Lynching

History Compass 12/1 (2014): 8499, 10.1111/hic3.
12121
Lynching and Power in the United States: Southern, Western,
and National Vigilante Violence
Kathleen Belew
*
Northwestern University
Abstract
Lynching has shaped U.S. history and identity from the colonial era to the present. Recent scholarship
has expanded the periodization and geographical denition of lynching to encompass not only the South
from 1880 to 1930, but also acts of vigilante violence in the West that span a much longer history. New
scholarship treats the terrorizing and regulatory functions of lynching, but also the work that such
violence does in creating and upholding different kinds of power. Such attention to the constitutive
power of violence signals a momentous turn in the historiography, one that promises to connect histories
of vigilantism with those of empire, torture, war, rape, and other kinds of violence.
Vigilante violence has shaped the history and identity of the United States since the era of
British colonization. Lynching emerged at the same moment as the nation itself, concurrently
with its founding documents. Writing on the eve of the 1976 bicentennial, historian of
vigilantism Richard Maxwell Brown declared, Our nation was conceived and born in
violence. More recently, historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage called the act of lynching
peculiarly American. Although new transnational scholarship reveals that both lynching
and vigilantism occur in countries around the world, lynching remains as intrinsic to the
American nation as the ideas of democracy, popular sovereignty, and freedom.
1
Historians have documented incidences of vigilante violence from the late colonial period
through the twentieth century. Commonly referenced examples range from the violence of
state and state-sanctioned forces to those of private citizens. They include violence against
outlaws and criminals, social outcasts, and entire racial groups. They appear over large regions
of the United States.
2
Brundage estimated that some 4,0005,000 people have been lynched
over the course of United States history, but this number does not fully measure lynchings
impact.
3
It does not include those cases that escaped historical documentation. Neither does
it tally the victims who survived nor the communities and populations terrorized through the
lynching of particular individuals.
4
Despite its reoccurrence in U.S. history, the historiography of lynching has only recently
come into full fruition. In 1993, Brundage described the historiography of lynching in the
United States as having only recently moved beyond its infancy. This lapse extended far
beyond the discipline of history.
5
Sociologists Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, authors
of an award-winning 1995 work on lynching, quoted historian Edward Ayers to express
their dismay at the dearth of scholarship: the triggers of lynching, for all the attention de-
voted to it by contemporaries, sociologists, and historians, are still not known.
6
The remarkable delay in fully theorized work about lynching results, in large part, from
disagreement over its denition. Until recently, the historiography focused almost entirely
on the epidemic of lynching that swept the South between 1880 and 1930.
7
The spectacle
lynchings of this period, in which black victims were most commonly tortured and hanged
before large crowds, continue to dene the act in the American imagination. Nevertheless,
2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
the chronological and geographic story of lynching far extends far beyond the Jim Crow
South. Not only did the triggers and histories of lynching evade thorough study for the better
part of the twentieth century, but the very denition of the act also remained contested.
Recently, however, a new generation of scholars has expanded their scale of analysis to build
upon early foundational works of lynching and vigilantism.
The Challenges of Dening Lynching
Historian Christopher Waldrep has argued, Imagining the beginnings of lynching is a
political act, one with direct repercussions for the national narrative of the United States.
8
Activists and scholars have struggled to dene what acts of violence constitute lynching
and in what regional contexts lynching is best understood.
The problem of dening lynching arises even in histories of its origins. The most cohesive
long-view work on lynching in particular, Waldreps The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Punishment
and Extralegal Violence in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), presents an overview of how
people used the word from early America until 1991, when black Supreme Court nominee
Clarence Thomas described his contentious conrmation hearings as a high-tech lynching.
Waldrep explores a longer periodization of lynching by examining two possible origin stories.
In the rst, Colonel Charles Lynch used whipping, violent interrogation, and other forceful
tactics to break miners strikes between 1776 and 1782. Waldrep describes Colonel Lynchs
activities as establishment violence carried out directly by the governing elite to protect the
wealth of Virginia. In the second, Virginia farmer WilliamLynch responded to a string of crimes
carried out by an aptly named outlaw and Tory ringleader, Benjamin Lawless, for some three
years in the early 1780s. Lynch had a personal stake in Lawlesss prosecution, and testied against
him frequently over these years, but the local court failed to deliver a conviction. William
Lynch held no position of power and was not part of the militia that eventually arose to put
down the insurrection of Lawless and the lower rank of people. Nevertheless, he became a
character in popular culture, which ascribed torture of prisoners, mock courts, and execution
to his history.
9
As evident in these twin origin myths, the denition of lynching has always been
slippery. The term has referred to the anti-labor violence of wealthy elites, the righteous
revenge of the common man, and the efforts of ordinary frontier dwellers to assert the rule of law.
The challenge of denition troubled early scholarship on vigilantism. Richard Maxwell
Brown established the eld with his foundational Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of
American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), a synthesis that
presented vigilantism as native to America. Brown argued that a shift occurred during the
Civil War: lynching ceased to signify simply the iniction of corporal punishment and became
synonymous, mainly, with hanging or killing by illegal group action.
10
Brown who pointed
out that lynching occurred in all parts of the country located this deadly shift in the transition of
the United States from a rural, agrarian nation to an urban, industrial one. He also noted that
after the Civil War, lynch mobs, which had formerly targeted petty criminals and outlaws, began
to assail a new and larger variety of victims.
