PREFACE: AN AMERICAN ICON
1. Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 191. Mark Twain, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” in Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1901–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1992), pp. 479–86, esp. p. 486. Twain's essay was written in 1901, published posthumously in 1923; he sent it to an editor as a proposal for the multivolume work but changed his mind about the project. See L. Terry Oggel, “Speaking Out About Race: ‘The United States of Lyncherdom’ Clemens Really Wrote,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Volume 25 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 129.
2. Richard E. Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity During the Last Days of Rome (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1999), pp. 3, 195, 212. Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic Wars and the Modern Conscience (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. 142. The Afghanistan case is complicated because the Taliban mob claimed they were performing an execution, and in a state where there is no recognized authority the lines between execution and lynching become blurred.
3. Lewis Blair, “Lynching as Fine Art,” Our Day 13.76 (1894): 307–14, esp. pp. 307, 313. James Elbert Cutler, Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (Longman, Green, 1905), p. 1. Ida B. Wells, A Red Record (Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry, 1895), p. 14.
4. B. O. Flowers, “The Rise of Anarchy in the United States,” The Arena 30.3 (September, 1903): 305.
5. National Association For the Advancement of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 (New York: NAACP, 1919), p. 5. “The Great American Specialty,” Crisis 27.4 (February 1924): 168. “My Country, 'Tis of Thee,” Crisis 41.11 (November 1934): 342.
6. I would like to thank Nathan Connolly for his helpful suggestions in thinking about the implications of these politicians' claims.
7. Steven Lee Myers, “Bush, at Commemoration, Says Nooses Are Symbol of ‘Gross Injustice,’” New York Times (February 13, 2008).
INTRODUCTION: THE STUDY OF LYNCHING
1. Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 284, 283.
2. Hubert Howe Bancroft, Popular Tribunals, Volume 2, in The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft (San Francisco: History Company, 1887), Volume XXXVII, p. 670.
3. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 291.
4. Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 11, 282. Christopher Waldrep, ed., Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. xvii. Waldrep, in this anthology and, especially, in The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Macmillan, 2002), is rigorously attentive to the radical ambiguity in the term “lynching,” and nobody has done a finer job of showing the varying ways it has evolved and been contested.
5. Gore Vidal, “Lincoln, Lincoln and the Priests of Academe,” United States: Essays, 1952–1992 (New York: Random House, 1993), pp. 669–700, esp. p. 691. The author does recognize that footnoting such a quotation fulfills its truth!
6. Of course, hanging is only one mode; the next verse in Holliday's song focuses on “the sudden smell of burning flesh.” But the point I wish to make is not simply that there are different kinds of victims, and different ways they have been dispatched.
7. Brundage, Lynching in the New South, p. 1.
8. Ben Tillman, January 12, 1907, United States Senate, Congressional Record, 59th Cong., 2d sess., 1441; qtd. in Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, p. 120. Rebecca Lattimer Felton, Atlanta Journal (August 12, 1897); qtd. in Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 198. Coleman Blease, in Bryant Simon, A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 32–33.
9. Linda O. McMurry, Recorder of the Black Experience: A Biography of Monroe Nathan Work (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), pp. 124–25.
10. Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 24–25.
11. Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, pp. 127–50.
12. James Elbert Cutler, Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (Longman, Green, 1905), p. 276.
13. Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, pp. 183, 12. Waldrep's definition is more nuanced and useful than Cutler's.
14. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 59.
15. It is worth noting that Cutler, whose restrictive definition contemporary historians use to discount Reconstruction-era violence as lynchings, did himself believe that lynch-law reigned during Reconstruction; his view, however, is deeply informed by a romantic rendering of the work of the Klan during Reconstruction. See Cutler, Lynch-Law, pp. 137–54, esp. pp. 152–53.
16. Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, pp. 67, 79–80. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), p. 207, notes that some Puritan writers, like William Hubbard, who wrote about King Philip's War, used “outrage” instead of “war” because it was a term more “appropriate to the subhuman nature of the Indians.” In addition, as I will show below, the terms “lynching” and “lynch-law” did appear frequently in newspapers accounts of anti-Black violence during Reconstruction.
17. Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, p. 78.
18. Albion W. Tourgée, A Fool's Errand, ed. John Hope Franklin (1879; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 246, 149, 99. And even more telling, Tourgée refers to “Judge Lynch” to define the threat of “rope and fag[g]ots” faced only by antebellum abolitionists.
19. “North Carolina. Great Excitement over the Recent Lynching-Kinston in a State of Siege-Outrage in Duplin County by Negroes,” New York Herald (January 30, 1869). “Trouble in North Carolina. Lynching and Outrages,” Cleveland Plain-Dealer (January 30, 1869). “North Carolina. The Recent Lynching Outrage,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (January 31, 1869). “North Carolina. Discovery of the Secrets and Organization of the Ku Klux Klans” New York Herald (September 16, 1869).
20. “Lynch Law. An Outrage Upon a Lady Committed by Two Inhuman Fiends—They Are Captured,” Cleveland Plain-Dealer (August 28, 1869). “A Black Fiend, an Atrocious Outrage near St. Louis, Threats of Lynching the Culprit,” Indianapolis Sentinel (July 1, 1875). “The Lynch Law Case in Harford County,” Baltimore Sun (July 24, 1868). “Lynch Law in Arkansas,” Baltimore Sun (August 8, 1877).
21. Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, pp. 72, 73.
22. Ibid., p. 84.
23. “Ku-Klux Klan,” New-Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette (April 8, 1868).
24. Brundage, Lynching in the New South, pp. 6–7. Cf. William Cohen, At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861–1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), pp. 211–12: “In Reconstruction, mob violence most often stopped short of murder, and when killing was involved, it happened without ceremony. … By contrast, lynching was ‘ritualized murder’ conducted under the claim that the mob was dispensing justice.”
25. Tourgée, A Fool's Errand, pp. 255, 193.
26. For other opinions on Reconstruction lynching by earlier historians and commentators, see Cutler, Lynch-Law, pp. 152–53; and James Weldon Johnson, “Lynching—America's National Disgrace,” Current History 19.4 (January 1924): 597. Cutler argues that the “application of lynch-law under the anomalous conditions in the South … rendered the reconstruction period a distinctive period in the history of lynch-law.” Johnson traces lynching back to slavery and finds in Reconstruction a “recrudescence of lynching.”
27. The account of this incident in the Atlanta riot lynching is taken from Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 436. None of those murdered during the 1906 Atlanta riot are listed in the NAACP report. NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States (New York: NAACP, 1919). Cf. Appendix A in Brundage, Lynching in the New South, pp. 270–80. For a fuller narrative of the Atlanta riot and the newspaper rumors of an epidemic of black rape, see David Fort Godshalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Many “race riots” or political pogroms were spurred on by the same lynching discourse that mobilized mobs to kill individuals, including those in Atlanta (1906) and Wilmington (1898). See, for instance, an editor for a Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper who claims that “all these race riots have been caused by the attempts of negro men to override the race line and to make white women the victims of their lustful passions.” Qtd. in Philip Resnikoff, “A Psychoanalytic Study of Lynching,” Psychoanalytic Review 20 (1933): 421—27, esp. 422.
28. For the use of 1886 as a transitional year, see Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, p. 113. For the description of the typical lynching victim, see Ayers, The Promise of the New South, pp. 156–59; for that of the typical lynch mob, see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. ix–x.
29. Hubert Howe Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume 1, in The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXXVI (San Francisco: History Company, 1887), pp. 267–98, esp. p. 282. Patricia Bernstein, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP (Texas Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005).
30. For a recent example of that kind of discontinuity and the exclusion of Reconstruction from the history of lynching, see Manfred Berg, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), esp. pp. 69–89 and 165–85. Professor Berg's book was published just as I was completing American Lynching.
31. The Ohio law is quoted in Cutler, Lynch-Law, p. 235.
32. Jessie Daniel Ames, The Changing Character of Lynching (Atlanta: Commission on Interracial Cooperation, Inc., 1942), p. 29. Cf. McMurry, Recorder of the Black Experience, p. 127; and Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, pp. 147–49. This second definition has proven remarkably popular with scholars and has been used in many of the most recent studies of lynching; Waldrep lists the recent historians and sociologists who have used the 1940s summit definition (The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, p. 224 n. 140).
