Since we cannot atone you, we shall see
Justice design the victor’s chivalry.
—William Shakespeare, Richard II
LYNCHING CAN BE VIRTUOUS. At least, that was the attitude of whoever wrote the opinion piece in the Arkansas Gazette justifying the lynching of Henry James on May 14, 1892. This piece is worth quoting in full for the total defense of lynching presented therein:
In the South it is the unwritten law that the man who commits the most atrocious of crimes of which a woman can be made the victim will die. It was in obedience to this inexorable law that the monster Henry James, the negro who so fiendishly assaulted little Maggie Doxey, was hanged to a telephone pole early Saturday morning by an infuriated mob, and riddled with bullets.
There was no mistake in identity. The brute had been employed in the family to which the child belong [sic]. When arrested he confessed the crime, and his executioners realized that he deserved ten thousand deaths.
It is useless to moralize, and to deplore the reign of the mob. Every good citizen would prefer that the law should take its course. The courts are open. The flow of justice is unrestricted. In his case legal trial would have been followed by conviction, and the gallows would have claimed and found its own. But there are times when human passion becomes a law unto itself. There are times when that higher law which discards legal forms, and marches in a straight line to the execution of its awful decrees, supersedes all other tribunals, and, swift and relentless, hurls the thunderbolts of vengeance against its victims. The brute who assaulted little Maggie Doxey yielded his worthless life to this higher law. His crime was the most atrocious of all crimes; and however we may deplore the methods of the mob, who will say that he did not deserve his fate?1
How virtuous was this deed? So virtuous that it transcended the bounds of human legal strictures, representing a “higher law which discards legal forms.” So virtuous that the representatives of this “higher law” can be equated to Zeus, king of the Olympian gods of yore, who smote his victims with thunderbolts. So virtuous that it was the only response expected for “the most atrocious of all crimes.”
Henry James was described as a twenty-two-year-old “mulatto” who had been employed by the family of Charles R. Johnson of Little Rock as a general handyman for about two weeks. On the day of May 10, 1892, he reportedly raped Maggie Doxey, Johnson’s five-year-old adopted daughter, while Charles Johnson and his wife were away in Hot Springs, and the only other adult in the house was Johnson’s mother-in-law, one Mrs. Pennington. After the deed, he fled on foot, and when Pennington learned what had happened, she telegraphed the Johnsons in Hot Springs, and the mayor of Little Rock, Henry Lewis Fletcher, was subsequently alerted. Detectives managed to catch Henry James by the employment of a ruse—they spread word that the Johnsons were looking to employ James for more work, apparently pretending that his alleged assault upon their daughter had not been discovered. So when James showed up at the Johnson home on the morning of May 13, he was apprehended and taken to the city jail. The mayor, however, demanded the prisoner’s transfer, apparently hoping that any mob action would damage the county jail and not Little Rock’s own facilities, and so there James was taken. By the time a Gazette reporter managed to interview the deputy sheriff who was responsible for locking James up, the sheriff and his chief deputy had already absented themselves from the scene, having heard that “a mob of a thousand men would attempt to lynch James tonight.”2
The Gazette’s sensationalistic reporting on the lynching itself only serves to highlight the virtue of the deed by emphasizing the evil of Henry James. The very first lines of the report are: “Midnight! It is the hour when graveyards yawn, and hell breathes contagion to the world. It was about the hour when Henry James’ guilty soul took its flight from his polluted body.” When the mob arrived at the county jail and learned James was not within, some returned home, while others made their way over to the state penitentiary. There, the mob attacked the driver of a hack who, they believed, had just transferred James, until Colonel S. M. Apperson, in charge of the penitentiary at the time, met them and acknowledged that James was indeed present, and that their intended quarry would remain at the penitentiary until the morning, when he would be returned to the custody of the sheriff. As word spread about the location of Henry James, more people began arriving at the penitentiary, where various men took turns giving speeches on the nature of James’s crime. The mob appealed to Apperson repeatedly to hand over James, but he refused, although he reiterated that James was to be transferred in the morning, offering the mob an apparent opportunity to seize him then. Instead, the mob decided to break down the gates to the penitentiary, which they succeeded in doing just after midnight on May 14.3
The mob rushed in and found James in the very first cell they came to. Interestingly, before they could hang him, one of the mob leaders called out, “No rope yet! We want to try and convict him. We want to be sure.”4 The appeal to justice may seem odd or ironic coming from a member of the lynch mob, but many lynchings did style themselves after public executions, including moments of prayer and, especially of interest to the observers, an acknowledgment of guilt on the part of the one to be executed. As the historian Amy Louise Wood has observed, “These testimonials ensured that the condemned understood his crime and punishment, an understanding that was necessary to ratify the execution as divinely sanctioned.”5 Indeed, such confessions “lent lynchings the trappings of lawful punishment and served to justify the mob’s violence as rightful and warranted, despite that confessions were forced and were often obtained after the lynching was underway and not likely to be aborted.”6
