During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers tended to show a particular animosity towards black Union soldiers (Urwin 2004; Wyatt-Brown 2001: 218), and there is evidence that some of them singled out the remains of black soldiers for degrading treatment. This seems to have happened with the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts, a so-called ‘coloured’ regiment, after a battle in North Carolina in 1864. When members of the regiment returned to the scene eight months later, they found that the Confederates had given the bodies of white Union troops decent burial, but the black soldiers had been left unburied and all their skulls were missing (J.R. Neff 2005: 64).
This behaviour seems not to have ended with the end of the war. After the collapse of the Confederacy in April 1865 a New York magazine sent a special correspondent to travel through the South and report on conditions there. In one of his reports, he described staying overnight in South Carolina with a planter, and noticing two human skulls in a corner of the man’s courtyard. His host told him that he and his neighbours had some months earlier pursued a band of black troops, or their camp followers, who were roaming the countryside looting the property of local landowners. He had shot two of them, left their bodies to decay, and then returned a few months later to retrieve their skulls as trophies (Dennett 1986: 195–96, 357). The significance of this case is that it points to a continuity between trophy-taking during the Civil War and the practices of racist lynching which developed after the war in the southern states.
Before the Civil War, lynching was mostly a frontier practice, with the typical victim being a white man accused of murder or stealing livestock. These western frontier lynchings were usually summary hangings, with an emphasis on swift retribution, and little ceremony (J.W. Clarke 1998b: 271, 274; but cf. Pfeifer 2004: 47). In the southern states, the main public spectacles in which the white population demonstrated power over the bodies of blacks were floggings. The lynching of blacks was uncommon because slaves were valuable property. But after emancipation, lynching came to replace flogging as the central public demonstration of racial power by Southern whites (J.W. Clarke 1998a: 141, 143).
In certain respects, the behaviour of some Confederate troops after battles such as Bull Run can be seen, in hindsight, as post-mortem lynchings of a sort, or at least as having some of the same features as these public spectacles would later come to have – in particular, the taking and keeping of souvenir body parts and, sometimes, the sale of victims’ bones or other remains as mementos. The forms of violence which came after the Civil War to be directed in the southern states primarily at black victims may, then, have had their first large-scale rehearsal in the Civil War, with their initial victims being, predominantly, Northern white soldiers. In some respects, lynchings drew on practices that emerged in the wartime military, as though prolonging these afterwards in denial that the war had ended. They also foreshadow the treatment of the remains of Japanese soldiers by some members of the Allied forces in the Pacific War, which I discuss later in this book (Harrison 2006).
Some of the lynchings of black victims carried out between the 1880s and 1930s were elaborately ritualized spectacles performed in front of large crowds. The usual pretext was an accusation of rape of a white female. In contrast to the frontier lynchings of whites, the racial spectacle lynching often featured prolonged public torture, mutilation and dismemberment, followed by the keeping or selling of body parts as souvenirs (J.W. Clarke 1998b: 281). The atmosphere could be festive and carnivalesque (Apel 2004; Markovitz 2004).
These events usually followed a pattern. First, a hunt took place for the accused person, followed by his identification by the white victim or victim’s family. The time and place of the lynching were announced. The victim was killed, mutilated before and after death, and the remains finally put on display and photographed (Markowitz 2004: xxviii; McGovern 1982: 140).
The spectacle lynching arose in a cultural milieu in which hunting played a central role in local conceptions of masculinity and bonding between men (S.A. Marks 1991; N.W. Proctor 2002). In Jackson County, Florida, where Claude Neal was lynched in 1934, hunting expeditions into the woods for quail, deer and other game
belonged exclusively to the men and the boys, who teamed with close friends in a kind of fraternal foray, the game being carried home and given to the women for dressing and cooking. The hunt, which was basic to the experience of rural males in Jackson County, contributed to the psychology of stalking prey and doing so in the company of trusted friends, vital conditioning for the preparation of lynch parties. (McGovern 1982: 28–29)
Essentially, a lynching here seems to have been a ritualized game hunt, with the victim cast in the role of a dangerous rogue animal. An Alabama newspaper implied as much when it warned the local black population: ‘when the wolf comes and carries off our lambs we must hunt him with dog and gun and shoot him down in his tracks’ (Watts 1992: 8). The hunt culminated in the public killing of the prey, the dismemberment of the victim and a celebratory distribution of body parts. Hunting imagery was often reflected in lynching photographs in which lynchers – sometimes in hunting costume – would pose with their victim’s body as if it were a safari trophy (J. Allen et al. 2007: 171).
