There is a crucial scene toward the end of Owen Wister's 1902 The Virginian that ties together and leads to the resolution of both the political and romance plots of the novel. Judge Henry, a former federal judge and now a Wyoming cattle rancher, engages in a debate with Molly Wood in order to justify the acts and career of the eponymous hero of the novel, the lover of Molly and the hired gunslinger from Virginia whose job is to kill cattle rustlers in Wyoming. As Judge Henry considers the task before him, he realizes that his defense cannot resort to “mere platitudes and humdrum formulas” because the stakes—the course of “true love” between Molly and the Virginian—are too high. In the end, the Judge, and love, prevail. He ably defends his politics, and Molly becomes resolved to what the man who will shortly become her husband does for a living.
What the Virginian does, what the judge defends, and what Molly accepts, is lynching. The judge justifies lynching in terms that had become long familiar by the 1880s and 1890s. Lynching, he argues, is ultimately a sign of the sovereignty of the people. Although laws are most often made and upheld by elected and appointed officials, it is the “people” who elect those officials and therefore remain the final arbiter of justice. Indeed, “far from being a defiance of the law,” lynching, the judge concludes, is rather “an assertion of it—the fundamental assertion of self-governing men, upon whom our whole social-fabric is based.” For the judge, popular sovereignty is the principle, lynching the practice. The other part of his defense is less robust, since he confronts a thicket of contradictions in defining the key terms of his “principle,” notably identifying the “people.” The reason the people have to lynch, he argues, is that the “courts, or rather the juries, into whose hand we have put the law, are not dealing the law.” In other words, some “people” have to pursue justice outside the courts because other “people” fail to do it in the courts. The “people” is a convenient fiction here, as elsewhere, as we will see in the course of this book.
The marriage plot in The Virginian is ingenious in having a federal judge defend extralegal justice in order to encourage the marriage of Molly Woods, who is repeatedly called the “New England girl,” to the “Virginian”—all now living in the West. Lynching, then, is both an emblem of popular sovereignty and the democratic principle that unites all parts of the United States (North, South, West). The defense of lynching makes possible the romance of the nation redeemed, as much as it leads to the marriage of the couple in question. We saw, in the Preface, that this dynamic was popular at the turn of the twentieth century, and that Thomas Dixon's Klan romances essentially followed the same formula. The crucial difference is that Wister condemns the kind of lynching Dixon celebrates. Indeed, the judge is most insistent on this point, repeatedly asserting that he sees “no likeness in principle whatever between burning Southern negroes in public and hanging Wyoming horse-thieves in private.” The lynching of black Americans proves that the South is “semi-barbarous,” while the lynching of horse thieves proves that “Wyoming is determined to become civilized.”1
The distinction Wister makes in his novel in 1902 is the same one that the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft had earlier made in his 1887 book, Popular Tribunals. In defending vigilante groups, especially the San Francisco Vigilance Committees of 1851 and 1856, Bancroft had to distinguish between Southern and Western lynchers—the former “a turbulent, disorderly rabble, hot with passion, breaking the law for vile purposes,” the latter a “convention of virtuous, intelligent, and responsible citizens with coolness and deliberation arresting momentarily the operations of law for the salvation of society.”2 Like Wister after him, Bancroft upholds the principle of popular sovereignty—that the people have a fundamental right to lynch—while attempting to make distinctions about what kinds of lynchings are acceptable manifestations of that principle, and what kinds are aberrations.
Three things are worth noting about the strategies Wister and Bancroft adopt in defending lynching. First, they are intent on seeing lynching as a manifestation of larger social, almost philosophical, issues—in this case, the rights of the “people” to express themselves immediately, unencumbered by the social apparatus of police and courts that they have established through intermediaries. Second, they see lynching as a phase in the evolution of a social order, a stage in the march of history from primitive societies practicing rudimentary revenge to modern societies with mature mechanisms of administering justice. Sometimes it becomes necessary to resort to lynching because of corruptions in those modern mechanisms, but lynching is nonetheless presented as a practice that will necessarily be replaced by a more “civilized” means of dispensing justice. Finally, they are both confounded by a problem of definition. They have to distinguish between two practices—to defend one and abhor the other—that share sufficient common properties as to be designated by the same name: lynching.
Bancroft and Wister provide a paradigmatic case of the problems faced by the contemporary students of lynching. We can identify the three questions they ask as fundamental to the study of lynching. First, in their defense of lynching, they ask the question of the relationship of lynching to a given set of enduring political principles—in this case, the people's rights under democracy to extralegal expression of their disapprobation of an identified victim. Second, in their suggestion of the place that lynching occupies as a common practice in the transition from barbarity to civilization (to use Wister's terms), they ask the question of the historical evolution of lynching in relationship to the other practices of the society. Finally, in confronting the difficulty of affirming that some lynchings are acceptable while others are not, they confront the question of definition, of how to distinguish what is an appropriate manifestation of the principle (democracy) at the appropriate historical moment (frontier or corrupt society) from what is an inappropriate act of gratuitous mob violence both historically and politically out of place. The questions, then, are essentially questions of the relationship of lynching to the political order of democracy, the relationship of lynching to the evolving historical state of the society, and the relationship of lynching to other forms of collective violence.