When the mob took James to the home of his reported victim, Charles Johnson, having recently returned to Little Rock, met them outside his residence and cried out, at the sight of James, “That is the man!” Moved by this statement, the mob set off in search of a good place to carry out their lynching, growing as it traveled until it numbered approximately five hundred. After ruling out several sites, the mob eventually settled in a downtown corner at the local Pythian Hall and, there, threw a rope over a telephone pole. James was provided with some time to pray and an opportunity to confess to his crime, but all he could managed was eventually to mutter, “I guess I am guilty.” The mob placed a noose around his neck and strung him up, but before he was raised very high at all, the mob fired more than a hundred bullets into his body. Some of those attending the lynching included a “ladylike little woman, who occupied a seat in a carriage on one of the corners of Fifth and Main,” in addition to “quite a number of gentlemen in full evening dress.”
The next development further highlighted the impunity of the mob. Governor James Phillip Eagle and his wife, Mary, had just arrived in town from a visit to Memphis, Tennessee, when they saw the large crowd from their streetcar. Informed about the impending lynching, Governor Eagle bounded from the streetcar just as the first shots were fired. He was able to seize one member of the mob and started dragging him off before other men surrounded them and, after a bit of tussling, managed to free the governor’s prisoner. The Gazette insisted that the perpetrators of this attack upon the governor (though not the lynching of James) “should be severely punished.” The body of Henry James was not cut down until later in the day, after the arrival of the coroner and long after thousands of people had visited the street corner to see it hanging there (including a photographer who took pictures of the corpse).7
The lynching of Henry James provides an excellent example of what anthropologist Alan Page Fiske and psychologist Tage Shakti Rai have called the theory of virtuous violence. They summarize the theory as follows:
When people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent. Moreover, the motives for violence generally grow out of a relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, or their relationship with third parties. The perpetrator is violent to make the relationship right—to make the relationship what it ought to be according to his or her cultural implementations of universal relational moral principles.8
Such a theory challenges some of our popularly held assumptions about the nature of mob violence. Lynch mobs are popularly depicted as collectives of violent irrationality, aggregates of people temporarily giving in to their basest desires—people who may regret their deeds in the days to come and perhaps feel it necessary to develop some ex post facto rationale for what they have done. And there may be some basis in the field of mob psychology or crowd psychology for the idea that people behave differently among large groups, especially large groups of people with whom they share significant social identities. However, Fiske and Rai argue that, far from having roots in some collective id, most violence belongs to the realm of the superego, that most violence is motivated by a sense of morality: “Virtuous violence theory is based on the observation that people often judge that to constitute or regulate crucial relationships they are morally required to hurt or kill another person, and that obligation makes local sociocultural sense. In other cases, violence may not be absolutely required in order to regulate important relationships, but it is condoned, praised, and admired.”9 The philosopher David Livingstone Smith likewise asserts: “The attitude of dehumanizers toward those whom they dehumanize is anything but indifferent—it’s typically highly moralistic.”10 Or as the literary theorist and philosopher René Girard put it, “Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.”11 And no matter what evils those on the receiving end experience, perpetrators of violence universally posit their actions in terms of recognized goods, according to philosopher Mikkel Thorup: “No one ever struggles for unfreedom, submission, medievalism, ignorance but for their version of freedom, independence and enlightenment.”12
Moral action, Fiske and Rai argue, need not be exclusively something arrived at only after long contemplation, for most people “have strong, intuitive, emotional reactions to moral situations.”13 Granted, not everyone in a community will share the same morality, and some individuals may perpetrate acts of violence that are judged wrong by prevailing social norms of the time, as with, for example, mass shooters who feel themselves morally empowered to kill women; such men certainly perpetrate their violence within a moral framework, but it is not a moral framework currently shared by the relevant law enforcement agencies, mainstream media outlets, or other cultural authorities (even if they all share the same ideologies relating to gender). But collective action that goes unpunished can signify a broader shared morality, especially when that violence is widely praised.