As H. Young (2005) points out, one feature of lynching that has received relatively little attention in the extensive literature on the subject is the dismemberment of the victim’s body for souvenirs. The possession of such objects was a source of considerable pride.
To own [fingers and toes from Claude Neal’s body] conferred genuine status. One store owner [interviewed in 1977] recalled the pride with which a man came into his store that morning and declared, ‘See what I have here.’ It was one of Neal’s fingers. (McGovern 1982: 85)
An investigator sent to gather details of Neal’s lynching shortly after it occurred reported:
Fingers and toes from Neal’s body have been exhibited as souvenirs in [a local town] where one man offered to divide the finger which he had with a friend as a ‘special favor’. Another man had ‘one of the fingers preserved in alcohol’; photographs of Neal’s body were difficult to get because ‘those who had them would not part with them. I offered from 50c to $5.00 for one’. (McGovern 1982: 129)
In Linden, Virginia, in 1932, Shadrick Thompson, a black man accused of rape, was found hanged. The authorities gave his body over to the crowd, who burnt and dismembered it. They distributed his teeth as souvenirs and put the burnt skull on display in a nearby town (Edsforth 2000: 113). After some lynchings, parts of the victim’s body were auctioned (H. Young 2005: 640). After the burning of Sam Hose in 1899, in Georgia, fragments of bone and slices of his heart and liver were sold as souvenirs (J.W. Clarke 1998a: 140). His knuckles were put on display in the window of a local grocery store. Pieces of his body were still circulating in the locality more than seventy years later (Arnold 2009: 2, 171–72).
Sometimes, lynchers attached notices to the body requesting souvenir-hunters to let it hang undisturbed for as long as possible, so that it could serve as a warning. Although the most highly prized souvenirs were the victim’s body parts, it was common for the entire lynching site to be stripped bare by souvenir-seekers. Pieces would be chopped off the hanging tree, and the ground could be stripped of grass (H. Young 2005: 646; cf. Pfeifer 2004: 194). Photographs and postcards were another important form in which lynchings were commemorated (J. Allen et al. 2007; Rushdy 2000; M. Simpson 2004). With the invention of the phonograph, visitors at county fairs in the late nineteenth century could pay to hear sound recordings of lynchings (J.W. Clarke 1998a: 154–55).
As we saw with the royal executions of Charles I and Louis XIV, it was not only the body parts of the victim that were sought as execution souvenirs but anything with which the body had come into contact. In other words, we need to understand all the keepsakes of such a killing as parts of what one might call the extended or inclusive body of the victim. In violent death, such as death by burning or beheading, the boundaries of the body do, of course, very graphically and obviously break down. Hence the fallacy of S. Stewart’s (1993: 140) assertion that human body parts taken as trophies, unlike other sorts of objects, cannot function as normal souvenirs because they are appropriated and kept in order to obliterate the identity of the victim, and are therefore anti-souvenirs. Her claim rests on the unwarranted assumption that the body is a discrete entity separable from its accoutrements and from the environment of its death (see Hallam and Hockey 2001; Hallam, Hockey and Howarth 1999). In a lynching, not only was the victim’s body dismembered but the entire site of the lynching was taken to pieces, and all these precious fragments dispersed. It was as if the victim’s body, in being dismembered and distributed, grew to encompass everything it had touched. It thereafter pervaded everything connected with the lynching and everything capable of memorializing it, including photographs and sound recordings of the event. All these were valued as mementos because they were understood as extensions, ultimately, of the victim’s body.
Some of the elements from which the spectacle lynching developed had existed in Southern society before the Civil War. For example, slave owners consciously adopted medieval English punishments for rebellion, such as quartering, burning at the stake, and the public display of decapitated heads (Banner 2002: 71–75, 137; Egerton 2003; M.M. Smith 2005; Wyatt-Brown 2001: 52, 284). Hunts for runaway slaves, using specially trained dogs, sometimes had a sporting, recreational quality which seems to have been patterned after the English upper-class pastime of hunting with hounds (Franklin and Schweninger 1999: 160-61). And, of course, the sale or auction of lynching victims’ body parts echoed the way living bodies had been commodities during the era of slavery.
Body-snatching and dissection for medical training were also part of the repertoire of practices through which Southern whites sought to control blacks, both before and after the abolition of slavery. In the folklore of urban and rural Southern blacks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a much feared figure was the ‘night doctor’, who was said to be a white medical student, or a man employed by these students to abduct black people and take them to hospitals, where they were used in medical experiments and then killed. ‘Fear of the night doctor was so pervasive in black communities in the South that throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries people would avoid being out at night alone in the vicinity of a hospital’ (Jackson 1997: 194). According to Fry (1975), threats of hospitalization were a common way of intimidating blacks. Before the Civil War, dead slaves had also been used as an alternative to body-snatching as a source of cadavers.