11
However, Brown excluded most lynchings from his denition of vigilantism. Vigilantes, he
explained, were organized in command and often bound by a constitution or manifesto.
Lynch mobs, by contrast, he characterized as unorganized and ephemeral. Whereas
vigilantes subjected a criminal or other social outcast to what was by their lights, a fair but
speedy trial, lynch mobs simply tortured and killed their victims with little gesture toward
due process or law. Brown aligned vigilante violence, then, not with the lynch mob but rather
with a romantic ideal of frontier justice in which American men took the law into their own
hands only in places where the law and the courts could guarantee neither justice nor safety.
Lynching and Power in the United States 85
2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd History Compass 12/1 (2014): 8499, 10.1111/hic3.12121
The aws in Browns analysis become evident in the often-blurred distinction between
organized and unorganized mobs, and in their easy substitution of social outcasts and racial
others for criminals. The lynch mobs Brown designated as ephemeral frequently staged sham
trials before carrying out executions, demonstrating adherence to a cultural idea of lynching.
12
More recent works have criticized Browns false distinction and have instead treated lynching as
a subcategory of vigilantism.
Southern, Western, and National Lynching
SOUTH
In addition to disputing which acts constitute lynching, historians have also grappled with
what geographical and chronological boundaries best dene the phenomenon. To conne
the denition of lynching to the 18801930s South serves not only to stereotype that region
as backward and corrupt, but also to romanticize Western violence and cloak the suffering of
its victims. Likewise, to begin the story in the 1880s or even in the 1840s is to elide a
longer history of violence as a constitutive power in the American nation.
The modern study of lynching emerged from contemporary activism works penned by
anti-lynching crusaders such as Ida B. Wells and Walter white and by groups like the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Indeed, the very act of telling
stories about lynching led rst to organized black anti-lynching activism, and then, through
pan-generational organizing, to the long civil rights movement, as Kidada E. Williams has
recently demonstrated.
13
Both Wells and white made early claims linking lynching with
power. Wells established that criminal behavior had very little correlation with the mobs
choice of targets: the mob regularly lynched the falsely accused but only occasionally offered
an alleged crime as rationale for lynching. Both Wells and white noted the relationship
between outbursts of mob violence and economic competition, documented through the
volatile rise and fall of cotton prices from the 1890s to the 1920s.
14
Activist accounts
continued into the post-World War II period, most particularly with William L. Pattersons
edited volume We Charge Genocide: The Crimes of the Government Against the Negro People
(New York: International Publishers, 1951). Patterson invoked an emergent human rights
discourse following World War II to establish the humanity of black lynching victims and
condemned the state for failing to prevent their torture and death.
While activists analyzed relations of power, the rst professional historians to study
lynching dismissed such broad perspectives in favor of narrow, regional explanations. In
The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), Arthur
Raper leaned heavily on bias against the South rather than offering historical argumentation.
Raper attributed Southern mob violence to backwards poor whites and blamed white elites
for failing to stop the rabble. He ignored the fact that elite whites often actively participated
in lynching. At times, he also blamed black lynching victims for their own deaths by alleging
their involvement in criminality and vice. Contrary to Wellss careful documentation, Raper
essentially attributed lynching to black crime and lax regulation of poor whites. C. Vann
Woodward began to unravel these arguments with his pivotal work The Origins of the New
South, 18771913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), which linked
populism, racism, and the idea of the South as a colony in order to explore a long period
of Southern disempowerment and its relationship to violence.
Beginning in the early 1970s, historians of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Jim
Crow South advanced a still more nuanced set of arguments about Southern mob violence
than Raper had presented. In his 1984 book Vengeance and Justice, Ayers traced the sweep
of Southern lynching as it emerged from existing regional traditions of Regulator vigilantism
86 Lynching and Power in the United States
and problematized its periodization by studying it in tandem with other forms of Southern
violence such as dueling and whitecapping, which is to say, vigilantism ordinarily carried
out to maintain existing power structures in remote farming communities.
15
Ayers described
the South as uniquely, inherently violent even as he challenged prevailing ideas about the
periodization of lynching. Everyone today agrees on the obvious, even banal, causes of
lynching: racism, frustration, poverty, submerged political conict, irrational white fears,
and a weak state, Ayers observed.
These forces, though, were constants in the postwar South. They surely existed during Reconstruc-
tion, and yet lynching did not sweep through the region; they did not end in 1900, yet lynching
declined throughout the early twentieth century.
16
Ayers contended that lynching began as a symptom of widespread Southern crisis in the
1880s and 1890s, a period marked not only by the implementation of the new Jim Crow
racial order but also by multiple economic depressions, entry into an international market
economy, and a crime wave. Ayers identied several characteristics that had long dened
Southern society: moralism, racism, sexual tension, honor, rurality, and localistic republicanism.
After the Civil War, these traditional elements of Southern culture coupled with a declining
faith in legal systems and antagonism toward a new racial order. The result was a spree of
lynching that contributed to and exacerbated social instability in the South.
Ayers singled out the Souths entry into an international market economy, specically the
large-scale movement of white labor into cash-crop agriculture (especially cotton); the need
for large, docile labor pools for many of the Souths new industries; the emergence of
sharecropping; and the volatile rise and fall of cotton prices as contributors to the lynching
epidemic. In this way, Ayers reprised analyses about the cotton market and economic
competition rst offered by anti-lynching activists, and also retained the idea of the South
as a singular case from early historiographies of lynching.
