An excerpt from:  Ida B. Wells-Barnett, "Lynch Law in America" which appeared
in Arena, January 9, 1909.  From Ida B. Wells-Barnett:  An Exploratory Study
of An American Black Woman, 1893-1930, by Mildred I. Thompson.  Brooklyn:
 Carlson Publishing Inc., 1990, p. 235.

Our country's national crime is lynching.  It is not the creature of an hour,
the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an
insane mob.  It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent
people who openly avow that there is an "unwritten law" that justifies them
in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial
by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal.
 The "unwritten law" first found excuse with the rough, rugged, and
determined man who left the civilized centers of eastern States to seek for
quick returns in the gold-fields of the far West.  Following in uncertain
pursuit of continually eluding fortune, they dared the savagery of the
Indians, the hardships of mountain travel, and the constant terror of border
State outlaws.  Naturally, they felt slight toleration for traitors in their
own ranks...The thief who stole a horse, the bully who "jumped" a claim, was
a common enemy.  If caught he was promptly tried, and if found guilty was
hanged to the tree under which the court convened.  
Those were busy days of busy men.  They had no time to give the prisoner a
bill of exception or stay of execution...Judge Lynch was original in methods
but exceedingly effective in procedure.  He made the charge, impaneled the
jurors, and directed the execution.  When the court adjourned, the prisoner
was dead.  Thus lynch law held sway in the far West until civilization spread
into the Territories and the orderly processes of law took its place.  The
emergency no longer existing, lynching gradually disappeared from the West.
But the spirit of mob procedure seemed to have fastened itself upon the
lawless classes, and the grim process that at first was invoked to declare
justice was made the excuse to wreak vengeance and cover crime.  It next
appeared in the South, where centuries of Anglo-Saxon civilization had made
effective all the safeguards of court procedure.  No emergency called for
lynch law.  It asserted its sway in defiance of law and in favor of anarchy.
 There it has flourished ever since, marking the thirty years of its
existence with the inhuman butchery of more than ten thousand men, women, and
children by shooting, drowning, hanging, and burning them alive...
        This is the work of the "unwritten law" about which so much is said, and in
whose behest butchery is made a pastime and national savagery
condoned...Under the authority of a national law that gave every citizen the
right to vote, the newly-made citizens chose to exercise their suffrage.  But
the reign of the national law was short-lived and illusionary.  Hardly had
the sentences dried upon the statue-books before one Southern State after
another raised the cry against "negro domination" and proclaimed there was an
"unwritten law" that justified any means to resist it...
Thus lynchings began in the South, rapidly spreading into the various States
until the national law was nullified and the reign of the "unwritten law" was
supreme...
The alleged menace of universal suffrage having been avoided by the absolute
suppression of the negro vote, the spirit of mob murder should have been
satisfied and the butchery of negroes should have ceased...In fact...men and
women are put to death without judge or jury; so that, although the political
excuse was no longer necessary, the wholesale murder of human beings went on
just the same.  A new name was given tot he killings and a new excuse was
invented for so doing.