In declining to reduce the punishment of the 15 white men who are serving prison sentences for storming the Buncombe County jail in attempt to lynch a negro in the face of request to do so by 6,800 petitioners, Governor McLean has taken a firm position on high ground and wins the admiring applause of right-thinking citizens.
It would have been the easy course for the Governor to have yielded to the formidable petition. Many men in his position would have done so and would have attempted to justify it by some loose and maudlin statements to the effect that the men had been punished sufficiently, had learned their lesson, and would henceforth be good citizens. But Governor McLean didn’t fall for any such specious reasoning. In his admirable statement setting forth his reasons for declining to grant the petition, the Governor rings clear. “A prisoner in custody of the law,” he says, “is entitled to the same protection as is the judge on the bench or the solicitor who represents the State in the prosecution. In this instance the State of North Caolina went to great expense in order that the prisoner might be given a fair and impartial trial. The prisoners sought to destroy the very processes of government upon which they now rely. They were given a fair and impartial trial and convicted by jurors chosen from their fellow men. The sentences imposed, it seems to me, were eminently fair and just might easily have been more severe. . . . . Those who are asking for clemency for these men should remember that the crime they committed was one of the most serious known to our law—serious because the sovereignty of all the people of our State was trampled under foot and insulted by the mob when it attempted to take the law into its own hands.
“No questions of mere sentiment should enter into a case of this kind. Sentiment should all be upon the side of the people whose sovereignty was insulted.”
Which is the conclusion of the whole matter. Too often weak sentiment for the criminal runs away with people and they lose sight altogether of the graver aspects of the case and fail to recognize what the Governor so well states, that sentiment should be on the side of the people whose sovereignty is insulted.
Following his vigorous statement in declining to reduce the sentences of the would-be lynchers, Governor McLean stated in a letter to Mayor Cathey of Asheville that he “would pardon just a quickly” the negro Alvin Mansell, whom the mob made an unsuccessful attempt to take from the jail, “as I would the most outstanding white man in the State, fi they convince me at a hearing that he is innocent. A good many of my own ancestors died at the stake for religious freedom, and I feel very strongly that neither race, color nor creed should be regarded in the administration of the law.”
. . . .
From the editorial page of The Robesonian, Monday, Feb. 15, 1926, J.A. Sharpe, president
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn84026483/1926-02-15/ed-1/seq-1/
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