Fiske and Rai center their theory upon relationships, arguing that the perpetrator or perpetrators employ violence in order to make a social relationship “correspond with a prescriptive model of what the relationship ought to be—what it must be made to be.”14 These relationships can be conceived as employing four different relational models: (1) communal sharing, (2) authority ranking, (3) equality matching, or (4) market pricing. Communal sharing centers upon support for in-group integrity, and so violence in this model might be motivated against an external threat, or even to bolster feelings of collective solidarity, as with gang-initiation rituals. Authority ranking centers upon creating or maintaining explicit hierarchies; violence in this model can be represented by the punishment of insubordination. Equality matching entails balance in relationships, a sense of reciprocity, and so manifests itself violently through the notion of eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth responses to real or perceived attacks. Finally, market pricing weighs the costs and benefits of various social decisions; violence in this model can be justified if deemed proportional to an initiating act or even to possible future deeds, if some overwhelming act of violence might prevent more violence down the line.15
We can already see the violence of lynching easily fitting Fiske and Rai’s four relational models. Lynching, especially when directed at a racial other, can be employed to eliminate the threat to “our people,” especially the threat to the white race that interracial relationships or alleged rape constituted (as will be explored further in chapter 5). Lynching can be employed to preserve the lower status of African Americans, especially after one of them has committed an act of resistance (as with Henry Lowery in the previous chapter) or insubordination. Lynching serves to produce a sense of reciprocity, especially as a response to murder, in which case visiting the same fate upon the killer restores balance to the community. Finally, lynching, especially as intended to terrorize the Black population of a community (explored in the first chapter), was regarded as a proportional response to ideas of inherent Black criminality and a possible means of stemming the criminal behavior of African Americans in the future.
Too, the moral motives of these four relational models “generate, shape, and preserve the social relationships a person needs in six ways”: (1) creation; (2) conduct, enhancement, modulation, and transformation; (3) protection; (4) redress and rectification; (5) termination; and (6) mourning. These “constitutive phases,” as Fiske and Rai call them, can be performed both nonviolently and violently and can be directed at the self, a second party, or even a third party.16 The constitutive phases may also overlap with one another. For example, lynching as response to a reported murder serves perhaps most immediately the purpose of redress and rectification, but through the example it is meant to serve (the terror it creates), it also functions as a means of protecting the community from future harm. Lynching also can entail a mourning response, especially when the initial murder victim was reportedly well liked and perhaps even a model for others in the community.
In other words, although those undertaking lynching regarded it as a morally appropriate means of correcting or maintaining proper relationships, this did not mean that lynching entailed cold, objective justice. As noted in chapter 3, punishment can often be emotionally rewarding for the one dishing it out. As Fiske and Rai likewise observe: “We punish harm-doers when we believe that it is fundamentally just to do so and when we are morally outraged by what they have done—not when it is rational to do so in terms of preventing future harm.”17 In addition, building upon the themes of chapter 3, Fiske and Rai insist that virtuous violence cannot be based upon dehumanization, for that would negate the moral basis for violent deeds:
We would define dehumanization as any case where we remove human mental capacities and emotions from people that we previously viewed as having those qualities in order to enable violence against them that is motivated by non-moral reasons. If violence is morally motivated, then violence is intended to regulate a relationship with a fully moral partner, against whom the perpetrator intends to inflict pain, injury, or death. There is no point in punishing or seeking revenge against a rock, tree, computer, automobile, snail, or turtle with no capacity for moral sentiments or reasoning, because they can’t transgress relationships.
