crowd of one thousand local men used force to try to keep the National Guard from arresting men who’d been identified by the state police as leaders of a lynch mob. This crowd could not be explained as a “foreign mob” from “Virginia.” No one had known the National Guard were coming into town. They had arrived in the hours before dawn, and no significant out-of-state contingent could have been mobilized to face the Guard on such short notice. It was local townspeople in Salisbury who sought to repulse the arrest of the suspected lynchers.
