Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 September 1885 — THE SOUTH. [ARTICLE]

THE SOUTH.

Two boys, one 17, the other 18 years of age, have been detected by a Postoffice Inspector in robbing the mails on a North Carolina star route. E. A. Maines, a popular young traveling salesman, was brutally murdered at Knoxville, Tenn., by a noted law-breaker named Lee Sellers. The deed caused the wildest, excitemert. Two nights subsequently a party of twenty business and professional men, masked with handkerchiefs, went to the jail where Sellers was confined, and asked for admittance, but were refused. Three shots were fired, and 500 men appeared on the scene. They broke open the outer door of the jail, secured the keys from Sheriff Gilmore and the guards, opened the cell where Sellers, the murderer, was, and took him without a word to the center of the (jounty bridge. They asked for a confession, bnt the doomed man said only, “By God! I have nothing to say.” A long rope was then placed about Sellers’ neck, and he was swung from the bridge above the water. While dying several shots were fired into his body, amid the greatest silence on thepart of the crowd. While the lynching party was taking Sellers from the jail, the prisoner cut one of the party badly in several places, and then tried to cut his own throat. The mysterious epidemic in Clay County, West Virginia, is still raging, and a rigid quarantine has been established against the infected locality. , ■•’M/ Charles Williams, a drunken negro, at Chattanooga, Tenn., shot and instantly killed a street-car driver named Polk Mitchell. At night an- infuriated mob forced their way into the iron-clad jail, with sledge-hammers and chisels, and battered down the door of Williams’ cell. He was dragged to the third story of the jail by four of the leaders of the mob and a rope placed around his neck. The assassin maintained a stolid indifference, and did not utter a word. He was not given time to pray. After ho had been securely tied the rope was placed around a beam, and he was suspended batween heaven and ear:h.