In 1901 Thomas Dixon, Jr., began writing his Klan romances, The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman, which would become the basis for D. W. Griffith's 1915 movie, Birth of a Nation. The movie, which in turn inspired the birth of the new Klan in Georgia, had as one of its key episodes the Klan killing of Gus, a would-be black rapist. This incredibly popular film was viewed by millions and publicly endorsed by then President Woodrow Wilson and at least one Supreme Court justice. It seemed, in the apropos words of one historian, as if “all America had vicariously joined a lynch mob.” Also in 1901, Mark Twain wrote an essay as an introduction to a proposed multivolume history of lynching, what he called this “epidemic of bloody insanities” he titled this brief essay “The United States of Lyncherdom.”1
Here were two visions of the nation at the turn of the twentieth century—one a glorious celebration of America as a nation redeemed through the reuniting of the South and North, a birth requiring the death of the Negro; the other a tragic jeremiad of America as a nation united only through acts of ritual violence against a reviled caste in the otherwise not “United States.” Specific lynchings happened in towns and counties, patterns of lynching could be found in counties and states, but lynching itself was a national practice, and a practice that helped define the boundaries of the nation. The primary reason antilynching advocates wanted to implement a federal antilynching law was that state courts consistently refused to indict or condemn members of lynch mobs, but the antilynching advocates also wanted to make a federal case out of lynching itself, to show it as the shame or crime or sin not of a town or county or state, but of the nation.
Is lynching American, then? If lynching is defined in its broadest sense as a form of collective vigilante justice—the extralegal pursuit of vengeance against an offender of communal moral standards—then we cannot say that lynching is uniquely American. Every human society has practiced some form of lynching. Mobs have murdered for religious reasons, as happened in fifth-century Egypt when a mob of pagans and anti-Arian Christians beat to death George of Cappadocia, the bishop of Alexandria and the titular head of Egypt's Christian community, before parading his body through town and then burning it. Mobs have murdered for political reasons, as happened in 1992 when a mob of Taliban captured deposed Afghanistan leader Muhammad Najibullah, castrated him, beat him to death, and then hanged his body from a traffic warden's observation tower.2 Indeed, lynching is often described in nineteenth- and twentieth-century political writing as an atavistic activity—the crime of barbarians, the action of the uncivilized—because it is, literally, the form of retributive justice human societies must have employed prior to the organization of institutions of modern nation-states' judicial and police power.
Yet many have held that lynching is, if not uniquely then distinctively, an American activity. “The United States is the native heath of lynching,” wrote Lewis Blair in 1894. Even more to the point, he concluded that lynching constituted “a distinguishing feature of American Evangelical Christian civilization.” Writing the first academic book-length study of lynching in 1905, James Cutler traced the history of vigilante activity in other continents before calling it a “fact” that “lynching is a criminal practice which is peculiar to the United States.” He, like Blair, saw it as constitutive of the national identity when he concluded that “our country's national crime is lynching.” Ida B. Wells had maintained this same point in 1895 when she pointed out that “no other civilized nation stands condemned before the world with a series of crimes so peculiarly national.”3 Indeed, not only did many intellectuals believe lynching to be a distinctively American crime, but some went so far as to suggest that even within America it was uniquely the work of “free-born American citizens,” not naturalized Americans, or even “foreigners” or “political anarchists.”4
In the first half of the twentieth century, antilynching advocates would continue to insist, as did the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1919, that “the United States has for long been the only advanced nation whose government has tolerated lynching.” In 1924 the NAACP referred to lynching as the “Great American Specialty,” and in 1934 placed a caption under the picture of a hanged lynch victim: “This is what happens in America—and no other place on earth!”5
Why, then, do some American intellectuals believe lynching to be a uniquely American phenomenon, something akin to another form of American exceptionalism? Partly, this is a result of political rhetoric in the antilynching campaign. When Wells and Cutler and the NAACP noted that lynching occurs only in the United States, this information is meant to shame the citizens who countenance the practice or at least do not agitate for the passage of legislation that punishes those who do it. But there is something more than political rhetoric at work here. Lynching is in some senses distinctively American. A history of the practice in America would demonstrate the ways Americans have thought of lynching as an expression of ideals they hold sacred—ranging from Puritan religious ideals of communal lustration to Revolutionary political ideals of popular sovereignty. The contexts in which lynchings occurred in America—on the frontier, in corrupt cities, as a way of controlling labor and community mores—are just that, contexts.
The truly meaningful place to locate what is distinctively American about lynching is in the political traditions Americans have formulated and the political myths they have held. In the case of lynching, that requires us to return to the earliest institutions of American life and see how they shaped the central ideology of lynching: the belief in the right of a group of people to punish by virtue of their own volition. That belief, I argue, developed out of the two first institutions to be established, almost simultaneously, on American soil. The first institution, the House of Burgesses, defined the terms of freedom, while the second, slavery, created and refined through laws passed by the House of Burgesses, defined its opposite. As we will see in this book, lynching arose precisely out of an ideology of the sense of what rights accrued to someone possessing democratic freedom (which evolved into the argument for popular sovereignty), and that that sense of those rights was directly and formally a product of the earliest and most essential mandates of a slave society. It is, then, in the earliest American institutions that we can find the origins of the political traditions that would come to define and be used to defend American lynching.
Let me clarify first the terms of the argument I am making here, and then the implications of that argument.
