Lynching and Mob Violence

By: Christopher Waldrep

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Lynching and Mob Violence

Americans invented the word lynching, but not the practice. Mob violence that might be called lynching has appeared throughout history in such diverse locations as ancient Greece, Republican Rome, Africa, China, and early modern Europe and among Native American societies in North America. Newspaper reports in the early twenty-first century have found lynchings in Africa, Iraq, Mexico, and many other countries. Lynchers act in large crowds or small bands and attack all ethnic groups. Newspapers have reported that black people sometimes joined whites in integrated lynch mobs. On other occasions, African Americans formed all-black mobs to lynch other African Americans. White Americans have lynched Mexicans and Mexican Americans in large numbers. One student of lynching in Colorado, Stephen Leonard, claims that more nonracial lynchings occurred in that state, when figured on a per capita basis, than racial lynchings in any other state.

“The Mob Demanding That Quack Be Burnt,” an incident in the New York slave conspiracy, or supposed conspiracy, of 1741. Quack was one of those implicated, and although the evidence was spurious, no lawyer would serve as a defense counsel. Quack “confessed” and was burned at the stake.

New York Public Library, Picture Collection, Branch Libraries; Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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Meaning of Lynching

Lynching does not mean hanging alone; the word refers, in general, to the act of killing by mob violence without legal sanction. American mobs have shot, stabbed, drowned, and beaten their victims to death. Lynchings sometimes have occurred spontaneously, but well-organized vigilante groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, sometimes have lynched their victims. Crowd violence is a universal impulse that can take many forms. While violent crowd behavior appears to be widespread, the word lynching almost certainly began with Charles Lynch, a Revolutionary War–era militia officer and justice of the peace from Bedford County, Virginia. Through the spring and summer of 1780, Virginians loyal to England plagued Bedford and neighboring counties. Virginia militia seized and sometimes hanged such Tories on the spot. Governor Thomas Jefferson commended rural Virginians for their energy in rooting out Tory insurgents but urged them to take care that their prisoners be regularly tried before a proper judge and jury. The militia officers thought Jefferson's admonitions were unrealistic. To follow Virginia law required that persons accused of any felony be transported to the state capital, a cumbersome and inconvenient procedure at any time, let alone in the middle of a war.

Although the earliest violence that could be called lynching occurred during the American Revolution and involved the whipping and killing of white people by other white people, ethnic or racial prejudice played a role. Some late-nineteenth-century writers took pains to distinguish the original Judge Lynch from the brutal racists active one hundred years later. The truth is more complex. In addition to his militia duties, Charles Lynch also supervised lead mines that provided war material the Revolutionaries thought was essential to their effort. It was at these mines that Lynch abused Welsh miners. This mistreatment may have stemmed from Lynch's urgent desire, shared with Jefferson, to keep his fellow soldiers supplied with lead bullets, but some accused him of ethnic prejudice as well. Nor was race entirely absent from the proceedings. In 1782 Lynch wrote a letter to William Hay, saying that his assistant had “given Lynchs Law” to Tories “for Dealing with the negroes &c.” This document appears to be the earliest extant written use of the term lynch; it is noteworthy that Lynch associated “Lynchs Law” with race, although it does not prove that Charles Lynch brutalized African Americans.

Some scholars have claimed that another Virginian originated the term: William Lynch of nearby Pittsylvania County. The best evidence for William is an interview he gave in 1811, after moving to South Carolina. William Lynch boasted that he had his fellow “lynch men” hang Tories without trial. In 1836 Edgar Allan Poe published a document he claimed to have found, which purported to be William Lynch's constitution, formalizing his lynching organization and justifying his vigilantism. Poe published this document, which no previous writer had found and which does not survive today, in a time when journalistic pranksters (including Poe) played games with their audiences, testing readers' credulity with good-natured hoaxes. Discoveries of gold and life on distant planets appeared in print along with Poe's alleged lynchers' constitution.

The meaning of lynching has long perplexed scholars. By the end of the nineteenth century the word had come to mean lethal racial violence perpetuated by whites on African American victims. Before 1835 the term mostly circulated orally, only rarely appearing in print, which obviously hampers the ability to decipher original usage. From the surviving sources, it seems fairly clear that for the first decades of the nineteenth century lynching had slight direct connection to race.