It should be noted that there are fundamental contradictions in the different answers Bancroft and Wister (and a host of others who preceded or followed them) have given to these questions. Most important, there is no way to reconcile the principle of the first issue (lynching is an example of democratic rights) with the assumption of the second (that lynching must fade as more mature societies develop more organized modes of dispensing justice). There can, at best, be an uneasy coexistence between a state that believes its police and judicial apparatus is fulfilling the responsibilities of protecting the people and meting out justice, and an unyielding principle that allows the people to police, judge, and execute on their own imperative. The principle (popular sovereignty) is inherently at odds with the model of historical evolution (maturing society). These are the kinds of pressing questions, and dilemmas, that make lynching an appropriate subject of study for those of us who wish better to understand the nature of all social action, all practices that produce and reproduce a society.
In the end, we will follow Wister's and Bancroft's example and attempt to understand both the larger social issues involved in lynching and the place of lynching in a historical trajectory, but we must first deal with the dilemma of definition that is as perplexing now as it was a century ago. We can proceed by first identifying some of the vexing problems that make it difficult to define lynching. These problems, I think, fall into two large categories—problems in general and problems of application. I will first identify some of those problems in general, and then, working with one of the most widely accepted definitions of lynching, explicate some of the problems in application. I will end by proposing how we might encompass, if not solve, the problem of definition, by pursuing a strategy of having two different kinds of definitions.
The problem Bancroft and Wister faced in defending lynching at the end of the nineteenth century is similar to the one a contemporary student confronts in defining lynching at the dawn of the twenty-first. There are different kinds of lynching, different sorts of acts, some of which are called lynchings and others not, driven by different motives, employing different strategies, and occurring in different historical contexts. For Wister and Bancroft, the problem was how to distinguish what they applauded as an act of popular sovereignty from what they deplored as an act of people's savagery. For the contemporary student of lynching, the problem is how to determine what precisely are the constitutive features of a lynching that make it a lynching, so that we can discern patterns and meanings in that particular kind of violence. How, in other words, can we define “lynching,” given the multiplicity of acts, practices, and events that are called by that name or sometimes denied that name?
More and more, scholars of the history of lynching are recognizing that the “first question” they must address in any study of the phenomenon is, “What constitutes a lynching?”3 And the more they do that, they more they recognize the complexities and difficulties in that task. Some are now suggesting that it is so fundamental a problem that it might require more than just additional rigor in identifying the characteristic features of the events that are understood as, or have been called, lynchings. At least one urges us to come up with a new term. Jackie Goldsby has recently argued that “the history of lynching poses too great a burden for one word to carry,” and suggests that “to produce a history of lynching attentive to its constitution and operations through language, we need to invent a new name for the violence.” And another decides that the current term is effectively inoperative. The leading scholar of the evolution of the word “lynching” in American history, Christopher Waldrep, has come to the conclusion that “the word ‘lynching’ cannot be defined.”4
Given the range of events that the word “lynching” has been used to designate, the political agendas behind the definition of the term, and the other myriad problems in trying to come to a working definition, it is perhaps tempting to embrace the ambiguity in the term and claim it as what W. B. Gallie would call an “essentially contested concept,” or agreeing with Waldrep that it simply cannot be defined. Before doing that, however, it might prove instructive to see how various definitions of lynching have limited our understanding of the practice and how they might be modified so that they do not. In other words, much of what we understand about the history and dynamics of lynching depends on how we define lynchings. For that reason, we cannot afford to be complacent with what appears a dominant, though largely undeclared, definition. For, in the end, whether we have an explicit or implicit definition, we are usually working with some model in mind, and it is preferable for that model to be transparent rather than opaque.
One way to encompass the problem is to provide two kinds of definitions, what I will call capacious and specific. The capacious definition distinguishes lynching from other kinds of social violence, murder, dueling, rioting, and so on. A capacious definition requires us to identify the rudimentary elements that make an event a lynching and distinguish it from another sort of act. The second kind of definition—the specific—distinguishes one sort of lynching from another, usually but not always based on the historical moment in which we find those lynchings. The capacious definition allows us to appreciate the historical continuity in the practice, while the specific permits us to see the historical particularities of the practice at different moments in the past. The combination of capacious and specific definitions, I believe, will allow us to see both the large-scale evolution and the distinct species of lynching in American history. I will suggest a working capacious definition at the end of this chapter. First, though, in order to see if that solution is the proper one, we need to see what the terms of the problem are.