17
However, as Brundage notes,
Ayerss frustration-aggression model elided specic local contexts: some Southern
lynchings occurred when cotton prices were good or in communities that did not produce
cotton. Ayerss model also failed to illuminate the history of U.S. lynching outside of the
South or within Southern locales that did not rely upon cotton and other cash crops.
In the late 1970s, several Southern historians began to focus on the gendered nature of
lynching. A new model inuenced by the womens rights movement and by psychoanalytic
theory located the roots of lynching more fully in white anxiety about gender and sexuality,
most particularly in the perceived threat of the archetypal black rapist to the pure white
female body. Jacquelyn Dowd Halls Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the
Womens Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) opened
this discussion, and she soon followed with the inuential article The Mind that Burns
in Each Body: Women, Rape and Racial Violence in Powers of Desire: The Politics of
Sexuality, 1983. Hall compared lynching with rape, noting that neither act of violence has
yet been given its history and arguing that each has functioned to subjugate particular
groups of people. Hall contended that both lynching and rape have worked as instruments
of racial subordination: both became institutionalized under slavery and both found new life
as political weapons following the Civil War. She further established that the lynching wave
in the South, marked by tacit ofcial consent, corresponded to social uncertainty: Once a
new system of disenfranchisement, debt peonage, and segregation was rmly in place, mob
violence gradually declined.
18
Joel Williamsons The Crucible of Race: black/white Relations in the American South Since
Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) extended this gender analysis,
tracing tension about race and sexuality from 1880 to 1915. He noted that lynching most
often occurred in areas where it had happened before, in districts undergoing rapid economic
change, and in places with frequent and unpunished murders.
19
Like Ayers, he connected
lynching with other kinds of vigilantism, particularly white riots that targeted black victims
in Wilmington (1898), New Orleans (1900), and Atlanta (1906). Excellent recent accounts
have built on Williamsons work by more closely examining gender and class in relationship
to lynching. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmores cornerstone article Murder, Memory, and the
Flight of the Incubus (1998) examined the specic case of the Wilmington riot, demonstrat-
ing how the fear of the archetypal black rapist ignited white male vigilantism. Crystal
Feimsters Southern Horrors focused on womens roles in anti-lynching activism, particularly
in the life work of Ida B. Wells. Elsa Barkley Browns landmark Negotiating and
Transforming the Public Sphere: black Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Free-
dom (Public Culture, 1994) made strikingly plain that black women, too, found themselves
victims of lynch mobs and other sorts of oppressive violence.
20
Although this brief overview essay cannot outline all of the scholarship on gender and its
relationship to vigilante violence, such work is extensive. As Mia Bay and Lisa Arellano have
argued, Ida B. Wellss anti-lynching activism succeeded precisely because of her gender; she
purposefully used her womanhood to dismantle the lynching narrative.
21
Other works on
gender explore the fraternalism of lynch mobs much-invoked chastity of white women as
justication for violence and, most recently, the participation of women in lynching and
vigilantism.
22
As the scholarship on gender developed, a new generation of revisionist historians began
to challenge the older paradigms by which Ayers and others had explained the prevalence
of Southern vigilantism between 1880 and 1930, drawing provocative new conclusions
about its causes and consequences. Their rst innovation was to recognize the disparate
and uneven nature of lynching, an act that often differed profoundly among local iterations.
Brundages Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 18801930 (Champaign: University
of Illinois Press, 1993) attended closely both to the particularities of specic lynchings and to the
power relationships that linked and dened all such acts. Brundage, focusing on Georgia and
Virginia with admirable detail, nevertheless offered a widely applicable explanation: lynching,
he argued, was designed to preserve the status quo but varied widely from place to place. It
did not always enact a community consensus. As long as lynchings are interpreted as a
ritualized expression of the values of united white communities, Brundage noted, the task
of explaining both the great variations in the form and the ebb and ow of lynchings across
space and time will remain incomplete.
23
For Brundage, then, Southern lynching hewed
closely to articulations of local, rather than state, power. It ended, he argued, when the
Great Depression radically changed Southern agricultural systems, upending local power
structures and ushering in big government, massive labor migration, and the mechanization
of cash-crop farming.
Jacqueline Goldsbys A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006) further advances the study of lynching by incorporating
cultural history. Goldsby uses literature and photography because, as she notes, lynching
is both act and sign to examine Southern lynchings, pushing much further than had
earlier scholars in her consideration of culture and technology.
24
While her study remains
situated in the familiar Jim Crow era, Goldsby upends the historiography with three new
contributions. First, she describes lynching as intrinsically linked to technologies of circula-
tion and spectacle particularly photography, which became popularized around World
War I, at the same moment that photographic images of lynching were widely circulated.
25
Lynching, she further argues, should not be conceptualized as extralegal violence, but was
rather tied closely to state power over life and death, and particularly to the states denial of
black citizenship.
26
By nullifying African Americans rights of citizenship and, with them,
the afrmative duty to protect black people from unjust harm, Goldsby explains, the fed-
eral government effectively granted mobs a license to kill.
27
Finally, she cast lynching as part
of the United States transition into modernity, locating it within the economic system that
launched Americas emancipation in the twentieth century: corporate-commodity capital-
ism. Modernity, Goldsby asserts, demanded violence: lynching worked to codify particular
labor and racial orders that signied progress.
