A very fashionable performance

The complaint starts with the Potawatomi.

The 1882 county history says they complained of the theft of their ponies, and then the settlers of their horses, and then it got worse: house-breaking, house-burning, robbery, and counterfeit money passing through two counties and half of southern Michigan.

The pattern was too regular to be chance. The belief became general that there was a well-organised band of villains within or very near the borders of these counties, and by 1841 or 1842 people had decided the ordinary processes of law were unequal to it.

They were right about the band. The Tamarack, a trading house in Johnson Township, had become a noted resort for the blacklegs, with hiding places in the swamps, stolen horses secreted nearby, and neighbours who helped conceal both the property and the men. The Tamarack has a piece of its own. At Lima somebody built a store, filled it with dry goods, and was found to have three sets of counterfeit dies and half a peck of half-finished bogus coin behind the counter.

In 1852 the legislature gave them a law.

It authorised companies of not less than ten and not more than a hundred to form for the detection and apprehension of horse thieves and other felons. Each company signed articles, filed the name and residence of every member with the county commissioners, and had them put on record. Members could call on the peace officers of the state, and each man carried the powers of a constable while making an arrest.

The act said what it did not give them, and the county history says so plainly.

The law gave them no right to try, convict or execute criminals. The authority conferred was confined to the detection and arrest of law-breakers.

For four years nobody used it.

Then on the twelfth of September, 1856, men met at the Bullock Schoolhouse in Milford Township to organise the first company in the county. Fourteen of them are named. Eight days later they adopted a constitution.

They called themselves the LaGrange County Rangers. No man could join whose name was tainted with dishonourable associations, and every member swore an oath of secrecy. The meetings were private and the plans stayed secret until the arrests were made.

For more than a year it was the only one. Then five more: the LaGrange Protective Association, the LaGrange Association of Clearspring, the Self-Protectors of South Milford, the Self-Protectors of Springfield, and the Eden Police.

Six companies in this county. Noble had nine. Within three years there were thirty-seven in northern Indiana.

On the ninth of January, 1858, they met at Wright's Corners and put their intentions in the newspaper.

The resolutions said both counties were overrun by blacklegs and thieves, to the point where no man's property was secure. They named the tavern at Wright's Corners, said it was believed to be a rendezvous for these infernal banditti, and said the man who kept it was an accomplice.

Then the pledge, which every one of the hundred and thirty signatories put his name to.

by assisting to take them wherever they may be found, and that, when taken, we will deal with them in such a manner as to us may seem just and efficient

The tavern keeper was warned that if anyone he harboured committed a depredation, he would be dealt with as a depredator himself.

A week later the companies paraded.

Sixteenth of January, 1858, at an Old Settlers' meeting in Kendallville, the Regulator companies of Noble and LaGrange counties marched in double file through the town. Six companies came from this county. Many of the men they were looking for stood and watched. Six weeks after that parade the neighbours in the Haw Patch organised a company of their own.

The next day the arrests began. Nine at Rome City, then five more, taken to Ligonier and held.

The county history records what happened next in a phrase.

where they confessed (a very fashionable performance about that time)

Four pages later, in a footnote in small type, the same volume explains the fashion.

Prominent men at Ligonier, who were Regulators, and who participated in the examination and punishment of the blacklegs, informed the writer that several of the criminals refused to confess until they were threatened with lynching. Ropes were brought in and even placed around the necks of the villains; this generally brought them to their senses. It is said that one man was actually suspended by the neck for a few minutes, and then let loose, after which his confession was given without further ceremony.

One of the nine was a man named Gregory McDougal.

By his own confession he had taken thirty-four horses in under a year, broken two jails, robbed four stores, two tanneries and two peddlers, and passed a great deal of counterfeit money. Nobody has ever disputed that part.

The capital charge came from one witness. A deputy United States marshal from Michigan named Halstead testified under oath that a reward stood in Canada for McDougal, that he was charged with robbery, jail-breaking at Chatham, and murder, and that he had killed a jailer's wife to free his brother from confinement.

