Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [39]
The typical defendant at a lynching court was poor. Rich people routinely bought their way out of trouble, or else they hired their own regulators and bodyguards to keep the townspeople at bay. The defendant was most often one of the river people, or a stranger in town, or somebody who was a known troublemaker, or somebody who had been seen acting in a suspicious manner, or somebody who was just generally thought of as odd. While we think now that most of the defendants were people of color, that again wasn’t typically true before the Civil War. The courts in the lower valley didn’t ordinarily punish slaves. Slaves detained by the regulators and the vigilance committees were turned over to their owners for punishment. This wasn’t out of any concern for the slaves’ rights—it was because slaves were property, and property rights were regarded as sacred. The lynching court would only intervene and punish the slave when it was suspected that the owner was going to be too lenient.
This system, if it can be called a system, was known for its arbitrary and capricious results. The committees and the regulators often made a great show of legal formality in their arrests, but they weren’t bound to obey any law and were answerable only to the authorities of their local town. The lynching courts weren’t answerable to anybody. A perpetual fog of doubt shrouded the actions of those involved in the dispensation of lynch law. Nobody knew what officer or judge was acting fairly, who was seeking revenge, who was simply a criminal himself. One town’s regulator was likely to be another town’s wanted murderer; a chief justice in a county’s lynching court could be the most infamous highwayman in the state. There were celebrated cases where in the end it never was sorted out just what side everybody had really been on.
During the early years of the frontier, the most notorious of these cases involved a man named James Ford. Ford owned a ferry service on the Ohio just up from its confluence with the Mississippi. From around 1810 to the 1830s, Ford’s Ferry was a local landmark: the crossing of choice for everyone traveling between Kentucky and Illinois. Its prominence wasn’t a fluke of geography or custom. Ford worked very hard to establish its reputation. He practiced an early form of saturation advertising, nailing up signs pointing to his ferry along all the roads on either side of the river. He also had posters made proclaiming the safety of his ferryboats and the professionalism of his crews, and he put them in all the inns and taverns on the Kentucky and Illinois shores.
These ads probably weren’t lies. Ford did try to make his ferry practical and safe—more so than most ferries, anyway (ferrymen were legendary for their indifference to the lives of their passengers). He was also concerned with easy access to his ferry point. He cajoled and bribed the county government to improve the road on the Kentucky side; ultimately they agreed to clear and repair eight miles of roadway leading up to the riverbank. The road on the Illinois side was even worse. It was very old and in poor shape, and it routinely flooded out every time the river rose. It was known by a dismal name that informed everyone under what conditions it was passable: Low Water Road. But Ford had no luck persuading the Illinois government to fix it. So he paid out of his own pocket for a new twelve-mile stretch of road on the Illinois shore. He had it built on land above the flood crest, and he picked a name that would ensure that everybody knew what it was for, how superior it was to the Low Water Road, and who had provided it: Ford’s Ferry High Water Road.
Ford became a prosperous and respectable citizen. With the ferry fees rolling in, he grew rich enough to buy several large local farms. He became an appraiser of properties and an administrator of estates. He was a justice