For some readers, I imagine, the idea that “lynching” is an ambiguous term and difficult to define might seem unbelievable, and they might well look askance at a chapter devoted entirely to defining lynching—what Gore Vidal called “the kind of thing that gives mindless pedantry a bad name.”5 How, after all, can a practice that has such iconic properties be ambiguous? How can a term so easily employed in political rhetoric not be obvious?
That has partly been the problem—that “lynching” is a term more evocative than descriptive. For this reason, at this moment in our history a noose can be an effective material symbol of the practice, and a black male politician's reference to being a lynching victim is immediately resonant. It is likely that now most Americans think of African American men as the primary victims of lynching, and hanging as the primary mode. Billie Holliday's classic anthem captures this connection in one powerful couplet: “Black body swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”6 Yet it is worth noting that this has not always been the case. In a foundational study of lynching less than two decades ago, a prominent historian in the early 1990s noted that for “many modern-day white Americans, lynch mobs conjure up images of cowboys, cattle rustlers, and a generally wholesome tradition of frontier justice”—what former President George W. Bush referred to as “prairie justice.”7 We can call this the problem of popular understanding, or the problem of fashion. The term “lynching” has, at different times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, connoted quite different historical acts among the population. This, as we saw, was the problem that confronted Wister and Bancroft.
A second problem is that this same term has been used to designate acts that demonstrate a wide range of diverse motives, strategies, technologies, and meanings. The term has been variously used to describe forms of corporal but not lethal punishment (whipping, tarring and feathering) as well as fatal punishment; the same term is used to define acts of rough justice in frontier societies lacking the apparatus of state judiciaries as well as acts of direct defiance of those state judiciaries in more established societies; it defines acts of vigilante justice or racial terrorism by long-standing vigilance committees, by terrorist groups, or by ad hoc mobs. It is a term, in other words, burdened by having to denote a remarkable range of acts of extralegal violence for varying purposes, by different kinds of agents, and through diverse means.
A third problem is that “lynching” is a politically encumbered term. During the Progressive era, politicians like Senators Ben Tillman and Rebecca Lattimer Felton and Governor Cole Blease defended lynching as a form of Southern chivalry, because lynching was an act that, for them, implied popular sovereignty and Southern honor.8 Later, however, when the term came to imply the failure and not the apogee of a democratic civilization, politicians challenged the use of the term when it was applied to their constituencies in an effort to avoid the stigma attached to it. During the 1920s, governors from at least six states wrote to Monroe Nathan Work, the collector of data for the famed Tuskegee Institute lynching reports, requesting that he reclassify what was recorded as a lynching in their state.9 Politicians would continue to contest the application of the term to their counties and states. In 1955 the governor of Mississippi insisted to the media and to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that Emmett Till was murdered, not lynched.10
Those opposed to lynching were also attuned to the politics of the term. Three major institutions of civil society—the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), the NAACP, and Tuskegee Institute—debated among themselves what could or could not be counted as a lynching. The NAACP accused the ASWPL of prematurely attempting to record a “lynch-free year” as a sign of its success, while the ASWPL and Tuskegee accused the NAACP of being more interested in propaganda than accuracy. The definition each agency used, whether inclusive or stringent, served a particular political end.11
These three problems—of diverse phenomena, diverse implications, and diverse political resonance—are representative of the kinds of difficulties facing those who want a tidy definition. These problems, I hasten to add, are neither insuperable nor particularly prohibitive. They are simply the type of problem one confronts when dealing with a given phenomenon that changes, in practice and meaning, over time. One is tempted to say that it would be the occupational hazard of the historian, were it not the occupation. The other type of problem, the problem of application, is more difficult because these consist of acts that limit the range of the subject in significant and, I argue, detrimental ways.
In order to address these types of problems, we can turn to one of the most influential historical definitions of lynching that in many ways has guided the contemporary study of the subject. James Cutler formulated that definition in the first book-length academic study of lynching in 1905. Cutler defined lynching as “an illegal and summary execution at the hands of a mob, or a number of persons, who have in some degree the public opinion of the community behind them.” He emphasized the last point by claiming “it is not too much to say that popular justification is the sine qua non of lynching.” By “popular justification” Cutler meant “public approval, or supposed favorable public sentiment, behind a lynching.”12 As Waldrep points out, this first definition emphasizing community support has “long been a touchstone” for twentieth-century reformers. Indeed, Waldrep in his 2002 book-length academic study of lynching uses something like the Cutler definition in his working definition of what constitutes a lynching—“an act of violence sanctioned, endorsed, or carried out by the neighborhood or community outside the law.”13
There are deep problems with this definition—as a definition for the history of lynching, that is, as opposed to a specific type or era of lynching. The Cutler definition, published in 1905, draws on the types of lynching ascendant in the Progressive era—the large-scale lynchings that arose during the 1890s and began to diminish in frequency by the 1930s. These are the most iconic lynchings—attended by thousands of people, involving ritual acts of torture and dismemberment, and covered graphically in the newspapers. Because of the mass attendance and the news coverage, there does seem to be evidence of “favorable public sentiment.” But these are only one type of lynching—the spectacle lynching of the Progressive era—and by no means the only type. In fact, they were not even the most common type during that time. Lynchings during, before, and after had different dynamics and different degrees of community support, which cannot then be the sine qua non of lynchings.