A committee of five, appointed by the Noble County Invincibles, considered it and reported.

do recommend that the said McDougal be hung by the neck until dead, on Tuesday, the 26th of January, 1858, at 2 o'clock P. M.

The same report asked the captains of the companies in Noble and adjoining counties to notify their members and escort them into the village in regular file and good order.

He asked for a clergyman and for his wife.

She arrived at seven the next morning with their child and learned from her husband that he was to be hanged that afternoon. She went on her knees in front of the Regulators and asked them to wait until somebody could go to Canada and establish whether he had killed anyone.

The book gives what happened next four words: Her prayers were unheeded.

He was driven to a place near Diamond Lake in a wagon carrying his coffin, with a large crowd following. A rope was thrown over the limb of a tree and a plank run from the top of the wagon to a prop. He was given five minutes to speak, and he used them to deny the murder, to admit the thefts, to warn young men, and to say that the Regulators were right to break up the gang.

Then the prop was knocked out.

The murders never happened.

The same county history, four pages after the account of the hanging, says it outright.

It was afterward ascertained, beyond doubt, that the persons alleged to have been murdered by McDougal were yet living in Canada.

Halstead, the marshal who swore to it, came back to Ligonier some time afterwards and left the town in a hurry, in fear of being lynched himself.

What the county history does next is the strangest thing in it.

First it defends the hanging in principle. When the law is inadequate to protect life and property, it says, it has been the custom the world over from time immemorial for people to rise and put offenders beyond the power of committing further crime. Society has always asserted the privilege of hanging horse thieves. The world at large condones and frequently applauds it, and the servants of the law submit and secretly say they are glad of it.

Then, on the same page, it takes the argument apart.

But it cannot be said that, in 1858, the law could not be executed ; neither was it necessarily inoperative through the preceding twenty years. Nine out of every ten men in the county were honest. Why did they not execute the laws ?

And it goes further. It says the committee was probably not satisfied McDougal had murdered anyone, and that they recommended hanging him on general principles, because by his own confession he was an infamous villain, and perhaps because his death would frighten the rest.

The book argues that a community may hang a horse thief, and then establishes that this community hanged a man it did not believe was a murderer, on the word of a witness who fled, for killings that had not occurred.

There was very nearly a second.

Another man, a resident of the county, came very nearly being hanged by the Regulators. The proposition to hang was at first carried by vote; but was afterward reconsidered and then lost by a small majority.

He served two years in the penitentiary instead. The book does not name him or say what he had done.

One man in this county stood against them, and the record says what it cost him.

Andrew Ellison was a LaGrange lawyer. He took the cases of several of the indicted horse thieves and counterfeiters, with the whole community against him, and got most of them acquitted or released on a technicality after conviction.

The 1882 volume's summary of that is worth reading twice.

The bitterness engendered during these exciting times lasted many years and marred the happiness of many.

The bitterness is attached to the defence rather than to the hanging.

Three years later a man of that name stood up at the first war meeting in LaGrange and told the room his sentiments were not wholly in accord with the previous speakers. He is almost certainly the same man: the name is spelled identically, both are lawyers, both are in the town of LaGrange, the volume lists Andrew Ellison as one of three men still living in 1882 who had been heads of families there in 1844, and no second Andrew Ellison appears anywhere in it. All of that is one book, and none of it is a sentence saying so.

The companies did not disband.

Writing in 1882, Battey says the work has since been left almost entirely to the regular judicial officers, and then adds that several Regulator organisations are still going and still help make an arrest now and then.

And in the county's biographical sketches, membership sits in the same clause as church and party and public office. An active Regulator. A charter member of the Regulators. Twenty-one years as secretary of the Regulator Society. One man belonged to no secret society except the Regulators.

Sixteen of the county's biographies record it. Not one of them explains it.

The fullest account of any of this, the one the county history prints and the one this piece has quoted from, is footnoted to a book by M. H. Mott of Kendallville.

Its title is History of the Regulators of Northern Indiana.

Every word the archive holds about this was written by the men who did it, or copied from a book one of them wrote. No account by anybody arrested survives in it. The only person recorded as speaking for them is the lawyer, and he is remembered for the bitterness.