In stating the lynching is distinctively American because of the political myths and the political traditions that developed in the earliest American institutions—the House of Burgesses, which governed the transfer of property; and slave laws, which governed property itself—I am not claiming a directly causal connection between those original institutions in the first colonies founded in Virginia and the later lynchings that spread like a miasma across the nation. Lynchers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not understand or explain their actions by referring to those earlier statutes, nor did they necessarily believe them to be the source of the sanction on which they acted. Instead, I am claiming that the imperatives that drove the House of Burgesses to pass formative laws that defined the terms of freedom and enslavement, and identified the appropriate bearers of those forms of existence, produced both a formal set of legal statutes and an informal suite of ideological and intellectual rationales concerning the place of collective violence in the service of controlling freedom and slavery that, in turn, created, informed, and influenced the very cultural mores that lynchers acted on and justified. Slave laws, then, did not cause lynchings, but they did directly produce the very cultural values that inspired and gave lynching its impetus in America.
What is implied in that argument, then, is that lynching is not an aberration in American history, which some antilynching advocates hopefully suggested, but a result of the fundamental contradictions that faced the nation at its origins. That is what makes lynching distinctively American—that the earliest American legislators solved a set of intractable problems by legislating bills that promoted an act of collective violence, directed in certain ways at specific groups of people, that was originally, and later, meant to exhibit a particular kind of social power and exercise a particular kind of social control. What is not implied in this argument is that lynching is therefore uniformly practiced wherever the institution of slavery was established, or that it was absent where slavery was prohibited. What it means, rather, is that those laws created at the origins of the founding of the first states, in what would become the United States, produced a set of values and practices that would migrate with the westward expansion. The relative absence of lynchings in slaveholding Northern states and the occurrence of lynching in nonslaveholding western states is explained, then, by the extent to which the mores and established precedents that emerged from those original slave laws took hold of the imagination of the residents of those states, and to what extent they developed or relied on other forms of social control.
Finally, it should also be noted that what inspired the resistance to lynching was equally a product of those American cultural values that emerged at the origins of the nation. Antilynching advocates—both those who wished for the victory of law and order over anarchy, and those who wished the end of racial terrorism against African Americans—were inspired and moved by the same complex of cultural mores that valorized freedom as the defining feature of American life (the freedom from fear, in this case, to use the formulations that Franklin Delano Roosevelt employed). The crusaders and campaigns fighting for the end of lynching were also distinctively American in the same sense.
This book is a modest attempt to understand how lynching arose and evolved in America. In the Introduction, I discuss the problems involved in defining lynching as a practice, and then offer a working definition that is flexible and capacious without being diffuse. A major point in this chapter is that we need definitions that allow us to see the continuities in the evolution of lynching without losing sight of the specificities of the kinds of lynchings that arose at different historical moments. In the three chapters that follow, I describe the major contours in the history of American lynching, from its Revolutionary-era origins to its most recent recrudescence in the late twentieth century. In Chapter Four, I delineate what I am calling the “discourse of lynching,” that is, the cultural narrative about lynching that emerged in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and became hegemonic thereafter. Finally, in the Conclusion, I attempt to discern just what deeper meaning we can find in the history and practice of lynching. I draw on two ways of understanding the meaning of lynching: first, to understand the practice as an expression of the particular motivations of those people who employ violence to effect and mask their ends; and, second, to understand it as an expression of those political ideas that emerged with the origins of the nation itself.
Part of our concern in this study is to examine the rationales and justifications that lynchers and their apologists produced, to tease out what these defenses of lynching reveal about American political discourse of all kinds. The most recent manifestation of that discourse has been African American public figures who have described their political ordeals as a “high-tech lynching” (Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 at his Senate confirmation hearing) or the media coverage of a legal indictment for perjury as exhibiting an “unethical, illegal lynch mob mentality” (Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in the 2008 State of the City Address). The rhetoric here is meant to evoke the image of lynching with which most Americans in the early twenty-first century are familiar—the vicious violence against a lone black man by a white mob. In these cases, then, the term “lynching” operates as shorthand for a particular historical experience, which also conveniently erases certain stubborn facts at odds with the evoked scenario—such as the African American woman law professor reluctantly bringing forth charges of sexual harassment, or the African American woman county prosecutor issuing the indictments.
But while we can rightly deplore the opportunistic rhetoric these politicians have employed to evade their responsibilities, we can also appreciate what changes in the society their claims of being lynched are meant to mark. These black politicians are tapping into a post–civil rights discourse that America is a nation of law, and that now, unlike the era of spectacle lynchings, people in a democratic society would not idly watch a lynching but would intervene in some way. What these claims suggest is that we do live in a different world, one in which the claim of being lynched is supposed to inspire widespread opposition, not celebration, one in which lynchings can be employed as metaphor because they are purportedly no longer employed as a material practice.6
At the same, time, we are also forced to recognize the ways that lynching as both metaphor and reality continues to haunt the republic. As we shall see later, America continues to witness actual lynchings, as it did in the 1998 lynching of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas. In more regular ways, there are frequent metaphorical employments of lynching as a way of terrorizing black Americans. In just the past few years, for instance, nooses were found in a Long Island town's police locker room after an African American man was named deputy chief, on a Columbia University black professor's office door, and in several incidents connected to the events around the so-called Jena 6 in Louisiana. Even then President George W. Bush, whose record of support for capital punishment is beyond reproach, recognized that in these cases the “noose is not a symbol of prairie justice, but of gross injustice,” and that the lynchings for which the noose was a metaphor constituted a “shameful chapter in American history.”7 In the chapters that follow, I hope to demonstrate the extent to which the practice of lynching in American history is not only shameful but central, and how this practice is not merely a chapter but a theme running through the whole book.