33. Ames, The Changing Character of Lynching, p. 30. On the NAACP, see Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, p. 2.
34. James Harmon Chadbourn, Lynching and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), pp. 149–214.
35. Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 28. Elliot Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America (New York: Basic, 2007), explores a series of episodes where counties had lynchings, riots, and then expulsions of the black population within them. He distinguishes racial cleansings from lynchings and riots (6–7), but he also notes that half of the racial cleansings he studies were precipitated by allegations of black rapists and frequently by their lynching (215).
CHAPTER ONE: THE RISE OF LYNCHING
1. Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men Held in the City of Syracuse, N.Y. Oct. 4, 5, 6 + 7, 1864 (Boston: J. S. Ruck, 1864); reprinted in Howard H. Bell, ed., Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions 1830–1864 (New York: Arno, 1969), pp. 19–20.
2. Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 4.
3. For summaries of these accounts, see: Albert Matthews, “The Term Lynch Law,” Modern Philology 2.2 (October 1904): 173–95. James Elbert Cutler, Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (New York: Longmans, Green, 1905), pp. 13–40. Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 13–25.
4. Col. William Campbell to Col. Arthur Campbell, July 25, 1780; in Louise Phelps Kellogg, Frontier Retreat on the Upper Ohio, 1779–1781 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1917), pp. 236–40; reprinted in Christopher Waldrep, ed., Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 33–34.
5. Thomas Jefferson to Charles Lynch, August 1, 1780; in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 3:523; reprinted in Waldrep, Lynching in America, p. 34. For a more nuanced account of Jefferson's struggles as a war governor trying to control the militia, see Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 166–240, esp. p. 194, on Jefferson's limited role in Charles Lynch's handling of the lead miners and the legislative act of immunity that the militia received for that handling.
6. Col. Charles Lynch to Col. William Preston, August 17, 1780; in Kellogg, Frontier Retreat, pp. 250–51; reprinted in Waldrep, Lynching in America, p. 36. Col. Charles Lynch to William Hay, May 11, 1782; in Governors' Letters Received, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia; reprinted in Waldrep, Lynching in America, pp. 36–37.
7. “A Hint for Attention to Be Paid to Lynch's Law,” Augusta Chronicle (June 14, 1794).
8. Cutler, Lynch-Law, pp. 36, 39. Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, p. 25. Some have attempted to recuperate Charles Lynch's reputation; see Thomas Walker Page, “The Real Judge Lynch,” Atlantic Monthly 88 (December, 1901): 731–43. Page represents Lynch as sentencing the Tories to jail and fining them, not hanging them.
9. Waldrep, Many Faces of Judge Lynch, pp. 8, 28.
10. Waldrep, Lynching in America, p. 35. Nancy Devereaux to Col. William Preston, August 1780; in Kellogg, Frontier Retreat, p. 252; reprinted in Waldrep, Lynching in America, p. 35. Charles Lynch to William Hay, May 11, 1782; in Governors' Letters Received, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia; reprinted in Waldrep, Lynching in America, p. 36.
11. William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia (Richmond, 1809–1823), Volume 11, pp. 134–35. The Virginia legislature offered similar Acts of Indemnity to other Virginians in 1777, 1779, and 1784. See Matthews, “The Term Lynch Law,” pp. 21–22.
12. John Winthrop, “A Declaration in Defense of an Order of Court Made in May, 1637,” in Edmund S. Morgan, ed., Puritan Political Ideas (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 144.
13. Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), pp. 122–48, 153–73.
14. Waldrep, Lynching in America, p. 41.
15. Frank Soule, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (New York: D. Appleton, 1855), p. 315.
16. Tom Watson, “The Voice of the People Is the Voice of God,” Jeffersonian (August 26, 1915); in Waldrep, Lynching in America, p. 195.
17. “The Vicksburg Tragedy,” Vicksburg Register (July 9, 1835).
18. Ibid. For a fuller account of the Vicksburg lynchings, see Waldrep, Many Faces of Judge Lynch, pp. 27–32; and for a shorter one with different numbers of victims, see David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 12. Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), p. 111, discusses the apologists who saw the lynching as a response to the failures of the law.
19. Waldrep, Lynching in America, p. 45.
20. “Lynch's Law,” City Gazette and Daily Advertiser (December 8, 1819). Another article from 1819 also used the same headline but described simply the act of a sheriff and posse arresting a group of thieves and putting them in jail. See “Lynch's Law,” American Beacon and Norfolk & Portsmouth Daily Advertiser (March 2, 1819). This discrepancy between an earlier and a later, more modern, usage suggests the process by which the term was becoming more fixed in its meaning.
21. “Lynch Law,” New-Hampshire Sentinel (September 24, 1835).
22. “Frightful Affair,” Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics (August 1, 1835). “Lynch Law—Five Gamblers Hung Without Trial,” Connecticut Courant (August 3, 1835). “Lynch Law, as It Is Called at the West,” New-Hampshire Sentinel (July 30, 1835). “Southern Atrocities,” New Bedford Mercury (August 7, 1835).
23. Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics (August 22, 1835).
24. “Infamous Outrage Under Lynch Law,” Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics (January 9, 1836).
25. The editor of the Boston Commercial Gazette is quoted in “Miscellany. Lynch Law,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette (August 24, 1835). The Philadelphia Enquirer article is reprinted in “Lynch's Law,” Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics (August 8, 1835).
26. “Origin of Lynch's Law,” New Bedford Mercury (August 7, 1835). “Origin of Lynch Law,” New Bedford Mercury (July 15, 1836).
27. “Memorial of a number of citizens of the City and County of Philadelphia, praying Congress to adopt the Sub-Treasury system, and to establish an exclusive metallic currency. December 18, 1837. Referred to the Committee on Finance, and ordered to be printed.” Serial Set Vol. No. 314, Session Vol. No. 1, 25th Congress, 2nd Session S. Doc. 22.
28. “Lynch Law,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette (August 24, 1835). “Lynch Law,” New Bedford Mercury (September 4, 1835).
29. Grimsted, American Mobbing, pp. 4, 13–14, ix.
30. Carl E. Prince, “The Great ‘Riot Year’: Jacksonian Democracy and Patterns of Violence in 1834,” Journal of the Early Republic 5.1 (Spring 1985): 1–19.
31. Thomas Brothers, The United States of North America as They Are; Not as They Are Generally Described: Being a Cure for Radicalism (London, 1840); qtd. in Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 402.
32. Richard R. Johns, Spreading the News: The American Postal Service from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 278–79.
33. Grimsted, American Mobbing, pp. 22, 4. For a thorough history of these riots, see Leonard L. Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
34. Grimsted, American Mobbing, pp. 22–24. The commentator is Philip Hone, and the comment made in his diary on August 18, 1835. The Kentucky newspaper is the Lexington Observer.
35. Ibid., p. 16.
36. Ibid., pp. 11–12. William H. Skaggs, The Southern Oligarchy: An Appeal in Behalf of the Silent Masses of Our Country Against the Despotic Rule of the Few (1924; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), pp. 314–15.
37. Lawless; qtd. in Missouri Republican (May 26, 1836), in Waldrep, Lynching in America, pp. 55–57. The Lovejoy episode is widely discussed in many histories; see Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing,” pp. 101–11.
38. Abraham Lincoln, “Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” January 27, 1838, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), Vol. 1, pp. 108–15.
39. “The Vicksburg Tragedy,” Vicksburg Register (July 9, 1835).
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1985; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), pp. 37–38, 211.
43. Richard Maxwell Brown, “Western Violence: Structure, Values, Myth,” The Western Historical Quarterly 24.1 (February, 1993): 5–20, esp. pp. 5–8.
44. Stephen J. Leonard, Lynching in Colorado, 1859–1919 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002), pp. 3, 67, 74, 90.
