hands. Unfortunately, a similar case had happened two weeks earlier at Janesville, in which the avenging crowd was made up of Americans.[1] It was suggested by some that DeBar was himself a Know-Nothing, or at least trained with the Know-Nothing element, and there were dire whispers about the trial judge, Charles H. Larrabee. Doubtless these rumors were altogether wild. The nineteen-year-old DeBar, practically non compos mentis, was of no possible political consequence, while Judge Larrabee at the time was as sound a Democrat as could be found.[2] But passions once fully aroused hurl reason from its throne, and so it was in this case. The rowdies gathered at a drinking place in West Bend, and decided on a lynching.
Judge Larrabee convened a special session of court, impaneled a grand jury, and having summoned two companies of militia—the Union Guards of Ozaukee County, a German company, and the Washington Guards, another German company, of Milwaukee—to come up for the protection of the prisoner, had him conveyed to the courthouse and examined. The grand jury brought in a true bill, charging murder in the first degree. To this the prisoner, on the advice of his attorneys, pleaded "not guilty." The multitude which had been permitted to press into the court room, despite the judge's instruction to the militia to limit the number to the seating capacity of the room, fairly raged when they found a trial would be required, and before the prisoner took many steps in the direction of the jail, they seized him and made way with him.
The severest censure was leveled against the militia companies and their leaders. All the American writers whose statements appear in the Sentinel charge that these companies fraternized with the lynching party, and practically