28
Rather than reading lynching as a rural, backwater,
or reactionary phenomenon, as had many other scholars, Goldsby positions it as an instrument of
state modernization.
In other words, Goldsbys interdisciplinary method rendered legible several ways in which
people who held state, racial, and economic power directly benetted from spectacle
lynchings in the 18801930 South. Not only did Southern whites benet from the racial or-
der created by lynching: but the act also worked to nullify black claims to citizenship, and
both the state and capitalism benetted from the lynchings that maintained cheap and docile
black labor. Rebecca N. Hills Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S.
Radical History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) created a comparative and rich history
of the interplay between vigilantism and resistance, examining anti-lynching and labor
defense violence in concert throughout American history. These revisions of Southern
exceptionalism set the stage for an even wider approach to lynching, one that would yield
rich new analyses.
WEST
A denition of lynching that includes Western vigilante violence has proven indispensable to
a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon and a full accounting of its victims. As
historians began to dismantle Richard Maxwell Browns early division of organized
vigilantism and lynching, noticing the overlap between both categories, they also began to
study lynching outside of the 18801930 South. This shift most impacts Western historiog-
raphy, which until recently dened vigilantism as a sort of noble rough justice that was part
and parcel of settlement on the frontier. Instead, recent scholarship and photographic and
documentary collections reveal both organized and impromptu lynching in the West. These
accounts do include lynchings used to enforce law and morality, especially on the frontier,
where the state failed to deliver justice. However, they also show the repeated use of
Western lynching to police social outsiders along the lines of race, class, and gender.
By tracing the use of the word lynching itself, Waldrep delivers a particularly strong study of
lynching in California in the mid-1800s. Waldrep uses the word as it was used in that
moment, to mean an act of violence legitimate only when it represented the will of the
whole country implicitly, that is, the white male community.
29
He focuses on the San
Francisco Vigilance Committee, which purportedly endeavored to enforce the law but which
often targeted Chinese, Mexican, and other immigrant scapegoats. This committee eventually
included such numbers, and established such local power, that the governor of California
attempted to put it down as an armed revolt. After local militias added their strength to the
Committee, however, and after its members won several ofces, the San Francisco Vigilance
Committee became synonymous with local political power. By 1850, Waldrep writes, the
Western vigilante had already emerged as a stock character in ction, well on his way to
becoming a national icon. According to popular rhetoric, lynch mobs only targeted unprinci-
pled and vile men who mocked the law. No courts existed that could properly convict these
irredeemable persons, the logic went, so the burden fell on the public to exercise its popular
sovereignty through lynching.
30
Waldreps characterization of vigilantism indirectly confronts Brundages notion that
lynching did not always represent the will of a cohesive community. In California, Waldrep
claims, in the turmoil of economic competition and frontier lawlessness that surrounded the
Gold Rush, lynching frequently did nd this kind of broad community support. Indeed, the
San Francisco Vigilance Committee eventually counted more than 10,000 members, and it
created an extensive organization of the kind used by Brown to distinguish it from Southern
lynch mobs.
31
Nevertheless, Waldrep denes its activities as lynching by analyzing contempo-
rary language. While Southern and Western lynching might vary, as Arellano adds, they should
still be understood as two qualitatively different versions of the same act (emphasis added).
32
Waldrep argues that Western vigilante violence preceded Southern violence and that
Southern lynch mobs consciously followed its form. This argument problematically obscures
the early Southern history of vigilantism.
33
For instance, in Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in
the American Grain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.), Stock argues that in 1767, South
Carolina Regulators committed violence against Native Americans, religious minorities, rap-
ists, gamblers, and domestic abusers, other social outcasts in order to create and sustain power
within their own communities. These episodes occurred long before the example of Western
vigilantism could shape them.
34
Linda Gordons The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2001) attempted to draw connections between Southern and Western lynching,
focusing closely on violence motivated by race and labor animosities. Gordon dened
lynching as a subsection of vigilantism that served to punish and terrorize labor in order to
keep it cheap and pliant. In this way, lynching functioned either to defend systems of power,
or, especially on the frontier, to implement them. Gordon also argued that the line between
state power and vigilante violence frequently blurred, particularly during the Indian wars, in
which there was no way to distinguish military from vigilante actions.
35
NATIONWIDE
New historical works have moved beyond differentiating Southern and Western vigilantism
and have begun instead to conceptualize a broad, national history of lynching as concurrent
with the formation and expansion of the United States. In Rural Radicals, Stock examines
vigilantism as a tradition of rural life in the United States. She divides vigilantism into
three broad, overlapping categories. First, Americans on the frontier attacked deviants,
criminals, poor people, and others whose behaviors or beliefs threatened the physical safety
and/or economic stability of the community. Second, settlers and other rural Americans
targeted people whose racial heritage they deemed intolerable. Third, communities turned
violent against those they saw as un-American because of religious or ethnic heritage or
political beliefs.
36
Stocks central argument that vigilantism is an inherently rural phenomenon tied to the
isolation and deprivation of the frontier, the enforced homogeneity of the small town, and
the wide availability [of] and reverence for guns runs counter to Goldsbys argument
about the simultaneous development of lynching, modernism, and technology between
1890 and 1915. It also clashes with the assertions of Southern historians that the
18801930 lynching peak coincided with dramatic decreases in both isolation and deprivation,
especially in the South. By 1890, 90% of Southerners lived in counties with railroads,
signaling an unprecedented level of connection.