Medical school personnel often asked slave owners to donate the bodies of dead slaves to practice autopsy and dissection. Because slaves were the property of the slave owner, it was within the owner’s power to grant or deny the request without seeking permission of the family of the deceased slave. The request was usually, but not always, honored …. [T]he threat of dissection was another weapon in the arsenal of the slaveholder that helped him maintain psychological control over his chattel. (Jackson 1997: 196; see also Savitt 1982)
In the United States, dissections of executed criminals continued until the end of the nineteenth century, and were reported in graphic detail in the press (Banner 2002: 234; Sappol 2002: 91). United States courts seem to have had more discretion in imposing this penalty than those in Britain, and do not seem to have applied it as often as British courts. But one effect of this greater discretion seems to have been that blacks were more likely to be anatomized than whites who had been executed for the same crimes. After the abolitionist John Brown and his companions were hanged in 1859 following their failed raid on the armoury at Harpers Ferry, Brown’s body was returned to his family, while the bodies of his black co-conspirators were claimed by a medical college and anatomized (Nudelman 2004: 7).
After the dissection of particularly notorious felons, their skeletons and other body parts were often kept in the anatomical museums attached to universities and medical schools (Sappol 2002: 91). These museums laid particular emphasis on collecting and exhibiting examples of abnormality and pathology, both moral and medical. Throughout much of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, criminality was widely understood in the United States as a disease, an hereditary one or environmentally caused (Banner 2002: 103–104, 118–121). Phrenology, of course, attached a particular importance to the skulls of criminals, and the authorities sometimes gave the heads of executed criminals to phrenologists to exhibit and study (Banner 2002: 120). This happened, for instance, with Nat Turner, a slave executed and anatomized for leading a revolt in 1831 (Egerton 2003: 160; French 2004; Greenberg 2003). The medical museum was just as fitting a repository for the skull of an infanticide or a rebel slave as it was for a sample of diseased tissue, or a malformed foetus: all were aberrations of nature, specimens of biomedical abnormality.
As we have seen, such practices were by no means restricted to the United States, but part of a transnational scientific and criminological culture common to North America, European nations and their colonies. In this culture, the museum was understood to play an important role in public morality and law enforcement. The heads, skulls and other remains of infamous malefactors, placed on public display there, were didactic illustrations of human evil and its consequences. In other words, from a certain perspective museums were ancillaries to the penal system. They certainly seem often to have been viewed in this light by condemned persons. When John Ten Eyck of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was condemned to death in 1878, he expressed great concern ‘lest his body should be dissected and his skeleton grace some museum’ (Banner 2002: 80). His fears were allayed by his father-in-law, who assured him he would take proper care of his corpse.
The father-in-law did carefully remove Ten Eyck after the execution to another part of Pittsfield, where he began charging admission to see him. When the town government shut down the show, the father-in-law moved to a nearby town and netted fifteen dollars at ten cents a head. (Ibid.)
Ten Eyck did escape the anatomical museum, then, only to become an exhibit in an impromptu museum curated by his own father-in-law.
Lynchers seem often to have been concerned to give their actions an appearance of legitimacy, and consciously imitated certain aspects of legal executions – by using the method of hanging, for instance, or by allowing the condemned person an opportunity to repent, confess or pray before they were killed (McGovern 1982: 76; Pfeifer 2004: 45).
The dismemberment of the victim and the keeping of body parts as souvenirs can also be understood in this light. By the early twentieth century, middle-class opinion had come to regard lynchings as reversions to the ‘barbarism of the dark ages’ (Pfeifer 2004: 146), a ‘cruelty which might well shock the sensibilities of the most benighted savages’ (Simpson 2004: 17). But dismembering the victim for souvenirs may actually have appeared, to the perpetrators themselves, to model the practices of their own legal system and give legitimacy to their actions.
For instance, local physicians were part of the social elite of rural communities and small towns and, as important intermediaries between the worlds of formal and informal justice, they sometimes played a significant role in lynchings both in the southern states and elsewhere. In 1908, a white man called Joe Simpson was lynched for murder in the isolated Californian mining town of Skidoo, by being hanged from a telegraph pole. Afterwards, the town doctor retrieved Simpson’s body, removed the head, and apparently gave it some sort of medical examination. Later, he set it on an anthill to remove the flesh, boiled it until it was clean, and then kept it in his office as a memento until he and the other residents abandoned the town some years later (Lingenfelter 1986: 298–99; Pfeifer 2004: 54).