Moreover, lynchers, for a century and a half, from the American Revolution to the interwar period, have claimed rather than enjoyed popular support. Edmund Morgan has brilliantly demonstrated that claims of “popular sovereignty”—on which claims of community support rest—are political fictions whose necessary characteristic is precisely “the impossibility of empirical demonstration.”14 The “proof” in such a case, then, is essentially the testimony of the lynchers and their apologists—that is, the channels for propagating and controlling information sympathetic to lynchers: newspaper coverage, editorials, sermons, and other informal testimonials from community members.
The main problem with this definition, then, is that it is too restrictive because it is premised on the idea that only one sort of lynching tableau is authentic, that only one dynamic constitutes a genuine lynching. Let us now trace some of the problems of application that have emerged in particular from historians' use of the restrictive Cutler definition. Because contemporary scholars so often implicitly assume, as did Cutler, that the Progressive era lynching was the authentic thing, they discount other kinds of collective violence as not being lynchings. We can see the problems with using a restrictive definition most clearly by looking at how historians treat the collective violence of the period before the Progressive era—particularly the years of Reconstruction.15
First, historians tend to find in Reconstruction either rudimentary or faux lynchings dissimilar in motive and level of popular support to the later spectacle lynchings. Waldrep, for instance, claims that contemporaries did not call the admittedly “brutal racial violence” of Reconstruction “lynchings” because “white societal support for the killings was not yet solid or beyond dispute.” The term most often used during Reconstruction, he notes, is “outrage,” a term, he suggests, that “implies a crime against the community” rather than “a killing carried out by the community.”16
We can see here the way that the Cutler definition, with its tenet of societal support as the sine qua non of lynching, has overdetermined this historical interpretation in some crucial ways. First, it requires us to make a distinction between two words (“outrage” and “lynching”) that much contemporary evidence shows to be specious. I am not in a position to say whether “lynching” or “outrage” was the more popular term, and I will defer to Waldrep, who notes that the term “outrage” appeared in headlines throughout the nation, and that it was a term preferred by many contemporaries to describe Reconstruction violence. I wonder, though, about the ways that the term “outrage” registered for those who used it. Consider the example of Albion Tourgée, the Union army veteran appointed to a judgeship in North Carolina during Reconstruction, someone particularly attentive to language as both a novelist for whom words were his stock in trade and a federal judge who understood the nuances of the terms describing extralegal violence during his tenure on the bench. Waldrep contends that the words used in “Tourgee's prose do not cry lynching; instead they shriek ‘murder,’ ‘assassination,’ and ‘outrage.’”17
In his 1879 novel on Reconstruction, Tourgée does indeed offer a catalogue of violent activities under “the fearful category of ‘outrages.’” But “outrage” for Tourgée does not at all imply the absence of communal support for violence. Indeed, at one point, he writes: “Many openly approved the course of the mob; others faintly condemned; and no one took any steps to prevent the consummation of the outrage threatened.”18 Even if “outrage” were the ascendant term for lynchings during Reconstruction, it did not, I think, imply the absence of widespread support, just as the term “lynching” did not imply the presence of it. (Again, recall that the support of the masses is a rhetorical strategy used to manipulate and not describe the phenomenon it names.)