Spread of American Lynching Language

The meaning of lynching originated with Charles Lynch: a magistrate acting beyond his authority. This meaning explains why some lynching proponents have argued for an origin of the term before the American Revolution. In 1820 James Hardiman proposed James Lynch FitzStephen, mayor of Galway in 1493, as the original Judge Lynch. Hardiman's Judge Lynch did not lead a mob but rather resisted popular demands for leniency after his own son committed murder. Given later understandings of lynching as mob law, this seems paradoxical. But Charles Lynch had defined lynching as violent action by an official in the service of what he saw as justice, making Hardiman's story a little more understandable. Even so, Hardiman's Judge Lynch followed the law. The point seems to be that defenders of lynch law saw extralegal violence as just and fair. In fact, lynching seems to have begun life as a term used to defend mob law. Rural Americans understood lynch law as fair and just, even when it violated the letter of the law.

As Americans moved west, they carried the term as well as the practice with them. Travel writers encountering lynch law sometimes disapproved but often endorsed the practice. James Stuart, riding a Mississippi River steamboat in 1830, thought the absence of convenient courts made lynch law unavoidable. He explained to his readers that the practice had its origins in the Revolution, when Judge Lynch acted outside the law, but that people respected that his decisions carried the force of law for their obvious fairness and rectitude. At the same time, Stuart acknowledged that lynch courts sometimes did wrong and mistakenly reassured his readers that groups of lynchers dissolved as soon as regular courts organized. Stuart interviewed a judge who said he had been unable to stop a lynching but sympathized with the practice anyway.

The South Carolina novelist William Gilmore Simms, who took pains to include frontier jargon in his novels, had discovered the word lynching by 1834, when he published Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia. Simms put a sectional twist on the meaning of the word. Lynch law, he wrote in this book, came from frontier regulators acting to punish individuals for “coming Yankee over everybody.” Simms thought that merchants acted like Yankees when they defrauded their customers. In Simms's jolly narrative, such men aroused the enmity of the neighborhood and had to be lynched.

Sensational incidents misrepresent the routine realities of eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century racial violence. Most white violence directed at black victims attracted scant newspaper attention and, perhaps for that reason, never received the label “lynching.” For example, in 1797 slaves apparently killed the Georgia planter Hergen Herson in Scriven County. Neighbors formed a posse and chased down six slaves they thought had committed the crime. Three resisted arrest and perished, gunned down by the white crowd. Attacking whites injured one slave. Two surrendered. According to newspaper reports, the white crowd debated what to do with the two uninjured slaves they had captured. After deliberation, the whites decided to burn alive one of their prisoners, the one thought most guilty of the murder. The assembled whites immediately carried out their sentence. Newspapers did not call this a lynching, and it is unlikely that any eighteenth-century newspaper editor would even have considered applying the term to such an event. But a hundred years later no newspaper editor would have failed to call such a mob killing a lynching.

On numerous other occasions court records document white supervisors of slave labor calling on other whites to help in subduing recalcitrant slaves. Sometimes two or three white men beat to death the slaves they intended only to chastise. Whether such beatings technically qualify as “lynchings” may be impossible to determine, and the question hardly seems meaningful. The more important point is that they document pervasive violence by small crowds of whites directed against individual blacks. Such violence went largely unrecorded in the popular culture, but white people enjoyed a right in slavery to injure or kill black people they thought guilty of misconduct.

Colonial Virginia laws excused slave owners from punishment if their enslaved property “should chance to die” during physical chastisement. If the law specifically allowed white brutalization of African Americans, perhaps such violence should be counted as outside the bounds of lynching, which usually means extralegal violence. But the Virginia legislature indemnified Charles Lynch and his fellows for their violent suppression of the Tory insurgency, and their violence would commonly be considered lynching, even by the original Judge Lynch himself.