37
Furthermore, as Ayers noted, lynching
victims were usually traveling laborers or transients: their lynching resulted in part from the
circulation of strangers created by technologies like the railroad rather than from isolation.
38
Stock not only contradicts Ayerss and Goldsbys notions about lynching as a consequence
of modernity and Southern transformation, but also disputes Brundages assertion that
lynching did not signify community consensus. Stock asserts that lynching was
supported and sustained over many years by most or all members of the white community,
including women. Lynch mobs were not sudden, irrational actions provoked by years of frontier
assault and revenge, nor were they organizations that took on an immediate problem and then
(sometimes at least) disbanded.
Stock describes all vigilante violence as a product of the community, but lynching as a
coherent form of crowd violence that included members of the elite. Lynching, she
argues, served to shore up local structures of power over the span of several years. Like
Goldsby, she emphasizes the spectacular nature of such events in creating fear among
victimized populations.
39
New periodizations of lynching have led to new ideas about why lynching occurred.
Michael J. Pfeifers Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society: 18741947 (University of
Illinois, 2004) utilizes a slightly condensed version of Waldreps timeline but offers a statistical
analysis of vigilantism. Like Waldrep, Pfeifer draws hard lines between Southern and Western
episodes, or in Pfeifers terms, between Southern lynching and Western mob violence. He
argues that both resulted from a nationwide transition from rural rough justice to urban-
and middle-class due process, a movement that incorporated regions sporadically: rst the West
and then the South lagging behind. While his data are impressive, his analysis is necessarily lim-
ited by his case studies. Louisiana, for instance, stands in for the entire South. His decision to
include only lethal lynchings regrettably foreshortens discussions of a complex form of crowd
violence: as other scholars have documented, lynching did not always prove fatal. Like
Waldrep, Pfeifer gestures to the present moment by arguing that the death penalty is now
disproportionately employed in the same communities that most recently used lynching to
preserve the order of dominant power systems. Capital punishment, Pfeifer provocatively
concludes, has signaled a bureaucratization, rather than tempering, of American violence.
40
While early works on Western lynching worked on a regional model, demarcating the
border between Western and Southern mob violence, Lisa Arellano advances a much
broader argument about geography. In Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs: Narratives of Community
and Nation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), she argues that scholars have until
recently drawn a false distinction between Western and Southern lynching. In so doing, they
have remained complicit in the veneration of potentially legitimate and order-making
extralegal violence in its Western shape, even while decrying the same phenomenon in
the South. For Arellano, Browns early distinction between vigilantism and lynching thus
created ethical concerns. Arellano also demonstrates that academic historians were only a
few of the many voices that informed popular understandings of lynching over the course
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perpetrators of mob violence, who justied their
actions in written accounts, shaped this discourse as well.
Arellanos book is the most notable example of a new turn in the historiography of
lynching, one that seeks to more thoroughly interrogate power within the act itself. She sees
lynching as a set of violent practices made recognizable by a constellation of formulaic
narrative practices. Arellano argues that a lynching is discernable by the claims of its
perpetrators, who allege that their acts served to punish criminals. She identies ve
narrative attributes that distinguish lynchers accounts of their deeds: overwhelming
crime, failure of the state, valorous action, pursuit of orderliness, and public popular-
ity.
41
Lynching, Arellano argues, was the same in the nineteenth century as in the
twentieth and more similar than different in the South and in the West. Rather than
trying to formulate distinctions between mob violence in various regions or even
within these regions, as did Brundage Arellano advances a broader denition and
periodization of lynching. In so doing, she enables new consideration of the relationship
between vigilantism and power.
Accounts of lynching that follow a broader denition and periodization have opened rich
terrain for further study. The popular photography exhibit and eponymous folio book
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000)
displays images of lynchings conducted in the Souths iconic 18901930 period alongside
those from other times and places. Waldreps edited collection Lynching in America: A History
in Documents (New York: New York University Press, 2006) follows suit by presenting
documents that span the new periodization and broader map of U.S. lynching. In both
collections, striking resemblances between Southern and Western lynching, and between
pre- and post-Reconstruction lynching, work to create a longer and fuller perspective on
the act.
42
Vigilantism and Power
Collectively, these and other works document a fuller history of lynching and its many
perpetrators, victims, and consequences. They also raise challenging questions about the
complicated relationship between vigilante violence and several forms of power. The
question of how to describe this relationship resonates throughout the historiography.
Perhaps vigilantism can be most clearly understood as group violence that serves systemic
power. I borrow systemic from George Lipsitz, who uses the term to identify not only
overt power wielded by the state but also subtle power exerted by the many informal
structures that uphold it.
43
When the state is weak, sytemic power often patriarchal, racial,
or religious commonly prevails. Historically, systemic power in the United States has
tended to privilege white men with property. Only persons who claim systemic power, I
argue, can carry out vigilante violence such as lynching. Extralegal political violence carried
out by persons who do not possess systemic power is not properly understood as vigilantism
because it typically seeks to negate, undermine, or overthrow the power of the state. The
violence of systematically disempowered persons is frequently better understood as resistance,
self-defense, or revolution.