In the end, “outrage” does not seem to suggest the difference from “lynching” that Waldrep insists on, as we can find a great deal of overlap in these terms, as Reconstruction writers used them. Consider the coverage of the crimes associated with Kinston, North Carolina, where five men were taken from jail and lynched (one white, four black), and then a white man was killed after firing into a group of black men he thought were assaulting a white woman near his house in Duplin County. When the New York Herald first reported the story, on January 30, 1869, the writer made a distinction between the two crimes, calling the multiple murder of the jailed men a “lynching” and the killing of the lone white man in his home an “outrage” (making the distinction in both the headline and the story). When two Ohio newspapers picked up the story, they reprinted the article verbatim but changed the headline. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer referred to the “Lynching and Outrages,” making some distinction, while the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer elided all distinction when it referred to “The Recent Lynching Outrage.” These words were often interchangeable, and editors did not hesitate to alter them as they saw fit. Indeed, when the New York Herald returned to this story nine months later, in an effort to connect those Kinston crimes to the Klan, it simply conflated the two crimes it had previously distinguished and explicitly referred to “lynching” as just one kind of “outrage” against law and order: “Among the most noted of these outrages was the lynching of a white man and five negroes who had been forcibly taken from Kinston jail.”19
In many other cases, the two terms are used during Reconstruction journalism as they would come to be in the decades following 1880, with “outrage” reserved to describe the attempted rape that “lynching” is intended to punish. A representative article from the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, for example, tells us of the “outrage” against Alice Thompson, and the subsequent “lynching” of Charles Brown and Jacob Berryman. Likewise, the Indianapolis Sentinel reported that Eliza Chamberlain was “most fiendishly outraged” and that the culprit just caught was facing “threats of lynching.” The Baltimore Sun seems to have used this terminology consistently through Reconstruction. In 1868, the newspaper called Isaac Moore's attempted assault on Ms. Oldfield an “outrage,” and his subsequent hanging a “lynching.” In 1877, it reported that George Jackson had “outraged” a little girl and subsequently suffered at the hands of a “lynching party.”20
That verbal distinction, then, does not appear to hold. What is more important, though, is that the dependence on the restrictive Cutler definition also leads to a teleological reading of history, in which acts that look like lynchings before the 1880s are cast as “not yet” lynchings because they have not exhibited the trait Cutler defined as categorical, and which some historians use to make a categorical distinction between historical eras. Consider this example of that kind of teleological reading of history: the problem the historian who wants to validate the Cutler definition confronts is that Reconstruction-era violence looks like a Progressive-era lynching. The solution is not to question the definition, but rather to argue that the earlier mob (in Reconstruction) actively anticipated the definition and modified its actions accordingly. Waldrep, for instance, suggests that the Klan “designed their killings to resemble lynchings, hoping to win community support by making it look like they already had it.” A mob of Klansmen, then, performs an action of hanging and shooting a person in much the same way that a mob during the Progressive era would do, but the difference is that the former replicates “the look of a lynching” in order to pretend it has “community support” while the latter has it.21
This insistence on reading the past as if its trajectory were inevitable, and the fact that earlier actors imitated later ones in anticipation, reveal something about how a restrictive definition can mislead us. It also reveals something about what some historians feel to be the stakes in denying the historical continuities in a practice when that continuity conflicts with their ready sense of established historical epochs. Waldrep, for example, goes into some detail about the importance of making the distinction between Reconstruction and the period following the 1880s, by again insisting on the Cutler criterion: “Understanding why racial violence in the Reconstruction era was not called lynching helps explain the difference between Reconstruction and the lynching era. … Once the white population seized power and rallied itself into a racial bloc, then, and only then, could they kill confident that they had the support of what they defined as the community. And they understood a community-sanctioned killing to be a lynching.” Waldrep concludes that “to describe the Klan as guilty of lynching not only ignores an important part of Reconstruction history, but it also assumes that all white Southerners opposed Reconstruction or that they all accepted the Klan's definition of community.”22
The historical record, however, shows that journalists regularly referred to Reconstruction and Klan violence as “lynching,” without implying that the term indicated community support of the act. A representative 1868 article introducing the newly formed Klan to its readers in the New-Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette repeatedly described the Klan as lynching African Americans, purportedly to punish criminals and likely to derail racial political equality. The reporter for the New-Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, writing in the midst of Reconstruction, does not make that kind of assumption when he uses the term “lynching” to describe Klan activity: “It is probable that the leaders of the ‘Ku-Klux Klan’ have an object far beyond that of lynching criminals who escape justice through the sympathy of governors or the connivance of courts and juries.”23 And the writer for the New York Herald, as we saw before, referred to Klan violence as both an “outrage” and a “lynching.” Neither paper accepted the Klan's definition of community (and, indeed, community does not seem to matter at all to them, because they see lynching in quite different terms).
I have gone on at some length in exploring how the Cutler definition can cause tunnel vision in even the most astute historians because it is important for us to see how a restrictive definition can produce only a particular kind of historical interpretation, closing off some avenues of research that can prove incomparably fruitful. Let me be clear. I am by no means suggesting that we dispense with, or are disserved by, definitions that are particular rather than general—definitions, that is, that attempt to identify the key elements that make lynching during a specific historical moment distinctive. As I said above, I think the best way of proceeding in our attempt to understand the history of lynching is by having both specific and capacious definitions. Such a restrictive one as Cutler's, however, works better as a specific one for the era in which he wrote (the late nineteenth century) than as a capacious one for the entire trajectory of lynching in the American past.
There are good reasons that Waldrep wants to keep separate what he calls the “era of lynching”—those roughly five decades after 1880—from earlier epochs in American history. I will explore in detail in Chapter Three some of the reasons that this era is indeed distinctive and exceptional. It is worth spending a little time here, though, examining some of the challenges that other historians have faced—and that I will face—in making those distinctions. Here I want to look at a popular and seemingly compelling reason historians distinguish between Reconstruction violence and the lynchings of the 1890s, and then to examine what I think is one of the primary, unspoken reasons behind the dating of the era of lynching.
