Gallows on the Marsh

On the afternoon of Tuesday, June 12, 1906, a young black man known as William Lee lay in jail in Eastville in Northampton County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Lee was under arrest for the rape of a white woman in nearby Somerset County, Maryland. Outside, a lynch mob of Somerset whites had gathered on the courthouse green. Between Lee and a hideous death stood only the crumbling walls of the old jail and the Northampton sheriff and his posse.
The plight of William Lee was hardly unique for the American South in the first decade of the twentieth century. The paternalism of the slave regime had given way to racial antagonism. Southern whites resented competition from industrious black farmers and laborers and from emergent businessmen and professionals. They felt menaced by increasing numbers of the black alienated, rootless, and criminal.
Many whites believed that the black race, escaped from the discipline of slavery, was descending into beastliness. “In superficial education, the younger negroes are advancing,” maintained a Virginia editor. “But in the real education which is the groundwork of substantial development — the education of industry and sobriety — the younger negroes are not advancing, but retrograding.”
Whites especially feared the young males, the “strange negroes,” who traveled from job to job in the countryside and along the waterways. “This indolent and insolent class of criminals spend their time ‘shooting crap’ and ‘rushing the growler,’ their criminal natures becoming more fully developed through their indulgence in intoxicant,” a Maryland man avowed. “Wandering from city or town to the country, they prowl and hide about lonely roads and lanes, lying in wait for innocent women and children, threatening them with torture and death and laughing with demoniac glee at the vain appeals and entreaties of their victims.”
In much of the South, lynching became commonplace. Between 1885 and 1907 more people were lynched in the United States than legally executed. Anything, however trivial, might trigger a lynching, but nothing more easily aroused the mob than the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man. Rape offended the white Southerner’s acutely developed sense of personal honor, confirmed his belief in black depravity, and convinced him that the black man’s deepest desire was racial amalgamation.
Although forgotten today, the Lee case was a major event of 1906 in Maryland and Virginia. It involved a criminal spree, a gripping trial, and a clandestine execution. It required the services of scores of government personnel and occasioned heavy public expenditure. It absorbed the attention of the governors of the two states and provoked debate on lynching, capital punishment, and the authority of the state. Rich in plot and subplot, the Lee case enthralled the public in 1906 and remains today an engrossing story.
Brooks Miles Barnes is Director of Information Services at the Eastern Shore Public Library in Accomac, Virginia.


Gallows on the Marsh, perfect bound, 130 pp., illustrations, index. ISBN $13.00