Watching the rise of Donald Trump brings to mind the story of Francis J. McIntosh’s demise.

McIntosh was a Mississippi River boatman who disembarked, one morning in the spring of 1836, at the port of St. Louis. He had a rendezvous planned with a chambermaid there, but he didn’t make it far before he got into a scuffle with a couple of constables, who had been in hot pursuit of another sailor, who was wanted for brawling. McIntosh was arrested for interfering with law enforcement, hauled before a justice of the peace, then marched off to jail. Along the way, he asked how long he’d be held there, and was told: at least five years. At that, McIntosh drew a knife, stabbed one policeman to death, badly wounded another, and bolted. Word spread, and a mob gathered. McIntosh was tracked down to an outhouse where he was hiding, and hustled back to jail.

Meanwhile, a much larger mob collected on the street, where, as Elijah P. Lovejoy, the editor of the St. Louis Observer, wrote a few days later, the body of the murdered policeman “lay weltering in his blood.” The mob soon moved on to storm the jail and tore McIntosh from his cell; it brought him to the edge of town, chained him to a tree, and built a fire at his feet. Until then, Lovejoy wrote, hardly a word had been spoken by the mob or McIntosh, but when the flames were lit he pleaded to be shot instead, then gave up and sang hymns as he was slowly roasted to death. His charred remains were then hung from a branch for all to see, and “a rabble of boys” who had taken in the whole spectacle took turns throwing stones at McIntosh’s head to see who could break it.

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Lincoln said that he did not want to dwell on the horrors, but then he laid the horrors on pretty thick. For example, he said, in Mississippi, the mobs began by hanging gamblers—even though gambling was allowed by law— then “negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection,” then “white men, supposed to be leagued with the negroes,” and then random strangers visiting from other states, until “dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.”

As for McIntosh, Lincoln said, his story was “perhaps the most highly tragic,” considering the speed at which he went from being “a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world,” to being lynched. Lincoln argued, as Lovejoy had, that the fact that McIntosh would surely have been sentenced to death anyway only made his lynching more offensive. To Lincoln, the offense was lawlessness, and he argued that both those who indulged in lawlessness and those who fell prey to it would eventually come to regard “Government as their deadliest bane . . . and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.” It was this feeling of “alienation” rather than “attachment” to public institutions that Lincoln feared most in the “mobocratic spirit.”