. . . In cases of retributive punishment, morally motivated perpetrators want their victim to feel pain, shame, humiliation, disgrace, or the fear and horror of dying precisely because the victim was capable of thinking, intending, and planning his actions. In these cases, perpetrators are not morally disengaged; they are morally engaged. Victims are not dehumanized; they are humanized.18
Nowhere is this dynamic more prevalent than in the many cases in Arkansas in which the lynching victim was burned to death—for the murder of Henry Lowery, mentioned in chapter 3, was far from the only case of such a torturous mode of execution. In fact, immolation of this sort precedes even the Civil War. In 1849, two runaway slaves suspected of murdering Phillips County plantation owner Henry Yerby were tied to a tree and burned alive. As historian Kelly Houston Jones writes, “The horrific incident would have served as a reminder of the dangers inherent in running away as well as a warning of the gruesome reprisal that could result if slaves murdered their masters.”19 Burning was one way to ensure that the victim experienced the full fear and horror of dying, if only because it required significantly more preparatory work than did hanging or shooting, often with the victim to be fully aware of what awaited him.
Another early example of this in Arkansas is the burning death of Jerry Atkins in Union County—in the very southernmost part of the state—while the area was still under Union occupation. Likely a former slave, Atkins allegedly murdered two local children, Sarah K. and Jesse G. Simpson, on November 7, 1865, and then fled the county. He was captured in a nearby county and returned to the scene of his crime. According to the Goodspeed history of the area, representing oral history and family stories as captured in the 1880s and 1890s, “The citizens thought it would be but useless expense to place such a case as this in the courts, and decided to chain him to a tree and burn him. This was done November 21, all the people in the vicinity, both Black and white, assisting in his execution, which was also witnessed by a small squad of United States troops.”20 One of the troops who witnessed this lynching, George W. Lewis, described locals building a pen “of fat or pich pine split up fine. It was then set on fire in diferant places after which he lived only 3 moments & then died. After burning about 10 minutes his head & arms droped off.”21
Another such lynching occurred in the same county just a few years later, noteworthy for an even greater spectacle of torture. This incident is known solely from a letter, written by one Thomas Warren of Union County and published in an Arkansas newspaper, from which it was subsequently circulated throughout the country. According to this account, a pregnant white woman, left unnamed, went to a neighbor’s house for a stay of several days but, finding no one home, made to return to her own abode. However, on her return, “a negro stopped her horse, took her off and drove, pushed and pulled her eight miles into the bottom lands, where he tied her to a tree and outraged her, keeping her there for three days.” The report notes that she gave birth to her child while tied to the tree but does not relate its fate. The woman’s husband, not finding her at the neighbor’s place, went in search and found the horse and, then, his wife, dead from “blows upon the head inflicted with a club.” The assailant was soon taken prisoner “by a party of negroes who were assisting in the search.” And this is where things become even more horrific: “At the husband’s request the negroes built two log heaps, and, setting them on fire, placed the negro between them. They were twenty-four hours burning him, and at intervals subjecting him to horrible torture, such as cutting off his toes and strips from his body.”22
In February 1904, Glenco Bays was burned to death in Crossett in southeastern Arkansas for a murder he allegedly committed. He stood accused of killing J. D. Stephens, a prominent farmer (and deputy sheriff) on whose land he worked. Stephens, according to reports, had been having “some trouble” with Bays when “the negro went into Mr. Stephens’ house, and, returning in a few seconds, fired two loads of buckshot into Mr. Stephens’ breast” before striking “the dying man with the butt of the gun as he fell.” Bays subsequently escaped but was captured by a posse. A dispatch from Crossett dated February 18, before Bays had been put to death, noted that a mob numbering more than a thousand had already formed “to take summary vengeance” upon Bays, adding, “Some of the mob advocate burning him.”23 According to the following day’s report, Bays “made a full confession just after he was captured” and “laughed when asked how he wanted to die, saying it made no difference, as he knew full well that his hour had arrived.” The mob, described as “extremely quiet” and “composed of Ashley county farmers, both black and white,” then “proceeded deliberately to the task of executing the negro,” agreeing “almost unanimously that he should be burned to death at the stake.” So Bays was bound to a post, with brush and wood piled about him, and reportedly managed to retain “a look of defiance even in his awful suffering” as he was “slowly roasted to death.” According to the Gazette, “The spectacle was sickening, yet not one of the witnesses appeared to doubt that the terrible punishment meted out was merited.”24