Historians of lynching have been loath to see the continuity from Reconstruction lynchings to spectacle lynchings because they believe that the lynchings of the earlier period are more politically motivated than those of the later. Fitzhugh Brundage, for instance, notes that while the “extralegal justice of Reconstruction presaged the epidemic of violence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it also differed significantly. Much of Reconstruction violence was a direct attack on Republican state governments and ruling political parties. Lynch mobs later in the century, in contrast, rarely had such overtly political motives.”24 Brundage is quite correct that the later lynchings were rarely justified with any kind of overtly political statements, and that they were not apparently motivated by the same kind of narrowly defined political impetus as the violence of Reconstruction.
Nonetheless, we must also search through the rhetorical apologia for lynching during both epochs in order to detect the ways that these statements hid their politics within more popularly accepted justifications. Tourgée again helps us here. When he writes about extralegal violence against African Americans during Reconstruction, he notes that the violence was indeed political. It was an expression, he writes, of “an ineradicable sentiment of hostility to the negro as a political integer.” Yet, Tourgée also exposes the ways that these attacks are justified through subterfuge. When black people were whipped by the Klan, he tells us that the “reason given was that they had been sassy: the true reason is believed to be that they were acquiring property, and becoming independent.” Using a specific case, Tourgée continues to make the case of how the justification for lynching differed significantly between Reconstruction mobs and Klan groups: “James Leroy was hanged by the Ku-Klux on Tuesday night, his tongue being first cut out, and put in his pocket. He was accused of having slandered a white woman. The truth is, he was an independent colored man.”25
By demonstrating the indirection of the accusations, by showing that the reasons for lynchings during Reconstruction were as masked as the Klan night riders who executed them, Tourgée raises an important consideration. Might not the justifications given during the 1890s likewise hide the true reasons white mobs lynched black people? Let me be perfectly clear. There is a much more compelling record of lynchings from the 1880s to the 1930s that shows that there were more direct criminal allegations that led to lynchings. At least partly this is a result of the fact that there are substantial records for the later period that do not exist for the earlier. But it is also worth considering the degree to which these later lynchings were motivated by political concerns—both the specific concerns with black accumulation of wealth or electoral power, or the general concern of the threats to white supremacy. Without necessarily denying that there are more clearly defined “political” motives in the extralegal violence of Reconstruction than in that during the Progressive era, we can still note that in both form and stated motive the lynchings of Reconstruction are nonetheless lynchings.26 James Leroy may have suffered what would be called an “outrage” for the political crime of being independent, but he was tortured, mutilated, and hanged for the alleged reason of being too free with a white woman in precisely the same way, and for the same allegations, as would thousands of African Americans during the half century following the end of Reconstruction. In other words, James Leroy was lynched.
Let me turn now to what I think is an implicit—and good—reason that historians insist on distinguishing the “age of lynching,” and the reason it is most frequently said to commence in about 1880. In 1882, the Chicago Tribune began to publish an annual report that tabulated lynchings, offering data on lynching by provenance, alleged crime, and race. In subsequent years, the Tuskegee Institute followed suit, as did later the NAACP. It is that body of data that has proven invaluable for all later historians of lynching. And it is not surprising that a majority of books on lynching begin their survey of a given state or region in the early 1880s.
Indeed, the statistical data can cast a veritable spell on the student of lynching since there are so many variables and so much data to be manipulated. Lynchings can be classified and tracked by state, by region, by date, by season, by mode of murder, by alleged crime, by provenance of the victim (taken from a jail cell or not), and by race. These statistics also provide a seemingly concrete set of data that reveal patterns, which can then be used to expose causes (tied to seasonal or labor rhythms, for instance). In addition, these statistics are often used to argue for large-scale historical patterns of declining mob violence as signs of progress in race relations or policing. I do not deny that the data are important, and constitute a significant historical source, but without invoking Mark Twain's gradation of deceit—lies, damned lies, and then statistics—we can nonetheless note the numerous ways they are flawed. At the core of the flawed data is the primary problem of definition, of determining what is or is not a lynching.
There are two particularly pressing problems in the statistical data we have available. The first is that it is limited to the years after 1880, which in itself is not so much of a problem. What is problematic is that historians of lynching who draw on that data tend to discount or actively dismiss any lynching that occurred prior to that year, with the assumption that only events that fit the implicit definition used by those agencies collecting that data are genuine lynchings.