45. Ibid., pp. 73–87, 123–54, 18–29, 8, 129.
46. Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), p. 29. Mob sign and Ft. Collins Express, qtd. in Pfeifer, Lynching and Criminal Justice in Regional Context: Iowa, Wyoming, and Louisiana, 1878–1946 (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1998), pp. 130, 108.
47. Pfeifer, Rough Justice, p. 30. See Pfeifer, Lynching and Criminal Justice in a Regional Context, pp. 174–78, for narratives of the lynchings of African Americans in Wyoming. Pfeifer gives a more detailed list of the phases of Wyoming lynching history, that has five phases (not four) and exposes the debate between rough justice/due process advocates (Rough Justice, pp. 29–30).
48. William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 29, 42–43, 21, 48–80.
49. Ibid., p. 32. Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, p. 183. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture, pp. 82–83.
50. Ibid., p. [291], Appendix B. Gideon Lincecum, qtd. in Bill Ledbetter, “Slave Unrest and White Panic: The Impact of Black Republicanism in Ante-Bellum Texas,” Texana 10.4 (1972): 335–50, esp. p. 338. The Denton Central Committee of Slavery, qtd. in William W. White, “The Texas Slave Insurrection of 1860,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 52.3 (January, 1949): 259–85, esp. pp. 264–65. For statistics of the number hanged, see Grimsted, American Mobbing, p. 175. For Reverend Bewley, see Wesley Norton, “The Methodist Episcopal Church and the Civil Disturbances in North Texas in 1859–1860,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 68.3 (1965): 317–41. His name is sometimes recorded as “Buley” in other documents, although that also might be a case of mistaken identity that led to his lynching. For the Gainesville hanging, see James Smallwood, “Disaffection in Confederate Texas: The Great Hanging of Gainesville,” Civil War History 22 (1976): 349–60; and Richard B. McCaslin, Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, 1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994).
51. “Vigilance Committee” is used here exclusively to describe those groups and movements committed to punishing alleged criminals through extralegal channels. The same term was often used by groups committed to protecting and assisting runaway slaves along the eastern seaboard, as the New York Vigilance Committee did, for instance, and also used as a term to describe electoral poll watchers, both Whig and Democratic, from the 1830s to the 1860s. For a list of vigilante organizations throughout American history, see “Appendix: The American Vigilante Movements,” in Leon Friedman, ed., Violence in America (New York: Chelsea House, 1983), Volume 2, pp. 171–80.
52. Owen Wister, The Virginian, ed. Robert Shulman (1902; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 283.
53. Hubert Howe Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume I, in The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXXVI (San Francisco: History Company, 1887), pp. 7–8, 12–13, 14, 400. Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume II, in The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXXVII (San Francisco: History Company, 1887), pp. 670, 74.
54. Edwin Miles, “Mississippi Slave Insurrection Scare of 1835,” Journal of Negro History 42 (1957): 48–60. Grimsted, American Mobbing, pp. 146, 148.
55. Frederick Allen, A Decent, Orderly Lynching: The Montana Vigilantes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), pp. 10–11, 164–66, 226–30, 301–3, 259–60, 294–95, 334–36, 305–7, 230–31. Allen provides a table of the victims of the Montana Vigilantes, including their names and dates of lynchings (pp. 365–66). Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume II, p. 166. Allen, A Decent, Orderly Lynching, p. 22.
56. Paul Black, “Lynchings in Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics 10.2 (1912): 151–254, esp. pp. 242, 174. Genevieve Yost, “History of Lynchings in Kansas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 2.2 (1933): 182–219, esp. p. 185. Frank Soule, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco, Together with the Continuation, Through 1855, compiled by Dorothy H. Huggins (Palo Alto, CA: Lewis Osborne, 1966), pp. 571, 579.
57. Brown, Strain of Violence, p. 97. Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 5, also notes the ways “lynch mob” and “vigilance committee” were sometimes indistinguishable in press usage.
58. Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, pp. 52–53. Brown, Strain of Violence, pp. 136–39. Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume II, p. 166. 1851 Committee Constitution, qtd. in Soule, Gihon, and Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco, Together with the Continuation, Through 1855, p. 569. 1856 Committee Constitution, qtd. in Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume II, pp. 111–12. Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume II, pp. 541, 643–49; and Brown, Strain of Violence, p. 139.
59. Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume I, p. 261. Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume II, 91. Brown, Stain of Violence, pp. 134–35. Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, p. 66. For the influence of the San Francisco Committees on other vigilante movements, see Soule, Gihon, and Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco, Together with the Continuation, Through 1855, p. 586; and Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume I, pp. 429–729.
60. Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume II, pp. 84–85. Brown, Stain of Violence, pp. 137–39. Grimsted, American Mobbing, p. 240. For the seal and motto, Bancroft, Popular Tribunals: Volume II, p. 111. Brown, Stain of Violence, pp. 139–41.
61. Pfeifer, Rough Justice, pp. 30, 54–55. Slotkin, “Apotheosis of Lynching: The Political Uses of Symbolic Violence,” Western Legal History 6.1 (Winter/Spring 1993): 1–16, esp. pp. 6–8. Brown, “Western Violence,” pp. 18–19. Wister, The Virginian, pp. 284, 282. Shulman, “Introduction,” in The Virginian, p. xix. For contemporary newspaper accounts of the battle between cattle barons and homesteaders in other Wyoming counties, see George W. Hufsmith, The Wyoming Lynching of Cattle Kate, 1889 (Glendo, Wyoming: High Plains Press, 1993), pp. 209–38.
CHAPTER TWO: THE RACE OF LYNCHING
1. Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 179. James Weldon Johnson, “Lynching: America's National Disgrace,” Current History 19.4 (January 1924): 596–601, esp. p. 597.
2. Theodore Roosevelt, “Lynching and the Miscarriage of Justice,” The Outlook 99 (November 25, 1911): 706.
3. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; repr., New York: Random House, 1991), p. 43. Cash offers no source for his statistics. They are reported uncritically by Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974; repr., New York: Random House, 1976), p. 32. William Lloyd Garrison suggested in 1856 that over three hundred white men had been lynched in the past twenty years; quoted in Frank Shay, Judge Lynch: His First Hundred Years (New York: Ives Washburn, 1938), p. 63. Shay speculates that while it would be “difficult to estimate the number of Negroes lynched in the same twenty years,” he believes the “number was considerably less than for whites.” Garrison, in the remainder of the paragraph Shay does not quote from The Liberator editorial of December 19, 1856, goes on to say that he believes “a considerably larger number of Negroes met with summary capital punishment during the various insurrection excitements which occurred.” Quoted in William H. Skaggs, The Southern Oligarchy (New York: Devin-Adair, 1924), p. 317.
4. Shay, Judge Lynch, p. 97. “The Sentence Was Immediately Put into Execution,” Norfolk Herald and Public Advertiser (February 24, 1797); reprinted in Waldrep, Lynching in America, p. 62. “Murder and Lynch Law. Baltimore, Feb. 2,” Pittsfield Sun (February 5, 1852).
5. Clarence L. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (1986; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), p. 219. Five of the seven were lynched at once, near Columbus, Georgia.
6. Before he raided Harpers Ferry, John Brown raided Missouri, going into Vernon County, killing a farmer and freeing eleven slaves in December 1858. Six weeks later, three abolitionists replicated this feat by going into Clay County, Missouri, and taking fourteen slaves to freedom in Kansas (these slaves were eventually recaptured). Free-soil Kansans had made at least nine such raids into Missouri, creating a climate of fear that led to the lynching of four slaves in the course of three days in the summer of 1859. See Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown, 2d ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), pp. 261–62; and Thomas G. Dyer, “‘A Most Unexampled Exhibition of Madness and Brutality’: Judge Lynch in Saline County, Missouri, 1859, Part 1,” Missouri Historical Review 89.3 (1995): 269–89; and Dyer, “‘A Most Unexampled Exhibition of Madness and Brutality’: Judge Lynch in Saline County, Missouri, 1859, Part 2,” Missouri Historical Review 89.4 (1995): 367–83.
7. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, p. 21. “Panics in Texas and Kansas,” Farmers' Cabinet (September 5, 1860).
8. See Richard B. McCaslin, Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, 1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994). The estimate of two hundred lynchings of Unionists in Texas during the first two years of the Civil War comes from Texas Unionist Andrew J. Hamilton (p. 153). Also see J. Terrell, “Lynch Law in Texas in the Sixties,” Green Bag 14.8 (1902): 382–83, for an account of two of the Unionists who received reprieves. For a fine fictional treatment of this event by the great-grandson of one the men hanged by the Citizens Court, see L. D. Clark, A Bright, Tragic Thing: A Tale of Civil War Texas (El Paso, Texas: Cinco Puntos, 1992).
9. The report from the Clinton Gazette of Mississippi is reprinted in “Horrible Conspiracy,” Salem Gazette (August 7, 1835). The report by an apologist for the Committee of Safety, Frank Shackelford's Proceedings of the Citizens of Madison County, Mississippi at Livingston, in July 1835, in Relation to the Trial and Punishment of Several Individuals Implicated in a Contemplated Insurrection in This State (Jackson, Mayson, and Smoot, 1836) is reprinted in Waldrep, Lynching in America, pp. 63–67.
10. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), esp. pp. 186–88.
11. Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion (1975; New York: Harper & Row, 1990), pp. 125–26, 99. John W. Cromwell, “The Aftermath of Nat Turner's Insurrection,” Journal of Negro History 5.2 (April 1920): 208–34, esp. p. 212, notes that in a “little more than one day 120 Negroes were killed.”
12. The contemporary is quoted in the Boston Weekly News-Letter (November 8, 1739); qtd. in Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), p. 318.
13. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 389.
14. Shay, Judge Lynch, pp. 97, 53, 54–55. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, pp. 219, 10–11, 22–23, 58.
15. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, pp. 388–89.
16. Waverly and St. Thomas Saturday Morning Visitor (May 28, 1859); qtd. in Dyer, “‘A Most Unexampled Exhibition of Madness and Brutality,’” p. 277. Three months later, this same newspaper argued that hanging and burning are “too good in cases of rape,” advocating castration as a fit punishment instead (p. 281).
17. Clarksville Jeffersonian (December 13, 1856); qtd. in Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 267.
18. Armstead L. Robinson, “In the Shadow of Old John Brown: Insurrection Anxiety and Confederate Mobilization, 1861–1863,” Journal of Negro History 65.4 (Autumn 1980): 279–97, esp. 279.
19. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 617.
20. Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 251, 254.
21. A. Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 179.
22. The preceding two paragraphs were taken from my Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 111.
23. Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens, in Public and Private, with Letters and Speeches, Before, During, and Since the War (Philadelphia, 1866), pp. 721–23; qtd. in Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, p. 50.
24. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, p. 453.
25. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943; repr., New York: International, 1987), esp. Chapter Two: “The Fear of Rebellion.”
26. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 114–15.
27. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), esp. p. 376.
28. The quotation in the subtitle is taken from Report of the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, 13 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), House Reports, 42d Congress, 2d sess., volume 1, p. 1. It will be cited hereafter as Report of the Committee and, where applicable, by state and volume number.
29. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, p. 52.
30. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1989), pp. 198–209.
31. Macon Telegraph and Confederate (April 17, 1865); qtd. in Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom, p. 280.
32. Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (1971; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), pp. 3–17. For a debate about the Reconstruction Klan as a terrorist organization or a more spontaneous one, see Paul D. Escott, “White Republicanism and Ku Klux Klan Terror: The North Carolina Piedmont During Reconstruction,” in Race, Class, and Politics in Southern History: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Durden, ed. Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott, and Charles L. Flynn, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 3–34; and Michael Perman, “Counter Reconstruction: The Role of Violence in Southern Redemption,” in The Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin, ed. Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), pp. 121–40.
33. Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 342–43. Trelease, White Terror, p. 154. Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 214; cf. Appendix 4, p. 323. Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed 1863–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), pp. 168–69.
34. George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), pp. 145–49. Foner, Reconstruction, p. 558.
35. Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979: New York: Random House, 1980), pp. 280–81.
36. For the Memphis riot, see James Gilbert Ryan, “The Memphis Riot of 1866: Terror in a Black Community During Reconstruction,” Journal of Negro History 62.3 (1977): 243–57; and Rable, But There Was No Peace, pp. 33–42, who notes that the Memphis riot “became the prototype for twentieth-century race riots” (p. 33).
37. Ibid., p. 54. James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2001). Trelease, White Terror, pp. xliii, 135. Report of the Committee, pp. 250–52. Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 342–43. Trelease, White Terror, p. 130. Cf. Skaggs, Southern Oligarchy, pp. 322–23.
38. Gilles Vandal, “‘Bloody Caddo’: White Violence Against Blacks in a Louisiana Parish, 1865–1876,” Journal of Social History 25.2 (Winter 1991): pp. 376, 378. Black people represented 71 percent of all homicide victims, while white people represented 80 percent of the presumed perpetrators.
39. John Edward Bruce, The Blood Red Record. A Review of the Horrible Lynchings and Burning of Negroes by Civilized White Men in the United States, As Taken from the Records (Albany: Argus, 1901), p. 20. Henry Adams, a black Louisiana native, gave various estimates of the number of victims of Reconstruction, ranging from 1,645 in Louisiana alone to half a million, presumably throughout the South. See William Cohen, At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861–1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), pp. 165, 167.
40. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 125–63, has shown how the freedman's handbooks, guides produced to aid the formerly enslaved in the mores of freedom and “proper conduct” after emancipation, also aimed at controlling the public presentation of the freed people and engendered a new kind of subjection for those emancipated. In this way, they also aimed at a particular kind of social control.
41. Rable, But There Was No Peace, p. 25.
42. Albert Bushnell Hart, “Lynching,” in Cyclopedia of American Government, ed. Andrew C. McLaughlin and Albert Bushnell Hart (1914; 2d ed., New York: D. Appleton, 1930), vol. 2, p. 381.
43. “Petition from Kentucky Negroes,” [March 25, 1871], in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Citadel, 1951), vol. 2, pp. 594–99. The petition states that this list of 116 acts of violence constitutes about half of the total acts of violence.
44. Robert Smalls, Congressional Record, 44th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 4, pt. 5, pp. 4041–42; in Aptheker, Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, vol. 2, pp. 610–14. Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 570–72. Also see Otis A. Singletary, Negro Militia and Reconstruction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957), esp. pp. 139–41.
45. Thomas Nelson Page, “The Lynching of Negroes—Its Causes and Its Prevention,” North American Review 173.566 (January 1904): 33–48, esp. pp. 36–37.
46. Myrta Lockett Avary, Dixie After the War: An Exposition of Social Conditions Existing in the South, During the Twelve Years Succeeding the Fall of Richmond (n.p., n.d. [1906]), p. 377.
47. New Orleans Daily Picayune (October 6, 1868); cited in Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, p. 169. Cash, The Mind of the South. The New Orleans Daily Picayune (July 4, 1874) would resort to the same rhetoric in offering an account of an armed black militia that, the newspaper claimed, were out to kill white men and enslave white women; cited in Rable, But There Was No Peace, p. 131.
48. Report of the Committee, Georgia, Vol. 1, pp. 356, 359, 360, 363, 363. For more on the case of Henry Lowther, see Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 154–58, and Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 198–99, 343, note 71.
49. Jordan, White Over Black, p. 121.
50. Cohen, At Freedom's Edge, pp. 211–12.
51. The story of James Costello's lynching is in Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 28–29; and Barnet Schecter, The Devil's Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (New York: Walker, 2005), pp. 204–5.
CHAPTER THREE: THE AGE OF LYNCHING
1. Royal Daniel, “While Hose Is Tortured the Multitude Applauds,” Atlanta Journal (April 24, 1899).
2. “Griggs Defends South for Lynching of Negroes,” Atlanta Journal (February 5, 1900). “The Georgia Exhibition,” Springfield Weekly Republican (April 28, 1899); qtd. in Ralph Ginzburg, ed., 100 Years of Lynching (1962; repr., Baltimore: Black Classic, 1988), pp. 19–21.