The year 1919 saw two lynchings carried out in a similar manner. For the first, we travel back to Union County, which seems to have had an inordinate share of such murders. There, Frank Livingston was lynched on May 21, 1919. He had recently been discharged from the army at Camp Pike in central Arkansas and worked on the farm of Robinson Clay, a local farmer. According to the Gazette, the two men quarreled (over what is unstated), and Livingston responded by procuring an axe and killing Clay from behind. He then “walked into the house, got Mr. Clay’s gun and beat Mrs. Clay to death with it” before bringing the other body into the house and lighting the residence on fire to cover his tracks. Other African Americans, possibly employees of Clay, “rescued the charred bodies” and notified the sheriff, and a posse went in search for Livingston on the strength of a pair of bloody trousers, supposedly belonging to him, being found at the scene. The posse captured Livingston and forced a confession from him before he “was tied to a tree and burned alive.”25 In neighboring Columbia County on November 11, 1919, the first anniversary of the World War I armistice, a Black man named Jordan Jameson was similarly burned to death after allegedly murdering the local sheriff, who had shown up at Jameson’s house four days prior in order to arrest him on charges of abusing his wife. Jameson shot the sheriff in the head and then fled into the nearby woods. Posses formed, including men from El Dorado in Union County, near where Livingston was killed, and local businessmen offered monetary rewards for his capture. A posse of men finally caught Jameson on the morning of November 11, but when word spread about the capture, a larger mob intercepted the posse and took Jameson for themselves. In the county seat of Magnolia, Jameson “was taken to the public square, tied to a stake, and a fire built around him. A rapidly increasing crowd witnessed the execution.”26
As Wood asserts, for the lynch mob, “the black victim’s torment offered them, and the white crowd witnessing it, a sign of their own spiritual redemption. The physical torment and tortures inflicted on the lynching victim were, in this respect, crucial elements of the white crowd’s own sense of moral and spiritual superiority.” For the readers of newspapers that reveled in the details of a lynching, such as the report on the murder of Henry James and the subsequent editorial justifying it, “the victim’s suffering allowed them to feel their own spiritual elevation in contrast to the condemned’s utter degradation.27 Or as the philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen writes, “Evildoing as unleashed in violent assaults against specific others never emerges qua evil, meaning qua bad, or immoral; instead it is dressed up as done for the sake of protecting the good.”28
Even if not all lynchings were endorsed by the editorial voice of a publication, the choice of words in newspaper reports often rendered the actions of mobs or posses in stark, Manichaean terms that left no doubt about who incarnated the forces of good and who the forces of evil. Such is the case with the lynching of John Hogan. In late June 1875 in the west central Arkansas town of Dover, Russ Tucker and his son were awoken at about 4:00 a.m. due to “the screams and shrieks of one of his daughters.” When he opened the door to his daughters’ shared bedroom, he “found that their room had been invaded by a negro man of notoriously bad character, and that the demon had attempted to offer violence upon the person of one of his daughters.” Already, the term “demon” serves to render this as a struggle between good and evil. The man fled, “pursued closely by Mr. Tucker, who soon alarmed others.” However, Tucker was able to keep sight of the man and eventually captured him. After this, things took the expected turn, but the language in which the Arkansas Gazette presented the story makes this more than simply another encapsulation of vigilante justice, however justified:
Quickly and silently a rope was procured and, after marching John to the woods a few hundred yards from town, he was swung up, and, after a few struggles, the life of the reckless, desperate man was ended. Thus, in less than an hour, the devilish deed attempted by this most unfortunate wretch brought swift retribution upon his head, and the rising sun found the town as quiet and calm as though nothing had occurred, few of the citizens being aware of what was going on.
What is impressive here is the obfuscating employment of passive voice: “a rope was procured,” and the life of the “desperate man was ended.” Here, the men whom we already know to be engaged in this act of vigilantism are rendered non-agents. Their names are even revealed at the end of the article—“H. H. Poynter, Anderson Morgan and J. Tucker”—but the Gazette writer nonetheless presents the murder of Hogan as something that happens to him rather than something these three men actively undertake. Too, there is reference to the “devilish deed” bringing about “swift retribution,” after which the sun rises upon a community that still retains its innocence.29
The virtue of lynching is a theme that recurs during newspaper debates on mob violence, as, for example, with a pair of letters that appeared in the Arkansas Gazette in August 1898, the first from Father John Michael Lucey (mentioned in chapter 2) in response to a recent mass lynching, and the second from John W. Dickinson, a state representative from Desha County, in response to Lucey’s original missive.