Before 1835 many Americans had never heard the term lynching. An incident in Vicksburg, Mississippi, that year set in motion events that made lynching part of the nation's argot. On the Fourth of July the citizens of Vicksburg gathered to celebrate the holiday and be entertained by their local militia company. However, a miscreant named Cabler interrupted the proceedings, taunting the soldiers, humiliating them, and exposing their military prowess as toothless. A mob formed to capture Cabler and “lynch” him, which to Vicksburgers meant taking him to the woods and whipping him. Later, the militiamen tried to reassert their authority by marching into the rough part of town, known for drinking, whoring, and gambling. In response, some of the gamblers fired into the crowd, killing one man, a doctor. According to local newspaper accounts, soon reprinted across the nation, the outraged crowd went berserk and seized five men, hanging them. Although the citizens of Vicksburg did not call this action a lynching, a New Orleans newspaper used that label in its account of the hangings. The term stuck, and soon reports of lynchings appeared in newspapers all over the country.

Lynching and Slavery

Although white Vicksburgers lynched other white men, some scholars contend the affair had a racial dimension. By clearing their town of insubordinate troublemakers, whites organized the landscape, making the Mississippi Valley safe for slavery and plantation agriculture. At the same time that the Vicksburgers were carrying out their hangings, violence with a more obviously racial basis occurred nearby. Whites in Madison County, Mississippi, hanged an uncertain number of slaves and two white men, all suspected of conspiring to revolt. Organizing into a vigilance committee, the county's white citizens held drumhead trials using testimony elicited through torture and then hanged their prisoners. Although some writers have tried to differentiate between vigilantism and lynching, there seems to have been little difference between Vicksburg's “lynching” of five white men and Madison County's “vigilante” executions of slaves.

Newspapers all over the United States covered the Vicksburg killings, which became a national spectacle. The next such episode to attract national attention took place a year later in St. Louis, Missouri, when a mob immolated Francis McIntosh, a mulatto charged with murdering a deputy sheriff. More than the Vicksburg hangings, McIntosh's death directly and obviously documented whites' racial prejudice. Newspapers described McIntosh as “a yellow fellow.” A large and sadistic crowd gathered to watch and cheer as McIntosh burned to death, but most Americans gleaned the ghastly details from a reporter who apparently stood in the front row of the mob. Every groan, cry, and “half-smothered word” went into the reporter's account, a pornography of pain that gave the whole nation access to the proceedings.

“Lawless Burning,” a page from the Anti-Slavery Almanac, 1840. The almanac was an annual publication of the Anti-Slavery Society; the article shown here describes a gruesome lynching that had taken place in 1836.

Library of Congress.

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Not long after McIntosh died, a state grand jury assembled to determine what to do. In charging the grand jury, the ironically named judge, Luke Lawless, offered what became the classic excuse of mob violence. Lawless directed jurors to consider whether McIntosh had died at the hands of a few or the many. Picturing the mob as “congregated thousands,” Lawless thought it impelled forward by an unstoppable force, “mysterious, metaphysical, and almost electric phrenzy.” The crowd had been inspired by “generous excitements”; the death of a good man, a father and a faithful public servant, had offended them, Lawless told the jurors. Such excited public opinion, Lawless said, represented a force too powerful to be stopped by mere agents of the state. If the grand jury dared challenge popular will, Lawless worried, it would fail and might even affront the foundations of public decency. Lawless then went on to condemn abolitionism and abolitionists, suggesting that the abolitionist movement had encouraged McIntosh to commit the crime that led to his lynching.

The sensational news stories of the Vicksburg hangings and McIntosh's burning set a pattern for the future and masked the day-to-day realities of racial violence. Often the history of lynching can seem to be a series of spectacularly gruesome rituals, each illustrating the worst evils of white racism. However, while newspapers sensationalized stories of particular events, many anonymous slaves labored on farms and plantations, always at risk of a nameless death at the hands of some small group of whites. Whites acquired a sense of entitlement over the bodies of their black laborers. Some state laws authorized whites to demand to see a roaming slave's pass, but the white feeling of entitlement went beyond law. Whites spying a running slave who would not stop when challenged felt that they could and should shoot. Spectacular lynchings reinforced this sense of entitlement, but so did the more ordinary brutalities the white population saw far more often—violent acts that the press never reported.