Although Simpson was lynched by a mob and afterwards dismembered, the dismemberment was carried out not by the mob (presumably because his killing had no racial dimension) but by a local doctor. At one level, the doctor’s actions could have been construed as an autopsy. But they could also have been understood as part of the lynching, an informal, extralegal anatomization as used in the formal legal system as an enhancement of the death penalty. It was not uncommon at the time for a doctor to display in his surgery, as an icon of his professional status, a skull or skeleton derived from some autopsy he had carried out (Sappol 2002: 94). But when the skull was that of a lynching victim, the professional medical specimen and the personal lynching souvenir could merge inextricably together.
A similar case of informal anatomization occurred in Rawlings, Wyoming, in 1881, when the outlaw George Parrott was lynched and the local physician, Dr Osborne, removed his brain in order to examine it for signs of abnormality. The top of the skull was kept by Osborne’s assistant as a souvenir, and used as an ashtray. Osborne also partially skinned Parrott’s body, and had the skin tanned and made into a pair of men’s shoes. At the time of the lynching, Osborne was an aspiring politician. He became Governor of Wyoming a few years later, and congressman for that state, and sometimes wore these shoes to official functions (Carbon County Museum 2009; Pfeifer 2004: 47).
Keeping victims’ body parts as souvenirs could therefore appear to be not some ghoulish aberration but a respectable practice modelled upon the normal procedures of what might be called judicial or forensic museology. There were cases in which these procedures were combined with features of a lynching in ways that made them difficult to separate. The U.S. social scientist John Dollard describes the killing of a black man in a gunfight with police during his research in ‘Southerntown’ in the 1930s. The man had shot at a police officer, and was then pursued through the woods and swamps by police and a posse or mob of some three hundred local men with bloodhounds, and killed in a gun fight when they caught up with him.
There was one detail about this case quite horrifying to the Negroes. The cadaver of the slain Negro was given to a near-by college, the flesh was stripped from the bones, and the skeleton arranged and used as an anatomical exhibit. Apparently skeletons should be nameless; at least the Negroes felt it was insulting and degrading to their group to have a Negro so used. (1937: 329)
Besides the professional anatomical museums belonging to medical schools and the private collections of individual physicians, there were commercial businesses which Sappol (2004) calls popular anatomical museums in many U.S. cities between the 1840s and the 1930s. These catered to the tastes primarily of young, working-class men and exhibited a motley assortment of anatomical specimens, some real and some modelled in wax, wood or papier maché, concerned principally with sex, disease and murder. Middle-class opinion tended to regard these establishments as a threat to public morals, and the authorities often sought to close them down on grounds of indecency. Nevertheless, as was evident in their overriding preoccupation with oddity and the abnormal and grotesque, they were direct cultural descendants of ‘cabinets of curiosities’, the early private museums that had been fashionable among Renaissance aristocrats (Sappol 2002: 275–76; 2004). There seems to have been some traffic in specimens between the high-culture museums and their low-brow counterparts. In 1867, one such enterprise, the New York Museum of Anatomy, exhibited the preserved head of an executed murderer, together with his right arm, the limb with which he had committed his crime, both specimens having been purchased from the Philadelphia College of Surgeons, which had carried out the dissection (Sappol 2002: 290; 2004).
Again, there were cultural middlemen who brought these practices, or versions of them, to the rural and small-town hinterlands: professional entertainers who peddled yet lower-culture refractions of metropolitan low culture to country folk. Such were the entrepreneurs who exhibited the head of John A. Murrell, a Tennessean bandit imprisoned for trying to incite a slave revolt in 1835, and who died soon after his release in 1844. After his death, grave robbers dug up his body, severed the head from the corpse, leaving the rest of the body to be eaten by hogs, preserved the head in some way, and ‘displayed their prize at Southern county fairs for ten cents a look’ (Wyatt-Brown 1986: 34; see also Pennick 1981: 31).