Lucey’s complaint centered upon the August 9, 1898, lynching of five African Americans in the southeastern Arkansas town of Clarendon. The event was sensational beyond the death toll, for the five people (three men and two women) were all murdered for actions they committed at the behest of a white woman named Mabel Orr, who had been seeking a way out of her marriage to husband John Orr. Mabel managed to arrange, through her cook, Lorilla Weaver, for a local Black “conjurer” named Dennis Ricord to prepare a solution of boiled scorpions and snake heads she could use to poison John, but this proved ineffective. The women were able to recruit another Black man, Manse Castle, to shoot John Orr with a shotgun. Castle, however, backed out and passed the job off to Ricord and Will Sanders, the son of Lorilla Weaver. On his first attempt, Ricord proved unable to use the gun due to his unfamiliarity with the specific weapon. On their next attempt, Sanders was able to murder John Orr successfully through his kitchen window after he returned from choir practice. After a few days of communal bewilderment regarding the murder, the investigation zeroed in upon Mabel Orr and her accomplices, and all five were arrested, along with Orr’s maid, Susie Jacobs. Orr herself, in custody, swallowed a fatal dose of poison, and as news spread that she would likely escape justice, a mob numbering in the hundreds formed outside the jail, overpowered authorities, and lynched the remaining five people implicated in the crime.
The Arkansas Gazette, in a departure from previous editorial stances, condemned the lynching in Clarendon without even offering the typical statement of understanding, of sympathy with the people who carried out the murder: “It is a terrible blot on Clarendon. It is an awful record for law-abiding Monroe County. It is a black spot on the state’s history which can never be effaced.”30 Indeed, the fact that two women were lynched seemed especially to provoke condemnation, but as historian Richard Buckelew, author of the definitive treatment on this event, has written, “While it might seem unusual and particularly barbaric to lynch the two black women involved, the fact that they were involved in poisoning their employer touched a nerve in the white community. The fear of poisoning by black servants was a long-held fear of whites who employed them.”31
In its August 18, 1898, issue, the Gazette published a missive from Father Lucey commending the paper for its unequivocating stance regarding the mob violence in Clarendon, stating, “Every thoughtful citizen of the state must shudder at the outrage. Such an affair, if viewed as an index of our civilization, and it has become such in being one of a lengthy series, places the United States below Mexico in the grade of nations.” The priest then went on to highlight “two capital offenses which strike at the root of political life,” namely “lawless taking of human life and corruption of the ballot box,” adding that, in the South, tracing “these evils to their source is to come to the negro.” For Lucey, the “endless trouble” that seemed to mark “the relations of the white and negro races” was marked by a devolution of the idea of justice: “At first, only rape was to be visited by lynching; next murder was added, and now any exciting crime will do; for we come to the negro.” Further down Lucey actually recommends that federal courts take over the administration of law “if state courts cannot deal with crimes between whites and negroes,” though admitting that such a course “may not be feasible.”
Lucey’s letter demonstrates the difficulty of arguing against lynching from the context of a “race relations” approach to matters of justice and human rights—attempting to do so riddles his arguments with inconsistencies. For example, he seems to locate the impetus for lynching not with structural inequalities as relating to the respective power of each group, but rather with poor representatives of both races: “The negro question has been settled many times, but never justly. It must be taken out of the hands of the two worst elements of both races, ‘the white trash’ and the ‘fool nigger.’” He then suggests the necessity of “an education, industrial as well as literary, and moral as well as political” being provided for African Americans to prepare them to “enjoy the franchise and become a real American citizen,” without any comparable program of improvement for the people he has already dubbed “the white trash”—and despite the fact that he later insists that “everyone who took an active part in the lynching,” not just the lower element of the white race, “is a murderer and legally all such are subject to indictment, conviction and death.” However, Lucey does issue one clear call to end the hypocrisy of the present regime: “If the negro is not to enjoy the franchise, let the proclamation be openly made. The evils arising from the corruption of the ballot to defeat the negro are already very serious. The violations of the law are grave.”32 Granted, Lucey does not directly state that empowering African Americans politically is the best way to end lynching and, instead, holds lynching and the “corruption of the ballot box” to be equivalent assaults upon constitutional rule, but his readers may well have made the connection in their own right.