Lynching occurred everywhere; no state escaped mob law in some form, and few whites anywhere doubted that in the absence of effective law-enforcement machinery, ordinary people had no choice but to band together and seek justice outside formal law. White southerners especially identified themselves with the practice, vigorously defending mobbing and even threatening their political opponents with lynching. In 1848 Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire, an antislavery Democrat, urged his fellow senators to pass a law designed to punish mobs and rioters in the District of Columbia. Hale acted after seventy-two slaves tried to flee in a ship named the Pearl. Slave catchers thwarted the attempt and jailed the slaves. Proslavery mobs roamed Washington, D.C., searching for the abolitionist behind thePearl affair. Thus, when Hale introduced his antiriot bill, he intentionally baited the proslavery side. Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi took the bait and charged that Hale wanted to “cover and protect” an act he called “negro-stealing.” Such an argument suggested that slave owners needed lynching to defend their property against abolitionists like Hale. Foote invited Hale to Mississippi, promising that if he came he would not travel ten miles without being hanged from a tree. Every patriot would participate in such a lynching, Foote told his fellow senator, adding that he would join the mob himself.

Northern newspapers periodically published accounts of southern mobbing. The abolitionist press did so regularly, but the mainstream press could not resist such accounts as well. In 1854 the New York Daily Tribune described the burning of a slave who allegedly had struck a white man, near Natchez, Mississippi. White southern newspapers defended slave burnings by charging that the slaves had raped white women. The Mississippi Free Trader alleged that two runaway Louisiana slaves kidnapped and repeatedly raped a pair of white women as the fugitives and their hostages traveled from Louisiana through Mississippi. When a posse finally tracked the men down, the paper reported, not only the pursuing whites but also blacks favored burning the rapists alive. As a further justification, the paper reported that the two slaves confessed their crimes before their extralegal execution. Whites' argument that a supposed black tendency to rape justified mob violence had been circulated even before the Civil War.

Lynching during the Civil War and After

During the Civil War the invading Union army disrupted plantation discipline, and much of the South's African American population escaped formal slavery. The freedpeople shocked white Southerners when they began to resist white violence, challenging the old slavery-era entitlement whites enjoyed over African Americans' bodies. After Appomattox, whites vigorously worked to reassert their old privilege. Even as southern legislators enacted laws designed to control their states' freed black populations, organized mobs of whites chose an alternative to law, assaulting and killing freedpeople across the South. Both state discrimination and violence carried out by individuals threatened freedpeople after the Civil War.

Across the South guerilla bands threatened lives and property after Appomattox. Some of these gangs claimed to perpetuate the Confederacy, but others more frankly sought to enrich themselves by taking advantage of the prevailing weakness of institutional authority. A genuine fear of crime enveloped the region. At the same time, white landowners found they needed new ways to control labor, and whites generally feared that their former slaves would assert themselves politically. For all these reasons southern states wrote harsh laws that northerners labeled “black codes.” These discriminatory laws sought to substitute law for the lash, replacing plantation discipline with tough legal processes. Under the black codes, white authorities hanged blacks by their thumbs and administered whippings. However, these new laws seemed ineffective, were troublesome even to whites, and soon became illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. White southerners found they needed a new instrument to control former slaves.

“A Freeholder's Court,” woodcut from Richard Hildreth's Archie Moore, the White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive (1855), a later edition, with illustrations added, of The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836)—America's first antislavery novel. In this scene, the freeholders have decided arbitrarily that a slave is guilty of theft from a rice plantation and condemned him to death. As described in the 1836 edition: “The sentence was no sooner pronounced than preparations were made for his execution. An empty barrel was brought out, and placed under a tree that stood before the door. The poor fellow was mounted upon it; the halter was put about his neck, and fastened to a limb over his head. The judges had already become so drunk as to have lost all sense of judicial decorum. One of them kicked away the barrel, and the unhappy victim of Carolina justice dropped struggling into eternity.”

Library of Congress.