3. Edwin T. Arnold, “What Virtue There Is in Fire”: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2009), pp. 112, 150, 135. Arnold has written the most thorough study of the Hose lynching and its aftermath. I have relied extensively on his work.
4. W.E.B. DuBois, A Pageant in Seven Decades, 1868–1938 (Atlanta, 1938), p. 254; qtd. in Arnold, “What Virtue There Is in Fire,” p. 171. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Lynch-Law in Georgia (Chicago: Chicago Colored Citizens, 1899), p. 1.
5. Arnold, “What Virtue There Is in Fire,” pp. 177–78, makes the argument about The Leopard's Spots. Tom Dixon, The Flaming Sword (1939; repr., Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), pp. 126–39, 137, [xiii].
6. The newspaper coverage of lynchings was extensive—and profitable, as at least some newspapers sold more issues when they reported stories of lynchings. For instance, the “extras” issued by both the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle detailing the lynching of Harold Thurman and Jack Holmes, two white men accused of kidnapping and murdering department store heir Brooke Hart, were spectacularly successful. The Examiner sold 150,000 copies above its circulation, and the Chronicle sold more of that issue than it had of any newspaper in its history to that date (1933). Brian McGinty, “Shadows in St. James Park,” California History 57.4 (1978): 291–307, esp. p. 301.
7. For the full story of the Chicago Tribune's publishing lynching records, see Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 112–14.
8. Linda O. McMurry, Recorder of the Black Experience: A Biography of Monroe Nathan Work (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), pp. 120–21.
9. For the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, see “The Anti-Lynching Crusaders,” Crisis 25.1 (November 1922): 8; and “The Ninth Crusade,” Crisis 25.5 (March 1923): 213–17. For more on the NAACP's rocky and exploitative relationship with the women who led the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, and for Ida B. Wells's critique of the political agenda of the Crusaders, see Paula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), pp. 628–31.
10. Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), p. 13. George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1990), p. 180. James Harmon Chadbourn, Lynching and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), p. 29. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, p. 165.
11. “Lynching: An American Kultur?” New Republic 14 (April 13, 1918): pp. 311–12, esp. p. 311.
12. Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. ix. The data compiled by Tolnay and Beck do not include victims of race riots. The NAACP started flying the banner on September 8, 1936, and stopped flying it after 1938, when its lease was threatened. See “The Cover,” Crisis 43.10 (October, 1936): 293.
13. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 150. Charles Chesnutt, “A Deep Sleeper,” in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 141. John Edgar Wideman, “Charles Chesnutt and the WPA Narratives: The Oral and Literate Roots of Afro-American Literature,” in The Slave's Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 59–78, esp. p. 78, first made this insightful point about Chesnutt's pun.
14. James Weldon Johnson, Lynching: America's National Disgrace (New York: NAACP, 1924), p. 2. Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929; repr., Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), p. 82.
15. New Orleans Times-Democrat (August 12, 1893); qtd. in William F. Holmes, “Whitecapping: Agrarian Violence in Mississippi, 1902–1906,” Journal of Southern History 35 (May 1969): 165–85, esp. pp. 137–38.
16. John Ross, At the Bar of Judge Lynch: Lynching and Lynch Mobs in America (Ph.D. diss., Texas Tech University, 1983), pp. 172–73, 209, 210–11. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 19–20. The primary differences between these two classificatory schemes is that Brundage merges the terrorist and vigilante mobs, does not recognize the organized mob, adds posses as a type of mob, gives private mobs more latitude in terms of size—for Ross, their upper limit is fifteen, for Brundage fifty—and does not distinguish private mobs from secret mobs, which Ross does by noting that the former did not, and the latter did, wear masks and otherwise hide their identities.
17. Brundage, Lynching in the New South, pp. 28–29, 33–35, 36–43. Ross, At the Bar of Judge Lynch, pp. 172–236. See Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002), p. ix–x, for the structure of a typical mass mob.
18. I have come up with these figures based on Brundage's statistics of mob victims, 1880–1930, based on type of mob (Lynching in the New South, p. 262). I have not included cases where the type of mob is unknown. Again, I am aware of, and caution others of, the fact that these statistics are flawed to the extent that they do not include victims of race riots.
19. The editor of the Vicksburg Evening Post; qtd. in Christopher Waldrep and Michael Bellesiles, eds., Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 162.
20. Ida B. Wells, A Red Record [1895] in Southern Horror and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston: St. Martin's, 1997), pp. 91–96. Wells also mentions the lynching of Edward Coy as one of the first of these spectacle lynchings. Coy was burned to death at the stake three miles east of Texarkana, Arkansas, in 1892 in front of a mob of six thousand. See “Burned at the Stake: An Arkansas Colored Man's Punishment,” Baltimore Sun (February 22, 1892).
21. James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 77–82.
22. Wells, A Red Record, p. 93.
23. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Random House, 1998), pp. 207, 222, 201. The statistics of lynchings from 1893 to 1934 are taken from Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, pp. 271–72, ix. Cf. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 117–18.
24. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 97. James M. Inverarity, “Populism and Lynching in Louisiana, 1889–1896: A Test of Erikson's Theory of the Relationship Between Boundary Crises and Repressive Justice,” American Sociological Review 41 (April 1976): 262–80. Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, p. 137. Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, p. 251. Nell Irvin Painter, “‘Social Equality,’ Miscegenation, Labor, and Power,” in The Evolution of Southern Culture, ed. Numan V. Bartley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 47–67. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, DC: Civitas, 1998), pp. 179, 210. Hale, Making Whiteness, pp. 203, 229, 205–6, 236. Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, pp. 141, 152–53.
25. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), pp. 208–9. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (1962; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 27. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 133. Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” trans. Thomas Burger, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 453–54.
26. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, pp. 32–33, 36–37. Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” p. 454.
27. Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, p. 194.
28. Rebecca Lattimer Felton, in Atlanta Journal (August 12, 1897); quoted in Brundage, Lynching in the New South, p. 198. “Only One Sixth of Lynchings for Rape,” Crisis 42 (January 1935): 14. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, p. 11.
29. Jessie Daniel Ames; qtd. in Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948; repr., New York: Monthly Review, 1970), pp. 558. Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (1933; repr., Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1969), p. 47.
30. Williamson, The Crucible of Race, p. 185. Wells, A Red Record, p. 100. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching, pp. 85, 88.
31. The Facts in the Case of the Horrible Murder of Little Myrtle Vance and Its Fearful Expiation at Paris, Texas, February 1st, 1893, with Photographic Illustrations (Paris, Texas: P. L. James, 1893), pp. 7, 98, 111.
32. Wells, A Red Record, p. 91. Wells, Mob Rule in New Orleans [1900], in Southern Horror and Other Writings, pp. 202–3. Wells, A Red Record, p. 93. It should be noted that another treatise written by a Paris, Texas, lyncher also contests the idea that those who lynched Henry Smith were a “mob.” See J. M. Early, “An Eye for an Eye” Or the Fiend and the Fagot. An Unvarnished Account of the Burning of Henry Smith at Paris, Texas, February 1, 1893, and the Reason He Was Tortured (Paris, Texas: Junius Early, n.d.), pp. 38, 48: “it was no mob.”
33. Cox, Caste, Class and Race, pp. 555, 549, 554, 549.
34. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” pp. 8, 13–14, 24, 26.
35. As I noted above, I am not claiming that the lynch mob of the age of lynching constitutes the first appearance of the coercive public. Rather, the lynch mob of this era, which frequently gets treated as an ephemeral agent without institutional life, constitutes the continuation of those earlier coercive publics that had a more traditional institutional existence (vigilante organizations and white supremacist groups).
36. David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp. 211–12.
37. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching, p. 19 on “legal lynchings.”
38. Hale, Making Whiteness, p. 207. Cf. Ross, At the Bar of Judge Lynch, p. 28: “perhaps the most detailed account of a lynching ever written from the lyncher's point of view.”