Eight days later, the Gazette published a missive by Representative Dickinson, who stated that Lucey’s own writing had created “the impression that he loves the negro so well he is willing to put ‘black heels upon white necks.’” Furthermore, the legislator explicitly linked the prevalence of lynching to the prevalence of crimes warranting it: “Judge Lynch does not hold his court in Arkansas more frequently than he does in the other states of the Union, or in the civilized world where the brutal crimes of rape and assassination occur—nor does he legislate against color—and if the negro gets into his court more often it is because he commits these crimes more frequently. This fact anybody knows.” Then, in order to underscore the apparent virtue—or at least necessity—of lynching, Dickinson cites unnamed representatives of both the law and the clergy:
A great barrister has well said: “The history of the civilized world does not record one solitary instance in which a man has been punished for defending the virtue of his mother, his sister, his wife or his kinswoman.” If this be true, and we believe it is, then we conclude that when such crimes as were recently perpetrated at Clarendon and in Grant county are committed, the whole people become temporarily insane and call into operation Judge Lynch’s court.
A great bishop said in substance in speaking of the lynching of the brute that ravished and killed the four-year-old girl at Texarkana a few years since: “If it had been my little girl that had thus been treated, I am not sure but that I would have become insane as that whole community was at that time, and done the lynching myself.” A crime committed by a man whilst he is insane is not punishable, and doubtless juries, grand and petit, have such cases which they discharge upon this proposition. Arkansas is not more in the habit of lynching than any other state or country, and ought not to be abused as she has been by many writers.33
In other words, men become insane in response to the occurrence of certain evils, but this state of insanity can be regarded as one in which men ably defend the virtues of women. Too, the reference to “the civilized world” and other countries is designed to put Arkansas on a moral equivalency with more elevated and ancient societies; recall in the previous chapter how the lynchers in Stuttgart considered their deed in a positive light compared to a recent official execution in England. Besides, the “great” barristers and bishops essentially endorsed as understandable, as natural, the state of temporary insanity that arises from the desire or necessity to defend one’s womenfolk. And if these states of violent insanity are typically directed against “the negro,” it is because that race commits a greater number of crimes and thus deserves more punishment.
Even when a newspaper might argue against the act of lynching, it could sometimes do so by reference to a greater suffering available to the would-be victim. On the night of October 16, 1911, Nathan Lacey was lynched in Forrest City in northeastern Arkansas for having allegedly “attempted to assault Mrs. Thomas Cox.” After his arrest, a mob of some three hundred men arrived at the county jail and overpowered the sheriff before breaking down the doors of the building, and then the door to Lacey’s cell, with sledgehammers. According to the Arkansas Democrat, the mob then dragged Lacey from the building by a rope around his neck and marched him for about a mile to a local brickyard, where “the negro shrieked and begged for his life, praying to his God for mercy and to his captors for time to prepare to meet his fate.” The mob then, with the stereotypically reported “quiet,” hanged Lacey from the cross arm of a telegraph pole, where the body remained hanging until the following morning. The Gazette, however, reported that the mob hanged Lacey briefly and then let him down “in order that he might make a statement or utter a prayer” before pulling him “up by the neck” and leaving him there. The latter newspaper took pains to emphasize the reputable behavior of the mob: “The mob was not a riotous one. There was no drinking and not a shot was fired by any member of it.”34
The Arkansas Democrat reflected upon the lynching of Nathan Lacey in an editorial that attempts to present lynching as the lesser or two alternatives for stemming the criminal nature of “negro brutes.” While it could not argue against lynching without reinforcing the notion that a righteous cause lay behind so many mob murders, as well as indirectly crediting lynching as efficient and representative of the democratic spirit, it did present the trappings of “law and order” as a means of fostering a greater sense of existential dread in the Black population as a whole. Titled “Do Lynchings Pay?” it is worth quoting in full:
Does the lynching of a man accomplish any good? That is a question that the people have been asking for years past and the answer appears to be as uncertain and indefinite today as it was in the past century when the first lynchings were heard of in this country.
There are two ways of looking at lynchings—from the abstract and from the concrete. From the former there is no doubt that no good is accomplished. Take, for instance, the lynching of Nathan Lacey at Forrest City, Monday night.
The black brute attempted to assault the wife of a prominent farmer of St. Francis County. He was chased down and captured and placed in jail. There is practically no doubt that he would have been convicted and legally executed.
Would not the trying of this negro and the legal hanging of the fiend accomplish more than the wreaking of summary vengeance upon him by a gathering of 300 men without warrant of law?
