House Charleston S. C.) left the Mills House, of a dreary, dark showery night and at the suggestion of the former we must needs go have some oysters at a place in the same street on the other side of the way, some distance nearer to the Charleston Hotel. Here and subsequent, young John Mitchel fell to talking about abolitionists, asserting that he had assisted in lynching one, in a certain county in Alabama, but two weeks ago. "And" he said, "I'm not ashamed to say that I pulled at the rope. I render myself amenable to the law by the admission, for as it was done by the Vigilance Committee, of which I am a member, it was, of course, illegal. But I am confiding it to gentlemen and men of honor!" This boy with his frail arms no thicker than a rabbit's legs, which I could have snapped by a vigorous twist of the wrist, to be talking thus! I inquired particulars. The man was murdered as an insti

Date

1861

Archive

Wikimedia Commons

Type

photograph

Original size

2,926 × 4,369 pixels

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