The Lynching of Andrew Springer

   On the evening of May 14, 1887, a man stopped at the home of William Montgomery in Lawrence County, Arkansas. The 32-year-old Montgomery, who lived at the head of Jeff Creek near the now-defunct community of Opposition, was away, but his 27-year-old wife, Patsy, was home with their six-week-old child. The young man asked for a drink of water, and it was provided. He then left, but he soon came back and ordered Mrs. Montgomery to lay her baby aside. When she refused, he wrested the infant from her and tossed it on the floor.
   Pulling a knife, he threatened to kill her unless she yielded to his desires, and he proceeded to outrage her "in a most horrible manner." Montgomery returned home shortly after the rape, and when Patsy told him what had happened, he "started in pursuit of the fiend." At Opposition, he was joined by several other men, including a local constable, and the posse soon overtook and captured the villain. The captive, who gave his name as Andrew Springer, was identified by Mrs. Montgomery as her attacker, and he also supposedly confessed to the crime, after first denying it.
   Montgomery reportedly wanted Judge Lynch to preside over the case right then and there, but instead Springer was taken to Powhatan, the Lawrence County seat at the time, and lodged in jail.
   Between one and two a.m. on the morning of May 21, a mob of about 25 men, thought to be from the vicinity where the rape occurred, descended on the county jail. A few men went to the door of the jailer's living quarters adjacent to the jail and told him they had a prisoner for him. Noticing a man with the group who had his hands tied, the jailer did not suspect anything. As soon as he opened the door, though, the rest of the mob, who had been concealed nearby, rushed in and forced the jailer, under a threat of violence, to turn over the keys to the jail.
   The vigilantes then dragged Springer from his cell. Resisting mightily, Springer begged the mob to shoot him and spare him the agony of being choked to death at the end of a rope, but they took him a short distance from the jail and strung him up to an oak tree. Not until after he'd swung a while did the mob oblige their victim's request and fire several shots into his body to make sure he was dead. The vigilantes then withdrew into the night.
   As was usually the case in instances of mob violence during the late 1800s and early 1900s, no one was ever charged in the extralegal hanging of Andrew Springer. Although all but one of the men who composed the mob were unmasked, the jailer said he did not recognize any of them. 

   Little is known about Springer's origins, although, after his death, a man named Bates wrote to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to say that he had formerly employed Springer in the post office at Franklin (Arkansas). According to Bates, Springer was the son of a widow woman and was originally from Salem, Arkansas. Bates said Springer had always seemed like an "honest, obliging, and unassuming young man."
   Published in 1889, just two years after the Springer lynching, the Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Northeast Arkansas misidentified Springer, who was white, as a black man. This error was woven into the local mythology surrounding the rape of Mrs. Montgomery and the lynching of Springer, and it has since been repeated by at least one or two other writers.