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Whites' vigilante violence and lynching followed the failure of state law to return blacks to a slavelike status. Whites used extralegal violence to intimidate and discipline black laborers. Blacks' voting enraged whites and excited their brutalities. In 1873 whites massacred more than one hundred black Republicans in Colfax, Louisiana, after a disputed election. Whites also expected their violence to discipline the sexual appetites of black men. During the Civil War, Democratic politicians coined the term miscegenation to describe sexual relations across racial lines, making interracial sex a national issue for the first time. In their fight against new federal laws protecting the citizenship rights of former slaves, Democrats warned against black sexuality in debates over voting rights and integrating railroad cars in Washington, D.C. In the minds of many whites, Democrats successfully associated black freedom with supposed black male lust. Southern whites' own lust for violent physical control over their former slaves thus acquired a new rationale: the need to curb the threat that black males posed to white women.

While white vigilantes organized, Congress seemed far more worried about state discrimination than mob violence. The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, intending to protect American citizens from state discrimination, wrote that “no state shall make or enforce any law” depriving citizens of their privileges and immunities, due process rights, or equal protection of the law. The amendment thus seemed designed to stave off state misconduct rather than violent mobs of individuals.

That the power of the state was not the worst problem blacks faced became increasingly clear. Members of the U.S. Senate, alarmed by the continuing violence, demanded an investigation. The army carried out the nation's first official lynching probe. At the request of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, General Ulysses S. Grant compiled a list of “outrages” committed by white southerners through 1866. Grant included a few black victims, but the names on his list were mostly white people. Although Grant described the results of what later generations would call “lynchings,” the general, white southerners, and northerners did not use the term.

By whatever name, many resented Grant and his list. When the secretary of war presented Grant's findings to the president's cabinet, the assembled cabinet secretaries reacted angrily. Secretary of the Interior Orville Hickman Browning, an opponent of the Emancipation Proclamation, called Grant's document “a mean, malicious thing” full of exaggerated reports. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, distrustful of Stanton anyway, thought Grant had prepared “a strange and equivocal document,” nothing more than newspaper gossip and “rumors of negro murder.” The cabinet thought the idea of assembling a list of mob activities was a politically partisan act designed to force the federal government to expand its role into ordinary policing, traditionally the job of the states.

Grant assembled his list before the most organized violence of Reconstruction erupted. The Ku Klux Klan began life in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 as a small circle of Confederate army veterans. In 1868, after Congress required the southern states to write new constitutions to be ratified by black as well as white voters, the Klan expanded exponentially. Like the earlier articulation of white southern violence, this new wave of vigilantes formed mobs and hanged black victims, and the public still generally called their actions outrages, not lynchings. The word outrage implied a crime against society, against the community. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans believed lynching implied community approval. Numerous lynchings in the West had made the practice seem a valid substitute for ineffectual or nonexistent law enforcement. Republicans, the authors of the country's Reconstruction policies, did not want to suggest that the state governments they had fostered somehow did not offer true or effective institutionalized law enforcement. Even the Klan's white racists hesitated to call their violence “lynching,” though they sometimes did so. Because they wore masks and acted at night, they clearly understood that they did not enjoy the widespread support characteristic of true lynchers.

In 1870 and 1871 Congress passed a series of Enforcement Acts designed to put down Ku Klux Klan vigilantism. These laws allowed prosecution of persons acting “under color of any law” to deprive another person of their constitutionally protected rights. In 1876 William W. Murray, the U.S. attorney for western Tennessee, vented his frustration with the continuing mob violence by persuading a Tennessee grand jury to indict the sheriff of Crockett County, Roland Green Harris; three of his deputies; and sixteen other persons for failing to protect their jailed prisoners. By arguing that a lynch mob had the cooperation of Sheriff Harris and his deputies, Murray hoped to use the Enforcement Act against mob law. In United States v. Harris (1882) the Supreme Court knocked down Murray's effort. Tennessee had committed no crime, the Court said, and the Fourteenth Amendment allowed federal prosecution only of some state act. The Court's decision in United States v. Harris seemed to shut down any possibility of federal prosecution of lynchers. Meanwhile northern states generally withdrew their support for the idea of reconstructing southern society. Whether or not the Harris decision specifically animated whites' violence, white racial violence became more open after 1882. With no chance of federal or state prosecution, lynchers no longer operated only at night, and the masks came off. The mobs even posed for photographs.