39. Early, “An Eye for an Eye,” advertisements following title page and page 70. The governor's message is quoted on pages 50–55.
40. Elliot Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America (New York: Basic, 2007), p. 48.
41. Jessie Daniel Ames, The Changing Character of Lynching: Review of Lynching, 1931–1941 (Atlanta: Commission on Interracial Cooperation, 1942), pp. 2, 5, 8–9.
42. “Maryland Witnesses Wildest Lynching Orgy in History,” New York Times (October 19, 1933); reprinted in Ralph Ginzburg, ed., 100 Years of Lynching, (1962; repr., Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988), pp. 200–2. “Heart and Genitals Carved from Lynched Negro's Corpse,” New York World-Telegram (December 8, 1933); reprinted in Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynching, pp. 211–12. “Girls in Teens Take Part in Raid on Funeral Home,” New York Post (May 25, 1937); reprinted in Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynching, pp. 231–32. Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, pp. 359–60. Julius E. Thompson, Lynchings in Mississippi: A History, 1865–1965 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), p. 105.
43. Historians debate which lynching constituted the “last” spectacle lynching and, implicitly, when to date the end of the age of lynching. John Ross argues that the “last large mob” appeared on October 17, 1942, when a “hundred men” took Howard Wash from jail and hanged him from a bridge. James A. Burran identifies the “1942 Texarkana, Texas, mob that tortured to death William Vinson for rape as the last open mob.” Dominic J. Capeci argues that the 1942 immolation of Cleo Wright in Sikeston, Missouri, “signaled the beginning of the end” of that kind of racial lynching. Laura Wexler refers to the 1946 mob murder of two African American couples as the “last mass lynching in America” (but here “mass” likely refers more to the number of victims than the size of the mob). See Ross, At the Bar of Judge Lynch, p. 140. Burran, cited in Ross, At the Bar of Judge Lynch, p. 151. Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., The Lynching of Cleo Wright (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), p. 193. Laura Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America (New York: Scribner, 2003).
44. “Tuskegee Omits ‘Lynching Letter,’” New York Times (December 31, 1953). For an example of hopeful media coverage of Tuskegee's report, see “End of Lynching,” Washington Post (January 2, 1954). The Crisis responded to the announcement by Tuskegee that 1952 was a lynch-free year by noting that the Tuskegee definition of “lynching” was “too technical and doctrinaire,” and that the claim of the “end of lynching” would actually weaken the cause of those who hoped to end “lynching, less technically defined.” Marguerite Cartwright, “The Mob Still Rides—Tuskegee Notwithstanding,” Crisis 60 (April 1953): 222.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE DISCOURSE OF LYNCHING
1. “Interview with Shawn Berry,” 60 Minutes II, CBS News. Shawn Berry was one of the three who lynched James Byrd.
2. I have defined in more detail elsewhere something like what I am here calling “discourse.” See Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). I have also greatly profited from Richard Slotkin's illuminating discussions of the ways “myths” operate in a similar fashion in American history; see, especially, Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), and Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1985; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
3. South Carolina News and Courier (Charleston) (March 5, 1880); reprinted in Christopher Waldrep, ed., Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 113. Mississippi Free Trader (March 8, 1854), in Waldrep, Lynching in America, pp. 77–78.
4. For the Seminole War cases, see Waldrep, Lynching in America, pp. 42–45. For Fort Pillow, see James M. McPherson, The Negro's Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (1965; repr., New York: Ballantine, 1991), pp. 220–26. Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (1956; repr., Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987), pp. 173–77; William Wells Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion (Boston: A. G. Brown, 1880), pp. 235–47; Albert Castel, “The Fort Pillow Massacre: An Examination of the Evidence,” in Black Flag over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War, ed. Gregory J. W. Urwin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), pp. 89–103; and Derek W. Frisby, “‘Remember Fort Pillow!’: Politics, Atrocity Propaganda, and the Evolution of Hard War,” in Black Flag over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War, ed. Gregory J. W. Urwin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), pp. 104–31.
5. “The Vicksburg Tragedy,” Vicksburg Register (July 9, 1835).
6. Sir Matthew Hale, The History of the Pleas of the Crown. Now First Published from his Lordship's Original Manuscript, and the Several References to the Records Examined by the Originals, with Large Notes by Sollom Emlyn (London, 1736), vol. 1, p. 635.
7. Mississippi Free Trader (March 8, 1854), in Waldrep, Lynching in America, p. 77.
8. James M. Shackleford, Marshall Democrat (July 22, 1859); this letter, the first of the five Shackleford wrote for this newspaper, is reprinted in Waldrep, Lynching in America, pp. 78–79. On the effect of the escaped slaves and John Brown's raid, see Thomas G. Dyer, “‘A Most Unexampled Exhibition of Madness and Brutality’: Judge Lynch in Saline County, Missouri, 1859: Part One,” Missouri Historical Review 89.3 (1995): 269–89, esp. pp. 272, 274.
9. For the Lexington Express and subsequent debate, see Dyer, “‘A Most Unexampled Exhibition of Madness and Brutality’: Judge Lynch in Saline County, Missouri, 1859: Part Two,” Missouri Historical Review 89.4 (1995): 367–83, esp. pp. 370–71.
10. Ida B. Wells, A Red Record (Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry, 1895), p. 8.
11. Frederick Douglass, “Why Is the Negro Lynched?” (1894), in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International, 1955), vol. 4, p. 501. Wells, A Red Record, pp. 8–9. Irenas J. Palmer, The Black Man's Burden, Or, The Horrors of Southern Lynchings (Olean, NY: Olean Evening Herald Print, 1902), p. 33, also liberally borrows from Douglass in his discussion of the rise and evolution of the intellectual justifications for lynching.
12. Douglass, “Why Is the Negro Lynched?,” p. 501. Wells, A Red Record, pp. 9–10.
13. Wells, A Red Record, p. 10. Douglass, “Why Is the Negro Lynched?,” pp. 502, 503. Wells, A Red Record, pp. 11, 10.
14. Douglass, “Why Is the Negro Lynched?,” pp. 517, 515.
15. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 178.
16. Williamson, Crucible of Race, p. 320, argues that the racists who rose to political and intellectual power in the 1880s until about 1915 were not demagogues, dishonest, or dissembling. In my reading of those racists who contributed to the discourse of lynching, they appear to be demagogic, dishonest, and dissembling. Some labor under a conviction that will not allow them to hear alternative or contradictory accounts, but others, who may well be sincere in their beliefs, are nonetheless deceptive in their rhetorical strategies for defending those beliefs.
17. Thomas Nelson Page, The Negro: The Southerner's Problem (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904), pp. 84, 9, 111, 99, 88.
18. Page, The Negro, p. 84. Douglass, “Why Is the Negro Lynched?,” p. 499. Page, The Negro, pp. 21, 84, 95, 96, 112.
19. Ibid., pp. 171, 177, 96.
20. Ibid., pp. 95, 93, 116, 101, 100.
21. Ibid., pp. 98, 99.
22. Ibid., p. 99. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. xx. Page, The Negro, pp. xi, 87, 111, 113, 98, 115. R. W. Shufeldt, The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization (Boston: Gorham, 1907), pp. 150, 13. Cf. Philip A. Bruce, The Plantation Negro as Freeman: Observations on His Character, Condition, and Prospects in Virginia (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1889), p. 99: “The religion of the plantation negro is a code of belief, and not a code of morals, having no real connection with the practical side of his existence, and slight bearing on the common motives of his conduct.”
23. Williamson, The Crucible of Race, pp. 117, 460. Williamson does not provide any specific text or set of events to substantiate why 1889 is the originating date; he suggests that the death of the black rapist/beast motif is connected to the death of radicalism, which, in Williamson's account, represents the most racist mentality of Southern intellectuals about the ultimate fate of African Americans (on radicalism, see Williamson, Crucible of Race, pp. 5–7, 492). Williamson also suggests that the antilynching refutation of the charge of lynching for rape with statistical evidence would not appear until 1905 (pp. 117, 529 n. 11). Ida B. Wells had already challenged the statistical evidence by 1892 and 1893. See Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: New York Age Print, 1892), p. 14; and Wells, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition (1893), in Wells, Selected Works of Ida B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 76–77.
24. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 282. Page, The Negro, pp. 207–8.
25. Myrta Lockett Avary, Dixie After the War: An Exposition of Social Conditions Existing in the South, During the Twelve Years Succeeding the Fall of Richmond (n.p., [1906]), pp. 58, 377, 381.
26. Douglass, “Why Is The Negro Lynched?,” pp. 496, 504, 505. Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Boston: Colored Cooperative, 1900), pp. 14–15.
27. Avary, Dixie After the War, p. 401.
28. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has superbly delineated the ways that the threat of rape and lynching worked intimately together to dramatize “hierarchical power relationships based both on gender and on race.” See Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, pp. 129–57, esp. pp. 149–56; and Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body’: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 328–49.
29. Page, The Negro, p. 112. Bruce, The Plantation Negro as Freeman, pp. 53, 26, 84, 19. Avary, Dixie After the War, p. 395. Cf. Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, pp. xxvi–xxvii. Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 172–201, was one of the first modern scholars to analyze the myth of the black rapist, which she does with exquisite insights, and among the first to demonstrate how the “fictional image of the Black man as rapist” has as its “inseparable companion” the “image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous” (p. 182).
30. Lynchings and What They Mean: General Findings of the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching (Atlanta: The Commission, [1931]), p. 5.
31. Maurice Thompson, “The Court of Judge Lynch,” Lippincott's Monthly Magazine 64.380 (August 1899): 254–62, esp. p. 256.
32. “Original Communications: Sexual Crimes Among Southern Negroes—Scientifically Considered—An Open Correspondence,” Virginia Medical Monthly 20.2 (May 1893): 105–25, esp. pp. 106, 107–8, 122, 116, 110–11.
33. Ben Tillman, in Charleston News and Courier (July 7, 1892). Cole Blease, qtd. in Bryant Simon, A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 32, 33. Cf. Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, p. 121.
34. “Governor Davis's Speech at Eureka Springs,” in Jeff Davis, Governor and United States Senator: His Life and Speeches, ed. L. S. Dunaway (Little Rock, 1913), p. 78. Little Rock Arkansas Gazette (October 26, 1905).
35. Sparta Ishmaelite, qtd. in Newnan Herald and Advertiser (May 8, 1899); qtd. in Mary Louise Ellis, “Rain Down fire”: The Lynching of Sam Hose (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1992), p. 148.
36. Ben Tillman, in Congressional Record, 59th Cong., 2d sess. (January 21, 1907), p. 1441. For a discussion of Tillman's political conversion from a more moderate to a more racist position, and his concomitant shifting opinions and actions on lynching, see Williamson, Crucible of Race, p. 133.
37. Rebecca Latimer Felton, in Atlanta Journal (August 12, 1897). Felton became the first female U.S. senator when she was appointed to complete the term of Tom Watson after his death in 1922. On the disenfranchisement of black Americans in Georgia, see John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 100–4.
38. Andrew H. Sledd, “The Negro: Another View,” Atlantic Monthly 90 (July 1902): 65–73. I have drawn on several accounts of this and the Bassett case. See, especially, Bruce Clayton, The Savage Ideal: Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 77–81, 89–101; Ayers, The Promise of the New South, pp. 424–26; and Williamson, Crucible of Race, pp. 259–67.
39. John Spencer Bassett, “Stirring Up the Fires of Race Antipathy,” South Atlantic Quarterly 2 (1903): 297–305. Josephus Daniels, in Raleigh News and Observer (November 1, 1903). For Daniels's defense of Sledd's rights, see Williamson, Crucible of Race, p. 266. The Smithfield Methodist Church letter and John Bruton's letter are both quoted in Williamson, Crucible of Race, p. 264.
40. John Carlisle Kilgo, “An Inquiry Concerning Lynchings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 1 (January 1902): 4–9.
41. For the Jessie Duke episode, see H. Leon Prather, Sr., We Have Taken a City: Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898 (Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1984), pp. 78–79. Wells, Southern Horrors, pp. 4, [iii], 4–5. Alexander Manly, “Mrs. Fellows's Speech,” Wilmington Record (August 18, 1898); qtd. in H. Leon Prather, Sr., “We Have Taken a City: A Centennial Essay,” in Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 23. E. Franklin Frazier, “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” Forum 70 (June 1927): 856–62, esp. pp. 859, 861. For the threats on Frazier's life, see Anthony M. Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 159–60; and Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 144–45.
42. Wells, Southern Horrors, p. 30.
43. Booker T. Washington, “Lynching in the South,” The Southern Workman and Hampton School Record 28.10 (1899): 373–76, esp. p. 373. In October of 1899, Washington published The Future of the American Negro (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899), in which he contested (with statistics) that black men were lynched for rape.
44. Thomas E. Miller, Congressional Record, 51st Cong., 1st sess. (1891): 707–8; qtd. in Prather, We Have Taken a City, pp. 74–75.
45. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), p. 145.
CONCLUSION: THE MEANINGS OF LYNCHING
1. D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation (1915). Oscar Micheaux, Within Our Gates (1919). Toni Cade Bambara; qtd. in Jonathan Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 40.
2. I draw on Kenneth Burke's terms of dramatism. See Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. xv–xxiii, for the five key terms of dramatism (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose—explaining what was done, when and where, by whom, through what means, and to what end).
3. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. xx. Also see Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body’: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review, 1983), pp. 328–49.
4. Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, p. xxi.
5. Hall, it should be noted, was among the first of the modern scholars who saw lynching as a changing ritual in postbellum America. She deftly describes the functions lynching assumed during three key moments in its evolution. She noted that, first, during Reconstruction, the lynching of black men and the rape of black women “became the most spectacular emblems of counterrevolution” in Southern communities. Then, at the height of the Populist era, a quarter-century later, lynching was employed as a “mode of political repression,” a “diffuse reassertion of white solidarity,” a “general warning to blacks of the danger of political assertiveness,” and “a means of uniting whites across class lines in the face of a common enemy.” Finally, with the end of World War I and the onset of modernity, a quarter-century later, lynching became effectively a communal ritual used by inhabitants of small towns and rural areas in resisting the modern nation-state, especially the modernization of law enforcement and a penal system that the nation-state came to monopolize. In other words, lynching became a way of asserting old communal values—including the value of “private violence” in the pursuit of “repressive justice”—against an emerging social order in which the modern nation-state was able to “monopolize the use of physical force within its territory.” See Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, pp. 131, 132, 144.
6. Ibid., p. 149.
7. Ibid., pp. 153, 156.
8. For other studies of gender and lynching, see Hazel V. Carby, “‘On the Threshold of Woman's Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 262–77; Robyn Wiegman, “The Anatomy of Lynching,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3.3 (1993): 445–67; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), pp. 100–24. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Barbara Holden-Smith, “Lynching, Federalism, and the Intersection of Race and Gender in the Progressive Era,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 8.1 (1996): 31–78; Crystal N. Feimster, “‘Ladies and Lynching’: The Gendered Discourse of Mob Violence in the New South, 1880–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000); Feimster, Southern Horrors, Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
9. Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), pp. 76, 82.
10. Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 18–19, 198–99, 159, 215. For other studies emphasizing the economics of lynching, with differing emphases, see James M. Inverarity, “Populism and Lynching in Louisiana, 1889–1896: A Test of Erikson's Theory of the Relationship Between Boundary Crises and Repressive Justice,” American Sociological Review 41 (April 1976): 262–80; and Nell Irvin Painter, “‘Social Equality,’ Miscegenation, Labor, and Power,” in The Evolution of Southern Culture, ed. Numan V. Bartley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 47–67.
11. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), p. 125.