44
Similarly, extralegal personal violence vengeance can
function without relation to power, often under its own set of governing principles. While
vengeance is frequently invoked to justify vigilantism, the latter is distinguished by its effect:
shoring up or constituting systemic power.
Several recent works on lynching have also illuminated the constitutive power of vigilante
violence that is, the way that lynching works to create power rather than merely uphold it.
In The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in
World War I America (The Journal of American History, March 2002, 13541382),
Christopher Capozzola argues that vigilantism, rather than being an exercise of violent
power, is instead about law. In his study of popular mobilization for World War
I, he demonstrates that vigilantism functioned to establish social order. During that war, the
U.S. government brought citizen policing under state authority and in line with state
objectives, thereby transforming the nature of vigilantism during and after war.
45
Because the
historical record offers myriad examples of vigilantism that benetted the state both in times
of war and during long periods of peace, Capozzolas argument might be fruitfully expanded:
there is space at this juncture for further scholarship. Capozzola nonetheless makes the case that
the U.S. government has used vigilantism to regulate its populace during wartime, turning
lynching into one element of state power.
Likewise, Goldsby elucidates the difference between lynching as mere social regulation
and lynching as the systematic terrorization of a particular racialized subject, meant to stand
in for state oppression of an entire racial group. She sees Reconstruction, rather than the
1890s, as the crucible in which lynching turned deadly. She argues,
By the end of Reconstruction, the nature and aim of lynching had changed perceptibly. What had
once been an exacting and painful measure of social regulation became a mortal tactic of political
terrorism, targeted to reverse the gains won by blacks because of emancipation.
46
In other words, Goldsby identies a shift from the use of lynching to police criminals and
social outcasts to the use of lynching to designate entire racial groups as vulnerable to
violence. Goldsby argues that lynching worked both to establish and to maintain a racial
hierarchy understood here as inexorably tied to state power.
Here, the historiography of lynching dovetails with excellent emerging work in Latina/o
studies, history, and anthropology about the U.S.Mexico border, most particularly on the
violent project of subjugating Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas, together
referred to as Tejanos following the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. New histories
of vigilantism in South Texas bridge the geographical divide between Southern and Western
studies of lynching. These accounts reveal a blurry line between state-sanctioned and
extralegal violence, recognizing a long continuum between the actions of private citizens
and those of the Texas Rangers and other public authorities. Benjamin Heber Johnsons
pivotal work Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned
Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) details the attempted
191516 revolution by ethnic Mexicans in South Texas under the Plan de San Diego, and
the far bloodier counterinsurgency carried out by Texas Rangers, law and order leagues,
and private mobs that killed between 300 and 5,000 Tejanos in the same period. During
World War I, this violence rose to such a nationalistic fervor that the military intervened
to reclaim the rule of law from lynch mobs and posses. After the war, in the 1920s, the
anti-Mexican Ku Klux Klan revived local vigilantism.
47
Johnsons argument, in fact, identies many of the same factors that contributed to
Southern lynching. For instance, when South Texas shifted from cattle ranching to cotton
production in the years just before its vigilante period, many Tejanos became eld laborers.
The region therefore shared a similarly volatile commercial agriculture system with the
South. And as in the South, vigilantism worked to install a system of harsh racial segregation
and to deliver a massive and tightly managed labor force.
48
Claiming that existing legal systems could not stop Mexican bandits or revolutionaries,
white South Texans justied their lynchings much as Western vigilantes did. Texas lynch
mobs made lists targeting not only rebels and bandits but also all Tejanos of bad character,
including unruly women and other social outcasts.
49
By intimidating voters and breaking
strikes, Texas vigilantes helmed in large part by the Texas Rangers delivered full political
power and racial privilege to Anglo residents.
50
William D. Carrigans The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central
Texas, 18361916 (University of Illinois Press, 2004) more directly takes Texas as a case
study of the intersection of Southern and Western histories. He analyzes a regional tolerance
of mob violence, tailoring his account around four major developments: the rhetoric of self-
defense along the expanding frontier; the day-to-day violence of slavery; the resistance and
suppression of ethnic, political, and racial minorities; and the tacit consent of the courts.
All of these factors, Carrigan shows, contributed to the culture of mob violence in Central
Texas. Carrigans work expands ideas of lynching from those used to structure Southern
history, calling early attention to the lynching of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and
Indians and social outcasts.
Carrigan and Clive Webbs new Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United
States, 18481928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) widens its scope of analysis
beyond Texas to the larger borderlands region. Carrigan and Webb create a new list of
documented lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, lling in the archival gaps left
by the absence of such activist organizations, in the West, as the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People and Tuskegee University that collected data on black
lynching victims in the South. They also focus on attempts at transnational justice for lynching.
They draw on previously un- and under-used sources, including oral histories, photography,
and Mexican diplomatic records, to recongure the periodization of lynching: most Mexican
and Mexican American victims were lynched prior to the beginning of the Southern epidemic.
New work by Monica Muoz Martinez deepens the study of Mexican American lynching
by revealing the spectacle of dead and mutilated bodies on the South Texas physical and
cultural landscape. She discovers that postcards depicting the lynchings of Tejanos circulated
through the region, mirroring the phenomenon Goldsby documented in the South.