The second problem is that within the years covered by the data, those agencies also did not count certain kinds of collective violence as lynchings. Consider, for instance, the case of an unnamed black man tortured to death, his fingers and toes amputated for souvenirs for the white mob spurred on by rumors of rampant black rapists. The fact that he was killed by a mob, employing the rationale conventionally used by lynchers during this era, and suffered the degrading rituals of mob violence common to spectacle lynchings would suggest that he was lynched. But because he was killed during the 1906 Atlanta race riot, he is not classified as such in the usual sources of statistical information on lynchings. Neither are the more than two dozen other African American victims of the Atlanta mob nor the numberless victims of other race riots in American history.27
What does it mean, then, when what looks by all accounts like a traditional lynching by any of the accepted definitions is discounted because it occurred in an urban space during a spree of mob violence or, as we saw in the case of Reconstruction, occurred prior to the conventional date at which lynchings began to be tabulated as lynchings? First, it means that the body of data (the routinely offered numbers from the Tuskegee, Chicago Tribune, and NAACP surveys) that is the source of so much of the scholarship on Progressive-era lynchings is quite limited and misrepresentative—limited by virtue of the dates of its compilation (from the 1880s to the 1940s) and misrepresentative to the extent that it does not account for victims of so-called race riots (which are more often white massacres of black victims). That in turn means that much of the interpretation of lynchings, insofar as they are derived from the supposed patterns of lynching by demography and chronology, are likewise limited and subject to some skepticism. The suggestion that lynching became a crime against black people in the year when the data show more black than white people being lynched (1886) can be disproved by taking account of the lynching of African Americans during slavery and Reconstruction. The suggestion of who was the “typical” victim of a lynching or what constituted the dynamic of the typical lynch mob is likewise inaccurate to the extent that it ignores those earlier periods or dismisses later acts of collective violence as something other than lynchings.28
These, then, constitute some of the most important problems in the study of lynching. They can be described as intellectual problems and technical problems. The intellectual problems are those found in Wister and Bancroft at the beginning of this chapter—the problem of comprehending the philosophical defense of lynching as a quasi-democratic code, the problem of appreciating the historical vision of those who situate lynching as a practice that waxes and wanes in relation to the evolution of other mechanisms for ensuring justice. It is that subject, that intellectual problem, which we will be spending the rest of the book attempting to understand and explicate. The technical problems are those concerning the data and definitions of lynching. It is that subject, and a possible solution to it, that we will spend the rest of this chapter attempting to limn.
We have seen, then, that the definitions historically and still used by scholars of lynchings are problematic to the extent that they exclude events that should be included, and they do so because they draw on the most iconic lynching scenario—the Progressive-era spectacle lynching—and then define any earlier, later, or other form of collective violence as something else. What might allow us to get around this problem is to try and develop a series of flexible definitions attuned to the changing dynamics of collective extralegal violence. For the subject of our study to be most meaningful, to open up for us the deepest significance of vigilante mob violence, we need to be able to discern both the specificity and the continuity of lynching in America. We need, in other words, to ask what acts of extralegal mob violence in any given era meant, and the meaning of the trajectory of these diverse acts in different historical epochs. For us to be better able to do that, we need definitions that are both capacious and specific.
The advantage of a capacious definition is that we can better appreciate the continuity of the phenomenon. For instance, we would be able to see in what ways mob violence at different times is a protest against the state's monopoly on punishment, or a resistance to the state itself. With a capacious definition, we can more clearly see the common impetus that motivated acts otherwise as different as, say, the hanging of James Stuart by the 1851 San Francisco Vigilance Committee and the immolation of Jesse Washington by a mob of fifteen thousand in Waco, Texas, in 1916. They were both challenges to the state by differently organized groups (the Vigilance Committee had offices and officers, the Waco mob was a seemingly ad hoc affair) that acted on the pretext that the state was unable to punish the alleged crime effectively and, in the explicit words of the Committee and the implicit beliefs of the mob, that “we, the people, are superior to law.”29
The advantage of specific definitions, on the other hand, is that they allow us to appreciate the significant differences in motives, forms, and practices in acts of collective violence at a given time. What is important here is not necessarily the principle the actors share (resistance to the state) but the more immediate and more pressing ways they pursue that resistance. We can better sense the difference between the hanging of Stuart and the immolation of Washington by attending to the differences between the organized forms pursued by the Vigilance Committee and the relatively disorganized collective violence of the mob in Waco, say, or the difference between a nativist sensibility in the West in the 1850s and a white supremacist one in the South in the 1910s.
Having the combination of a capacious definition and a set of specific historical definitions will allow us to discern the continuity in the longue durée and also to appreciate the distinctiveness of a particular set of acts performed by groups of people with variegated motives in different periods in American history. The focus on continuity does come with some costs, though, and it is only fair we acknowledge them here. The 1780s, the 1830s, the 1880s, the 1930s, and the 1990s—to select decades to which we give some extended attention in what follows—are obviously very different historical moments that contain their own specific conflicts, and their own particular political, economic, and social contexts. I attempt to address those differences where I can, especially in identifying the kinds of lynchings that evolve from one age to the next, but, to some extent, I honestly do not offer much extended analysis of those contextual differences. The reason has to do with focus. Given what I think is the prevalent trend in the current state of scholarship on lynching—that is, that it emphasizes discontinuity—I think it more important now to focus on the ways that the practice retained identifiable features over the course of more than two centuries. It is only by doing that, I believe, that we can address what I think is a deep flaw in the scholarship, namely, that it does not give much or proper attention to lynching during the periods of slavery and Reconstruction and, more generally, that it does not adequately recognize just what is continuous in the practice.30
Throughout the first three chapters and in the Conclusion, I will be identifying the various historically specific definitions of what constituted a lynching during several different epochs in American history. We can end this chapter by discussing briefly the rudimentary capacious definition that has guided the research and writing of this study.