But the other side.
The husband of the woman who was attacked, his relatives and her kinsmen and the close personal friends of the family are to be taken into consideration. What would be the feeling of these people toward the human monstrosity that had entered the home and attempted to do violence to the wife and mother?
That they should have desired the life of Nathan Lacey is easy to understand.
But there is nothing to show that any of those people were members of the mob that hanged the negro. Therefore it devolves upon other residents of St. Francis County. They were probably acquaintances of the husband whose home had been entered. They were possibly fired by the thought that should the negro be allowed to live another might attempt a similar assault upon some of their loved ones. Therefore, it is easy to argue, they executed him as a warning to any man who might contemplate such a deed.
But is it a warning? Does the lynching of a negro have any salutary effect upon others of their race who might contemplate such an act?
It is very doubtful. The negro who is guilty of an attack on a woman is ninety-nine cases out of every hundred the man who has little or no education, who is possessed only of the lowest sort of intelligence and who is really more brute than man.
It is usually the case that the negro guilty of such an act is incapable of reasoning out the principle of cause and effect to the extent of applying it to his own case.
But when a negro is imprisoned for several months, perhaps, given a fair and impartial trial, condemned to death and hanged for his crime, the fact is discussed throughout the countryside. Even the most ignorant acquire more or less information regarding the crime itself, the trial and conviction, and the horrible thought of waiting behind steel bars for that hour to come when his fellowman has decreed he shall die to pay the penalty for his infringement of God and man-made law, weighs more or less heavily upon even the poor mentality of the average black.
It is easy for those who have not had the fiend to come into their own home, to preach moderation, and it should be done for the general effect it may have, but it accomplishes about as much with the near relatives of the victim as the singing of Psalms does with the dead mule.
But to those who take part in these summary executions, it should become a matter of serious consideration.
Do lynchings pay?35
What the editorial author attempts here is very interesting. He asserts that, from the abstract perspective, “there is no doubt that no good is accomplished,” given that the person in question would have been hanged anyway, but he does acknowledge that lynchings can have a salutary effect for those most closely connected to the alleged precipitating act—in this case, the attempted assault. However, the editorialist also tries to argue for the greater virtue of letting the law work its course by appealing to a sense of humanist violence, as covered in chapter 3. The law, in this case, would inspire greater dread (and thus serve as a better corrective) precisely because it draws out the suffering of the man convicted, and thus inspires greater sympathetic suffering on the part of all who can identify with the convict by virtue of shared racial identity. A lynching, in other words, ends a life too quickly to serve as an example. Only the law can act virtuously enough to resonate with the humanity of “the average black” as a collective.
In short, those who lynched imagined themselves committing deeds of high virtue. And those who opposed lynching often cast their opposition in the light of greater pain and suffering for not only the victim himself but also for the entire Black community, and such pain and suffering would itself be virtuously undertaken. But what is truly interesting is that even those opposing lynching could sometimes, strategically, evoke the virtues of actual violence. For example, The Appeal of St. Paul, Minnesota, a Black newspaper, editorialized thusly on the lynching of James, covered at the beginning of this chapter, to interrogate the broader system of white supremacy in the United States, asking such questions as the following:
Does any fair-minded person suppose there was any actual desire on the part of the authorities to prevent the mob at Little Rock, Ark., from breaking into the penitentiary and taking therefrom Henry James the Afro-American accused of outraging the little white girl last week? The guards in that penitentiary could have kept a mob of 10,000 at bay for an indefinite period.
Does any fair-minded person believe that had Henry James been white and Maggie Doxey black and the circumstances otherwise exactly the same that there would have been any such exhibition in the defence of outraged virtue by the “superior race”?
Would a black Maggie Doxey at five years of age been any less pure than a white one?
Would an assault on a black virgin five years old by a letcherous [sic] white brute been any less aggravating than if the colors were reversed?
Did anybody ever hear of a white mob lynching a white man for outraging a black virgin?
Why cannot a black man be tried in the legal courts? If there is any doubt of his innocense [sic] he will get the benefit of the doubt.
Would it not be following the first law of nature if the constantly outraged Afro-Americans take “Lex talionis” as their motto all over the South, and act in accordance with the motto?
If an insurrection a thousand-fold greater than the Nat Turner insurrection should break out in the South who would be to blame?36