This week in 1878

“I felt at the time that I ought to have done it, and afterward I felt I did wrong. I tell you it’s a hard thing when a man brings it on himself, but whisky did it.”

— Isaiah Evans, convicted of murder, hanging, Louisiana.
Executed May 10, 1878

“Isaiah Evans (colored).” That’s all the New York Times revealed about the twenty-three-year-old man hanged for murdering an eighteen-year-old man. More than two thousand attended the execution. After a clergyman prayed, Evans’s rope was adjusted, he fell, and his neck broke. He had admitted to intoxication the night he shot a man named Edward Bowen.