12. Ibid., pp. 200–1, 203, 205–6.
13. Ibid., pp. 228–29.
14. Ibid., pp. 233, 236, 238.
15. White, Rope and Faggot, pp. 40, 43.
16. Both Patterson and Matthews want to show that the religious interpretation provides something that the earlier models focusing on gender, race, and economics lacked. As Matthews puts it, “It is clear that something more than mere punishment, sexual and gendered anxiety, and the logic of power was inherent in lynching.” That is not to say either Patterson or Matthews was dismissing those earlier models. They were intent on showing how the South's religious imperatives can help us better understand some of the leaps of logic that led to lynching. For instance, Matthews comments on the economic interpretation in the following way: “If the logic of market relations and the consumption of commodities by different races could ironically destabilize segregation in certain restricted ways, true believers of the segregationist faith could nonetheless regain stability by affirming racial orthodoxy in the face of such materialistic dissent.” He did not want to displace the economic interpretation, but to show alternative models for explaining the motives of lynchers. See Donald G. Matthews, “Lynching Religion: Why the Old Man Shouted ‘Glory!’,” in Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture, ed. Walter H. Conser, Jr., and Rodger M. Payne (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), pp. 315–53, esp. pp. 345, 342.
17. Patterson draws on the classical anthropological writings of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss to develop the tableau of sacrifice—the setting and dynamics that change what might otherwise be a simply brutal act of violence into a ritual. Hubert and Mauss focus on those strategies that people develop for consecrating the act of sacrifice itself and the physical place where the act was performed. They also attend to the ritual beliefs that these groups develop about the victim of the sacrifice, as well as the two forms of sacrificing that victim (the use of fire as a divine agent of cleansing, and ritual cannibalism, either actual or symbolic, as a final way of consuming the sacrificed victim). Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington: Civitas, 1998), pp. 175, 182–83, 179, 192, 173.
18. Ibid., p. 210.
19. Ibid., pp. 210–12.
20. Ibid., pp. 212, 213, 215.
21. Ibid., pp. 191, 196, 198. “The cooked Negro, properly roasted, has been tamed and culturally transformed and can now be eaten, communally, in imitation of the Euro-Americans' own God savoring his burnt offering” (200). To understand how communities in the South could rationalize and understand these kinds of actions, Patterson turns to an analysis of what others have called the South's “culture of honor,” and what Patterson calls “the culture of honor and violence in the South.” Patterson identifies four factors that promoted that culture: 1) “the honorific traditions brought over by Scotch-Irish immigrants who arrived in the South between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries” 2) “the frontier environment of the South” 3) the institution of slavery; and 4) the “secular religion of racism.” He argues that the first two initiated, and the last two institutionalized, the culture of honor and violence in the South. See ibid., pp. 190–91. Patterson draws on the insights of social psychologists who study that culture of honor, especially Richard E. Nisbet and D. V. Cohen.
22. Ibid., pp. 208, 218.
23. Ibid., p. 222.
24. Donald G. Matthews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice,” Journal of Southern Religion (2000), http://jsr.fsu.edu/matthews.htm.
25. Donald G. Matthews, “Lynching Is Part of the Religion of Our People: Faith in the Christian South,” in Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture, ed. Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Matthews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 153–94, esp. pp. 155, 163, 181. Matthews substantiates his argument about segregation as religion by drawing on anthropologist Mary Douglas's comment that holiness “means keeping distinct the categories of creation.” Matthews discusses how segregation worked in particular to marginalize black people, and thereby render them a “class of people to be punished as payment for the failures of white people in the complex transition to modernity.”
26. Matthews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice.” That distinction between a people who could not “understand” but could “sense” the logic that drove them to perform ritual acts of human sacrifice is important for Matthews's larger argument, which is that throughout the South there existed what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling” that permitted those acts that otherwise would have been seen as clearly transgressions. He is careful to note that he is not saying “that evangelical religion and segregation, linked as they were in the emotional life of white southerners, caused lynching.” What he is saying instead is that “they together did create ways of thinking that could justify” lynching. Thus does he trace what he calls the “violent logic” of white Southerners who were “crazed by a fascination with purity and profanation that cloaked political designs” and made sacred their “aspiration to supremacy.” See Matthews, “Lynching Is Part of the Religion of Our People,” p. 157.
27. Matthews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice.”
28. Matthews, “Lynching Religion: Why the Old Man Shouted ‘Glory!’,” pp. 346, 326.
29. Matthews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice.” Drawing on a 1905 book written by the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Newport News, Virginia, Edwin Talliaferro Wellford, tellingly titled The Lynching of Jesus, Matthews shows how Wellford challenged the unspoken assumptions about lynching victims, who became martyrs and saviors.
30. Matthews, “Lynching Is Part of the Religion of Our People,” pp. 166, 183.
31. Ibid., p. 156.
32. While it is somewhat played down in Hall, who sees lynching as a strategy to deny or resist the implications of modernity, segregation plays a crucial role in Patterson's and Matthews's analyses, as well as in Hale's. For all of them, segregation provides both the grounds of their analyses (as in Matthews's comment on “segregation as religion”), and also the background setting that they believe lynchings arose to address.
33. Elliot Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America (New York: Basic, 2007).
34. To Secure These Rights: Report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947), p. 6.
35. Maurice Thompson, “The Court of Judge Lynch,” Lippincott's Monthly Magazine 64.380 (August 1899): 254–62, esp. p. 258. The president of Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina (now Duke University), proposed the same argument; see John Carlisle Kilgo, “An Inquiry Concerning Lynchings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 1 (January 1902): 4–9.
36. Both the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union and Citizen (August 8, 1901) and the unnamed New York newspaper are quoted in Robert P. Ingalls, Urban Vigilantes in the New South: Tampa, 1882–1936 (1988; repr., Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), pp. 77, 86.
37. Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 17, 20.
38. Wesleyan Christian Advocate (April 5, 1899); qtd. in Mary Louise Ellis, “‘Rain Down Fire’: The Lynching of Sam Hose” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1992), p. 180.
39. Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” in Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American Black Woman, 1893–1930 (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1990), pp. 171–87, esp. p. 184. The essay was first published in Our Day (May 1893): 333–37. Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Boston: Colored Cooperative, 1900), pp. 14–15.
40. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 376. Vincent Harding, “Beyond Chaos: Black History and the Search for the New Land,” in Amistad 1: Writings on Black History and Culture, ed. John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 267–92, esp. p. 280.
41. William W. Hening, Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (Richmond, VA: Franklin Press, 1809–1823), vol. 1, p. 226.
42. Hening, Statutes at Large, vol. 2, p. 270. Even laws that attempted to be more generous in their apportioning of humanity to slaves, such as a 1799 Georgia law making it illegal to maim or kill a slave, made exceptions in “cases of insurrection by such a slave” or in case it “should happen by accident, in giving such slave moderate correction.” The Georgia law is cited in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943; repr., New York: International, 1987), p. 75.
43. Hening, Statutes at Large, vol. 3, pp. 460–61.
44. Later, slave owners could dispense with even this meager state involvement (two justices of the peace and a sheriff) and simply “outlaw” a slave, a legal act that placed the slave beyond law and his killers beyond prosecution. Indeed, as historian Gerald Mullins points out, the slave's killers were rewarded from both the public treasury and the slave's owner, who sometimes advertised a higher reward for the return of a dead slave than for a live one. See Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 56–57.
45. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 460, 401.
46. “Tom, A Negro Slave Man,” Boston Gazette (December 5, 1763); reprinted in Christopher Waldrep, ed., Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 61–62.
47. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alain Sheridan (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 32–69. I am not trying to do justice to the nuances of Foucault's argument about spectacle here; I am merely noting how lynchings could, with modifications, fit into his description of penal practice.
48. I should also emphasize that I am not making a case for a causal connection between these early slave laws and later lynch mobs. Lynchers would not later triumphantly cite these laws, in the ways that Americans refer to the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights as the origins of a particular set of practices that they deemed originally theirs. For the role that vigilantes played in controlling and oppressing free blacks, see Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), esp. pp. 316–40.
49. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 174–75.
50. Hening, The Statutes at Large, vol. 3, p. 459.
EPILOGUE: AMERICAN LYNCHING
1. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (1981; repr., New York: Random House, 1983), p. 196. See Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), pp. 210–55; and Davis's critique in Women, Race, and Class, pp. 172–201.