Black Response

As white lynchers became increasingly brazen, African American journalists began to criticize whites' racial violence. Among them was Timothy Thomas Fortune, who was born a slave in Florida and migrated north in 1881. He settled in New York City and became an editor at the New York Globe and then the New York Freeman. Closely allied with Booker T. Washington, Fortune advocated industrial education and self-improvement. However, Fortune also said things Washington would never say, insisting that African Americans should shoot to kill when threatened by white people. In 1886, after a crowd of whites gunned down innocent African Americans gathered in a courtroom in Carrollton, Mississippi, Fortune campaigned against the atrocity. Another black journalist was John Mitchell Jr., who founded the Richmond Planet in 1884 and made it one of the nation's leading opponents of mob violence against African Americans. Militant and a fervent Republican, Mitchell sometimes went personally to the scenes of lynchings, ostensibly to investigate but really to taunt white lynchers, daring them to touch him. Edward E. Cooper, an editor of the Indianapolis Freeman from 1888 to 1893, also published numerous articles recounting horrendous lynchings as well as editorials lambasting the incidents.

In 1890 Charles H. J. Taylor became editor of the Kansas City American Citizen. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Taylor became a Democrat, an act that led many to consider him disloyal to his race. His Democratic sympathies did not stop him from vigorously criticizing the violent acts of lynching. Taylor insisted that the guilt or innocence of the lynched victim did not matter; every American had a right to a fair trial and due process. Taylor filled the columns of his paper with stories of lynchings that occurred across the South. All these newspaper editors aspired to a national audience, and, with improved printing technology and subsidized bulk-mail rates, they reached large audiences across the nation.

In 1892, when Memphis whites lynched her friends the grocers Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, Ida Wells joined the black journalistic fight against lynching. Born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Wells became an orphan as a result of a yellow fever epidemic. On 15 September 1883, Wells, then a schoolteacher, had challenged railroad segregation. Ordered by a conductor to sit in the smoking car rather than the first-class ladies' car, Wells had refused. Although Wells won her case against the railroad at trial, the Tennessee Supreme Court threw out her victory. Subsequently, Wells purchased a one-third interest in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and traveled up and down the Mississippi Valley selling the paper.

At first Wells did not use her journalism to attack whites' racial violence. In her autobiography Wells admits to accepting whites' justifications for lynching until her friends Moss, McDowell, and Stewart died. Then she understood lynching for what it truly was: an effort to wipe out economic competition. A white grocer had resented the store operated by the three African Americans. In May 1892 Wells published an article saying that “nobody in this section believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women.” These words enraged Memphis whites so much that Wells did not dare to continue living in the South. She moved to New York and launched her crusade against lynching.

When Wells turned her considerable talents against lynching, she confronted a practice with deep roots in the soil of American culture. Long before the Civil War, Americans had lynched, developing rhetorical strategies to defend their brutal habits, arguing that communities could legitimize mob violence by sanctioning it. Moreover, whites developed a confidence in their “right” to kill blacks whom they thought guilty of some crime. The Civil War and its aftermath did nothing to ameliorate these violent tendencies. Defeated white southerners persisted in their violent customs, which they now saw as necessary to control black labor and discipline a people they considered savage and barbaric. The experiences of many white Americans through the nineteenth century served to reinforce their confidence in the necessity and legitimacy of mob law.

See also Black Politics; Black Press; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Act of 1866; Civil War; Colfax Massacre; Crime and Punishment; Democratic Party; Emancipation; Free African Americans before the Civil War (North); Entrepreneurs; Free African Americans before the Civil War (South); Freedmen; Jim Crow Car Laws; Laws and Legislation; Marriage, Mixed; Pearl Incident; Political Participation; Proslavery Thought; Race, Theories of; Racism; Reconstruction; Resistance; Riots and Rebellions; Sexuality; Slave Resistance; Slavery; Violence against African Americans; Voting Rights; Washington, Booker T.; Wells-Barnett, Ida B.; and Women.

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