That definition attempts to identify the minimal number of maximally shared characteristics that distinguish lynchings from other forms of social violence. So that it can be most representative, it draws on both legal precedents and earlier definitions produced by civil society groups, in other words, by both governmental and nongovernmental agencies that had a stake in offering differently inflected broad definitions.
The government law that I most draw on—and the one that provided a model for most later ones—is what historians recognize as the “first legal definition” of lynching in the 1896 law passed by the Ohio legislature: “That any collection of individuals, assembled for any unlawful purpose, intending to do damage or injury to any one or pretending to exercise correctional power over other persons by violence, and without authority of law, shall for the purpose of this act be regarded as a ‘mob,’ and any act of violence exercised by them upon the body of any person shall constitute a ‘lynching.’”31
The civil society definition that has most guided the capacious definition I use comes from the 1940 summit of antilynching advocates called in the wake of the acrimonious debates among Tuskegee, ASWPL, and the NAACP. The summit defined “lynching” by noting four necessary conditions: “There must be legal evidence that a person has been killed, and that he met his death illegally at the hands of a group acting under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition.”32 It should be noted that two of the agencies that attended and approved the definition at the summit—the NAACP and the ASWPL—ended up contesting it later, the NAACP because it did not cover enough and the ASWPL because it covered too much and, in their words, could be used “to convert into a lynching the death of every Negro at the hands of white persons.”33 That disagreement and dissent does not invalidate the definition; I think it tells us something important about the political agendas of the groups, and the political climate of their times.
Drawing on these two definitions, among others, and attempting to identify those characteristics that most evidently distinguished lynchings over the past two and a half centuries of American life, I offer the following working capacious definition: a lynching is an act of extralegal collective violence by a group alleging pursuit of summary justice.
Let me note what questions are assumed—or begged—in each clause of this definition (again, striving for transparency and acknowledging the premises instead of hiding them). Let me begin with the three key words at the heart of the definition, “extralegal collective violence”: 1) what constitutes “extralegal” depends on our accepting the “legal” status of the state (a status that at various times is more or less obviously apparent and/or contested); 2) what is “collective” or a “group” or a “mob” is open to interpretation: state legal codes define a “mob” either with ambiguity—“any number” (Alabama, Indiana), “a collection of people assembled for unlawful purpose” (Nebraska, Ohio, Virginia)—or by designating a number ranging from “three or more persons” (Pennsylvania) to “twelve or more persons who are riotously or tumultuously assembled” (Massachusetts);34 3) what type of “violence” rises to the level of lynching differs at different times (from corporal to lethal).
The clause that identifies motive—“alleging pursuit of summary justice”—is, I believe, a useful corrective to the Ohio law and summit definition's insistence on pretense (“pretending to exercise correctional power” and “under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition”). It employs the language lynchers use (“summary justice”), which strikes me as more accurate of what these mobs do—they not only correct, that is, punish, but they also police and judge in other ways. Additionally, they do not pursue “justice” as the summit definition has it, but only a particular form of justice (“summary”) that they cast as more efficient and effective than formal or state-sanctioned justice. Finally, it is important to emphasize what mobs allege in order to compare that with what they do. Lynchers almost always claim to pursue “summary justice”—justice, that is, not restrained or averted by the state's legal apparatus—but that claim (that allegation) is often at odds with what manifestly appears to be a mob's actions in exercising social control of a victimized group, sometimes represented in the punishment of a particular individual and other times in the mob violence performed against a specified population.
The final point I wish to make about this definition concerns the term “act.” I have already noted above that these acts, at different times, meant different levels of physical violence—from shaming rituals to murder. In addition, it is important to recognize that “acts” are not isolated events unconnected to other kinds of acts. They constitute a continuum with other forms of extralegal policing of social groups—both earlier in the nation's history and in the moment of that particular mob's formation. For that reason, some riots can be lynchings or can contain lynchings as part of the actions of the riot. Riots that involve what a historian of rioting in America calls “actions of communal regulation” (so-called race riots and other pogroms) differ from lynchings only in that they have multiple victims and occur in more widespread terrain. They often start with lynchings and develop into riots.35 These kinds of riots would be counted as lynchings. Other forms of rioting, around particular political issues or during elections, would not fit within this definition.
The questions assumed or begged by this definition are not unimportant, but they are less important for this book than having a definition that permits us to class together different acts that share enough common properties as to reveal something meaningful about the persistence, depth, and trajectory of this particular form of American violence. With that capacious definition guiding us, then, we can now turn to the specific forms that lynchings took over the course of two and a half centuries. We can begin by turning to the beginnings of that particular kind of violence that came to be named “lynching.”