A similar fate befell Elmer McCurdy, an outlaw whose mummified body was discovered by chance in 1976 during the making of a film in an amusement park in California, where it was being used as a funhouse mannequin, apparently without the operators realizing that it was a preserved human cadaver. A film technician, moving what he thought was a dummy, accidentally broke off one of the arms and discovered a bone protruding from it. The forensic anthropologists who examined the body found in its mouth a 1926 coin together with a ticket to the Museum of Crime in Los Angeles. These and other clues enabled the authorities to identify the body of that of McCurdy, who had been killed in a gunfight after robbing a train in Oklahoma in 1911. A local undertaker had embalmed his body and, according to some sources, then put it on display for $1 per view. Later, the operator of a travelling carnival tricked the undertaker into giving it up, on the pretence of being the outlaw’s long lost brother. Over the years, the body was exhibited around the country for money, and sold to a succession of wax museums, carnival freak shows and amusement parks (Svenvold 2003).1
Like saints’ relics in the Middle Ages, such objects were potentially lucrative assets because there was a large public eager to visit and view them. And, as with medieval saints, the body parts of deceased celebrities often multiplied. So it was with the actor John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Lincoln, five of whose skulls were being exhibited simultaneously in 1936, all of them accompanied by affidavits attesting to their genuineness. For many years, an object purported to be Booth’s mummified body ‘was an attraction at county fairs across the country, along with fat ladies and two-headed chickens’ (Hanchett 1983: 241; see also C.W. Evans 2004).
Such, then, were the miniature, and largely rural, touring versions of the urban anatomical museum. Some visitors may have viewed Booth as a hero, not a villain, and perhaps paid to see his embalmed corpse, or his various purported skulls, to offer their respects (cf. Verdery 1999). But, to others who paid to view such curiosities, they must surely have meant something very similar to the display of a lynching victim’s body parts. These audiences were paying to receive assurances that crime always met with punishment. The shows offered, in return, incontrovertible bodily evidence that the world was just.
The era of the racial spectacle lynching has often been viewed as a tragic aberration in the history of poor and backward regions of the South. My argument is that it needs to be understood as part of a much broader continuum of practices relating to crime and its punishment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, practices which were largely metropolitan in origin, even cosmopolitan. These included procedures of criminal law, forms of public entertainment, and medical and scientific research practice. What all of these had as their central unifying theme was the collection, preservation and exhibition of the body parts of criminals - for the punishment and deterrence of crime; for scientific study; and for popular entertainment.
To the male population of small town and rural communities, these must have seemed to resonate powerfully with one particularly important aspect of their own lives: the stalking and killing of game animals, and the victorious display of their remains. To many of these men, hunting was more than simply a pastime. It must have seemed an allegory of the fight of good against evil, and of order against disorder. For all these practices appeared to share a common moral purpose, and to speak a single narrative of consummated justice: first, the hunt for the perpetrator – usually male – of a shocking crime; then his capture, death and dismemberment; and, finally, the commemoration of his life and well deserved death through the retention and display of parts of his body.
Evidence of these links between lynching and the medical museology of crime is that both came to an end as significant social phenomena at the same time. The popular anatomical museums disappeared in the 1930s (Sappol 2004). By the middle of the same decade, lynching had become repellent to the vast majority of U.S. public opinion, and was in rapid decline (McGovern 1982: 140).
The dismemberment of the victim, and the keeping of body parts, usually viewed as among the most backward and regressive aspects of lynching, may actually have been understood by the perpetrators themselves in quite the opposite light: as giving their actions an aura of propriety, even legal formality. In certain respects the racial spectacle lynching developed its particular forms and rituals as an attempt by the largely rural and working-class supporters of what Pfeifer (2004) calls ‘rough justice’ to imitate or appropriate what probably seemed to them elements of modernity, in an attempt to give legitimacy to their informal, home-grown methods of social control.
Lynching was at the bottom of a pyramid at the top of which stood law, medicine and science. These epitomes of modernity had their joint material embodiment in the museum, an institution whose fundamental role was to amass and display evidence of human mastery of nature. Lower down, somewhere around the middle of the pyramid, were the salacious museums of crime and bodily pathology that purveyed what would now probably be described as edutainment to urban working men. Still further below these in respectability were the itinerant carnival and sideshow exhibits that brought to rural folk views of the bodily remains of famous bandits and public enemies, along with shows of midgets, sword swallowers and South Sea cannibals.
These, then, were the sorts of practices which lynchers drew upon and moulded to serve their own local understandings of justice and racial order. At the very bottom of the pyramid were practices such as the display of the knuckles of a lynching victim in a small-town shop window. But these descended from the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities no less than did the rest of the pyramid, up to the most respected metropolitan museum. Each of them was, in its own way, an assertion of order and control in a world perceived as unruly and threatening.
1. In another well known case in mid nineteenth-century California, the head of the Mexican outlaw Joaquin Murieta was preserved in a jar of alcohol, taken on tour and exhibited for $1 a view (Thornton 2003).