Muoz Martinez also examines the lived memory of lynching in South Texas for instance,
the display, to the present day, of lynching photographs in local restaurants and asks how
such images continue to shape race and gender relations. Finally, as do Carrigan and Webb,
Muoz Martinez examines transnational attempts to secure justice for the victims of
vigilante violence, particularly in the case of Tejano families who crossed the border to seek
advocacy from the Mexican government, and sometimes won damages from the United
States government for the lynching of their loved ones. She therefore extends our
understanding of both the people impacted by lynching and the actors responsible,
revealing how vigilante violence stretches across generations and continues to shape local
and national histories.
51
Conclusion
Lynching, its denitions, and its periodization remain pressing problems both for historians of
the United States and for those who hope to understand the current political moment.
Clarifying lynching as an act intrinsically tied to the creation and maintenance of power
has opened broad spaces for new scholarship. Expanding chronological and geographical
denitions made possible by the use of interdisciplinary methods and the advent of new
elds such as cultural history, performance studies, and postcolonial studies has revealed
the constitutive, regulatory, and terrorizing capacity of lynching violence not only in the
Jim Crow South but also in the West and on the U.S.Mexico border. Viewed historically,
lynching may be understood as a national form of violence that has shaped the United States
from colonization through the twentieth century. Hill and Pfeifer both connect lynching
to the death penalty; the burgeoning eld of carceral studies calls for the continued
examination of violence and systemic power. Further work might problematize relation-
ships of power within acts of vigilantism and more fully explore the interplay between
lynching and American identity. Recent transnational studies continue to belie the notion
that lynching is peculiarly American, but its peculiar place in American history is now
well documented.
The study of lynching is as important to an understanding of the workings of the state as is
scholarship on empire, war, torture, and other forms of state violence. Indeed, understanding
vigilante violence as a state-sanctioned activity shows how power has constituted and
regulated particular communities and how it has subjugated and terrorized specic peoples.
Such an understanding brings violence committed by the United States against foreign
peoples in the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam, for instance into conversation with
the subjugation of black, Mexican American, Chinese, female, and queer bodies by domestic
vigilantes. Properly understood, vigilante violence serves as a nexus connecting histories of
race, empire, gender, class, and sexuality.
Even now, lynching and the confusion around its denition continue to shape politics. In
the heady early days of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and 2012, police ofcers
arrested two protesters, one in Los Angeles and another in Oakland, and charged them with
lynching. Section 405(a) of the California penal code dened lynching as the taking by
means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace ofcer. Police ofcers
alleged that Sergio Ballasteros had interfered in the arrest of a third party and that Tiffany
Tran, upon her arrest, had cried for help. As California police interpreted the law, Ballasteros
and Tran had lynched; Tran had lynched herself. While these felony charges were quickly
dropped, their use to suppress democratic protest shows a continued intertwinement of
lynching and power. The charges wholly obscured the legislative history of Section 405(a)
and the broader history of lynching violence in the state. Whereas in the 1850s, private
California citizens purportedly used lynching to enforce the law, and in the 1930s,
Section 405(a) attempted to stop mobs from taking suspects from police custody in
order to lynch them, in the 2010s, California law enforcement ofcials charged private
citizens with lynching in order to suppress civil disobedience carried out in legal political
protests.
52
The long entanglement between state power and vigilantism continues, demanding
further scholarly attention.
Short Biography
Kathleen Belew (PhD in American Studies, Yale University, 2011) specializes in the history
of the United States after the Vietnam War, examining the wars long aftermath on the
American home front. As a postdoctoral fellow in History at Northwestern University,
she teaches courses on the American Vigilante, Histories of Violence in the United States,
the Vietnam War, Twentieth Century U.S. History, and Comparative Race and Racism.
Her work has received the support of the Andrew W. Mellon and Jacob K. Javits Founda-
tions and Albert J. Beveridge and John F. Enders support for her transnational research in
Mexico and Nicaragua.Her rst book, Bring the War Home: How Vietnam Veterans Ignited
the Radical Right (under contract, Harvard University Press), traces the circulation of vio-
lence from the Vietnam War, to Central America, to the United States, following a small
but inuential group of veterans who became mercenary soldiers and then joined racist right
groups at home. Their white power movement united Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads,
proponents of Christian Identity, and more declared war on the government in 1983 and
reshaped itself as the purportedly nonracist militia movement in the 1990s. Belew examines
the relationship between veterans and vigilante movements throughout the twentieth cen-
tury, circulations of military weapons and technology, and connections between seemingly
disparate racist groups. Originally from Colorado, Belew earned her BA in Comparative
History of Ideas from the University of Washington in 2005, where she was named Deans
Medalist in the Humanities. She has also taught at Yale University, Rutgers University, and
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her second project, a long cultural history of the
American vigilante from early America to the present, emphasizes the constitutive power of
violence in nation-building.
Notes
* Correspondence: Department of History, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA. Email: k-belew@northwestern.edu.
1
Special thanks to Simeon Man, Beth Lew-Williams, Geraldo Cadava, Kate Masur, Dylan Penningroth, Benjamin Heber
Johnson, and especially Bejamin H. Irvin for their generous feedback on this essay.Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch,
10, 21; Brown, Strain of Violence, vii, 5; Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 3. On a transnational approach to lynching schol-
arship, see, for instance, Godoy, Lynchings and the Democratization of Terror in Postwar Guatemala: Implications for Human
Rights, 640661.
