Jasper County Democrat, Volume 3, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 January 1901 — MOB BURNS A NEGRO. [ARTICLE]

MOB BURNS A NEGRO.

LEAVENWORTH, KAN., WITNESSES A HORRIBLE AFFAIR. Doomed Man Fastened to a f-take and Oil-Saturated Fuel Piled Abont Him —Wretch Had Attacked Miaa Eva. Both—Suspected of Another Crime. Five thousand infuriated men stormed the county jail in Leavenworth, Kan., Tuesday afternoon, took from it Fred Alexander, a negro, and burned him at the stake. Alexander was under arrest for an attempted assault on Miss Eva Roth and was suspected of having assaulted and murdered Miss Pearl Forbes last November. The negro was taken from his cell at the State penitentiary at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and loaded into a hack and taken to Leavenworth. Fifty deputy marshals surrounded him and Deputy Sheriffs Staucemyers and Tom Brown sat in the hack on either side of him. There were fifty buggies and wagons in the procession which followed the hack in, and it was a funeral march indeed for Fred Alexander. The trip to town was made quietly and there was no attempt to create a disturbance on the road. Entranee to the jail was effected by steel rails and iron bars, with which the mob battered in the doors and wrenched the cell doors and gratings from their fastenings. Sheriff Everhardy was called upon to surrender the negro, but refused. The mob was prepared for this action on his part, and in a minute the steel rails, nTfopetled as battering rams by the united strength of hundreds of determined and bloodthirsty men, began a resistless attack on the jail doors. One after another the barriers gave way to the onslaught and in less than fifteen minates the trembling negro was in the clutches of his captors. The punishment meted out to Alexander was identical with that administered by a Colorado mob last November to another negro, Preston Porter. The details Of Porter’s execution were fresh in the minds of Leavenworth’s people, and as Alexander was accused of precisely a similar crime his punishment was made a replica of the Colorado affair. He was taken to the scene of his alleged victim’s death, fastened by chains to an iron stake driven in the ground, fuel was then piled around him and saturated with oil and the father of his alleged victim given the privilege of putting the torch to his funeral pyre. Alexander* made no resistance after once dragged to the stake and only kept saying: “You are killing the wrong man.” While preparations were being made for the execution there stood on a box across the street a woman of 20. She had stood at the door of the penitentiary and had said, “That is the man,” as she saw Warden Tomlinson produce Alexander. “That is the man,” she said, "who assaulted me.” The crowd had heard her evidence. That evidence was the negro’s sentence and the mob was carrying it out. By 5 o’clock the stake was declared ready. It was the work of but a few moments for half a dozen men to haul Alexander from the wagon up the fourfoot bank of cordwood, and to fasten a chain about his chest and another about his feet to the rail. Then came the coal oil. It was poured on his head and splashed upon the cordwood. "More! Good!’ Light it!” were the cries. “Confess, for a hist time,” said rugged old Mr. Forties, determined to finish the tragedy he had set out to witness, but anxious to have conviction that he was about to help kill the man who had killed his daughter. “I ain’t got a thing to confess.” “Then you are off for hell,” was his answer. “Wait. Let me see my mother. Let me shake hands with my friends. I see lots of them here.” But the oil was all poured and the match was ignited. In a moment there was a flicker, a flame, the head es the negro waved from side to side as the flames jumped to meet it. A fiendish roar burst from the multitude. Alexander’s mother was the only one noticed crying. She was taken away by her negro friends before the match was applied. In less .than five minutes he was hanging limp and lifeless by the chains that bound him. As soon as the crowd saw that life was extinct, it began slowly to disperse. When, two hours later, the fire had died down sufficiently to allow the crowd to approach what remained of Alexander, there was a wild scramble to obtain relics, bits of charred flesh, pieces of chain, scraps of wood—everything that could possibly serve as a souvenir, was seized on with morbid eagerness.