2
Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain; Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction; Brown, Strain
of Violence; Waldrep, Many Faces of Judge Lynch. Adding other massacres to this list, see also blackhawk, Violence over the
Land; Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn.
Table of commonly referenced incidents of vigilante violence in U.S. history
Time Place Perpetrators Victims
1676 Colonies Settlers (Bacons Rebellion) Native Americans
1763 Pennsylvania Paxton Boys Native Americans
17671769 Carolinas The Regulators Outlaws, social outcasts
17761780 Virginia piedmont Colonel Lynch and mob Striking coal miners
1820twentieth
century
Texas Texas Rangers Mexicans, Mexican Americans,
and Indians
1832 Missouri State militias, townspeople Mormons
1835 Vicksburg, Mississippi Townspeople Gamblers
18541861 Bleeding Kansas Supporters of slavery Abolitionists
1856 California San Francisco Vigilance
Committee
Mexicans, Chinese, social outcasts
1863 Montana Masons Outlaws
1864 Colorado Mob and military men
(Sand Creek Massacre)
Indians
1866present South, then
nationwide
Ku Klux Klan blacks, foreigners, deviants, social
outcasts, Jews, scapegoats
1887 Indiana white Caps Social outcasts
19151920s Nationwide WWI Vigilance Committees Immigrants and communists
19041917 Arizona and Colorado Mining companies Non-whites, labor activists, striking
workers
3
Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 259.
4
Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 187.
5
6
Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, 246, quoting Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 238.
7
8
Waldrep, Many Faces of Judge Lynch, 13.
9
10
Brown, Strain of Violence, 21.
11
Brown also included explicit links between vigilantism and state power, noting Andrew Jacksons condonement of vigi-
lantism in Iowa and Teddy Roosevelts unsuccessful attempt to join a vigilante group in North Dakota Strain of Violence, 23.
12
Brown, 109110.
13
Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me.
14
Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings; white, Rope and Faggot; Feimster, Southern Horrors, 90. On the economic
volatility of this period, see also Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, Chapter 1.
15
Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 164.
16
Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 238.
17
Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 250252, 4, 1589, 225.
18
Hall, The Mind that Burns in Each Body: Women, Rape and Racial Violence, 328349. Here, too, historians
built on earlier works by activists, particularly the body of writings produced by Lillian Smith in the late 1940s and early
1950s. Hall also notes that the study of lynching was immediately familiar to feminists who worked in the anti-rape
movements of the 1970s and 1980s.
19
Williamson, The Crucible of Race, Chapter 6.
20
Gilmore, Murder, Memory and the Flight of the Incubus, 7393; Feimster, Southern Horrors; Barkley Brown,
Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere.
21
Arellano, Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs; Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely.
22
On the participation of women in vigilante violence, see Irvin, Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American
Liberties, 17681776; Waldrep, Lynching in America: A History in Documents; Gordon, Great Arizona Orphan Abduction;
McLure, I Suppose You Think Strange the Murder of Women and Children: The American Culture of Collective Violence,
16521930. On the defense of white female bodies as justication for racial violence, see also Pascoe, What Comes Naturally.
23
Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 13, 19.
24
Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret, 42.
25
Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret, 5, 218.
26
27
28
29
Waldrep, Many Faces of Judge Lynch.
30
Waldrep, Many Faces of Judge Lynch, 24, 50.
31
32
Arellano, Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs, 120.
33
Arellano, Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs 723; see, for instance, Brown, The South Carolina Regulators.
34
Stock, Rural Radicals, 9395.
35
Gordon, Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 2612.
36
37
Ayers, Southern Crossings, Chapter 1.
38
Stock, Rural Radicals; Ayers, Southern Crossings.
39
40
Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 3, 10, 14950.
41
Arellano, Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs, 2425.
42
See also Apel, On Looking: Lynching Photographs and Legacies of Lynching after 9/11, American Quarterly, Vol. 55,
No. 3 (September 2003) pp. 457478.
43
Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in whiteness, 381.
44
There are some exceptions, such as black lynch mobs, see Hill, black Vigilantism: The Rise and Decline of black
Lynch Mob Activity in the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas, 18831923. Further, one disempowered group could lynch
someone from another, if it were still in the service of systemic power. The difference is the relationship to power rather
than the positionality of the actor.
On revolutionary violence, see Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Chapter 1; Benjamin, Critique of Violence. On armed
self-defense, see also Tyson, Radio Free Dixie.
45
Capozzola, The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I
America, 13611379.
46
Goldsby, Spectacular Secret, 230.
47
The historiography of the Ku Klux Klan as a particular vigilante group falls out of the scope of this brief essay. See, for
instance, Wade, The Fiery Cross, 219; Schlatter, Aryan Cowboys, 64; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 110;
Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of white Supremacy; MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, xii, 184, 188.
48
Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 15, 3, 335, 40, 1634.
49
On unruly women as targets of lynch mobs, see also Gordan, Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 263.
50
Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 1089, 115, 86, 178, 173. See also Gordon, Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 271.
51
Martinez, Inherited Loss: Tejanas and Tejanos Contesting State Violence and Revising Public Memory, 1910-Present.
52
Albrecht, Lynching Not Always about Racial Violence; Mikultran, Occupier Charged with Lynching Herself;
Huus, Prosecutors Aim New Weapon at Occupy Activists: Lynching Allegation; California Penal Code Section 405
(a); jpmassar, Occupied Oakland: Now Come the Low-tech Lynchings.
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