Copyright, Michael J. Pfeifer, 1999Lynching and Criminal Justice: The Midwest and West as American Regions, 1878-1920
Professor Michael J. Pfeifer, Faculty Member, American Social History, The Evergreen State College,
Olympia, Washington 98505, tel: (360) 867-6009, e-mail: pfeiferm@evergreen.edu,
home page: http://academic.evergreen.edu/p/pfeiferm/home.htm
A version of this essay was presented at the 39th Annual Western History Association Conference, Portland, Ore., October 9, 1999In the early hours of April 11, 1891, a mob of forty masked men arrived by boats at Oysterville, along the coast of southwest Washington. After landfall, they proceeded to the town's jail and demanded that the guard let them in, and that if he did not that they would blow it up with dynamite. When the guard opened the door, he was seized by several of the mob and taken to a building next door. The mob entered the jail and fired into the cells that held John Rose and John Edwards, killing them. The band of forty then departed in their boats into Shoalwater (now called Willapa) Bay. Rose and Edwards had been convicted of killing Hans Frederickson and his wife and burying their bodies in a pigpen. Their conviction in Pacific County and sentence to hang the previous November had been reversed by the Washington State Supreme Court, which had ordered a new trial. The lawyers for the men, aware of murmurs of "discontent" by Frederickson's friends at the legal system's delay, had requested their removal for safekeeping to another county, and their transfer was imminent.1
The 1891 lynching2 in Oysterville, Washington was part of a significant social movement, the collective killing of persons accused of homicide, that flared in the late nineteenth century Midwest and West. Southern historians in a series of recent monographs have richly elaborated our understanding of lynching as a critical aspect of regional culture and social relations in the postbellum period.3 Beyond the South, Richard Maxwell Brown has identified many of the key dynamics of violence in American society and in the American West. Brown has detailed signal patterns of collective and individual violence and their relation to deeply rooted values and ideology. Brown's work has helped to correct and problematize the work of the West's initial historians, such as Hubert Howe Bancroft, who had legitimated and indeed sanctified vigilantism as the appropriate response of democratic citizens to frontier disorder.4
I argue that lynchings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Midwest and West represented in fact an ideological response to cultural and specifically legal changes that had regional and national dimensions. Thus lynching in the Midwest and West was not ephemeral and was not a response to frontier conditions, but was rather an important, if nefarious, social movement arising from a series of alterations in midwestern and western law and society. Consider: mobs of Iowans killed fifteen white men accused of murder between 1878 and 1907;5 Wisconsin lynchers took the lives of five white male murderers between 1881 and 1891; Wyomingites lynched twelve white men, one Latino, and two black men for murder between 1879 and 1918;6 Washington state mobs killed seven white men accused of homicide between 1891 and 1903. By comparison, in the South, Louisiana lynchers killed 172 persons for murder between 1878 and 1919, including at least 140 blacks, 14 whites, 13 Italians, and 1 Latino.7 In the Northeast, in New York State, one lynching occurred in the late nineteenth century, of an African American man accused of rape.
In short, lynching for homicide in the developing Midwest and West was not ephemeral and sporadic, but was substantial and patterned. It did not occur nearly as often as it did in the South, but it did happen much more often than in the Northeast. Its incidence and pattern tell us important things about the Midwest and the West, and about American regionalism.8
Lynching in the Midwest and West had strong affinities, ideologically and in practice, with the southern variety, but also displayed important differences, underlining the salience of regionalism and localism in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century America, which henceforth I will refer to as "postbellum America."
Most crucially, midwestern, western, and southern lynchers shared a commitment to what I call "rough justice," the harsh, informal, and often communal punishment of serious criminal behavior. The understanding of what was serious criminal behavior was heavily mediated by factors of race, gender, class, and circumstance. Murders of whites by blacks provoked a harsh response, as did murders of women, as did murders of law officers or homicides that seemed especially heinous because of the brutal method or relative defenselessness of the victim. Short of allegations of homicide, alleged sexual assaults of white women by black men could provoke a lethal reaction, as could the violation of the property of the landed elite by marginal landholders or the landless. "Rough justice," in addition to its requirement that serious crime be adequately redressed and thus crime deterred, that is, what Richard Maxwell Brown, following Herbert L. Packer, has termed "crime control" or "crime repression,"9 had an important performative quality: punishment required a communal, and sometimes ritualistic, dimension. "Rough justice" advocates, who were usually rural residents or members of the urban petty mercantile or working class, thus flocked to legal executions, hoping to witness the death rite; argued strenuously for a prolific and merciless application of the death penalty; and participated in or apologized for lynchings.
"Rough justice" enthusiasts in the Midwest, West, and South were opposed by middle class reformers who advocated due process law as a guarantor of social order and the free-flow of capital. This middle class reform element, evincing a significant humanitarian impulse and inclination towards social engineering, also sought the amelioration of the death penalty through abolition or at least the physical segregation of executions behind four walls and before limited witnesses. The statutory physical segregation of executions occurred in all states and territories by 1900, although in some, like Louisiana, the law was disregarded in rural jurisdictions in favor of continued public access to executions. The middle class intention was to place executions beyond the primal, morally depraved fascination of working class people and the potential disorder of an aroused crowd. For their part, due process advocates bitterly attacked lynchings as atavistic, prone to miscarriages of justice, and destructive to the cause of law and order.
Thus lynching in postbellum America was an aspect of a larger cultural war over the nature of criminal justice waged between rural and working class rough justice supporters, and middle class due process advocates. Lynchers failed to assimilate conceptions of a rational, detached, antiseptic legal process promoted by urban middle class reformers. Mobs, impatient with the inevitable delays of legal process and disdainful of the alleged leniency of legal solutions, instead enforced racial and class agendas through ritualized, communally-based punishment. Postbellum mobs did not respond to an absence of law, but rather to a style of criminal justice that was careful and deliberative, and in which the rights of the defendant, the reform of the criminal, and humanitarian considerations were factored in, beyond the punitive demands of communal opinion.10
Although lynching in the postbellum Midwest and West occurred less frequently than in the South, it nonetheless was a significant social movement. As such, it possessed a coherent ideology, a repertoire of performative practices, and consistent social bases. Some of these elements were inherited from the American tradition of vigilantism, others were invented or reshaped in the context of the developing Midwest and West. Furthermore, midwestern and western lynchers were aware of southern lynchers (and vice versa: southern papers liked to gloat when reporting mob killings that occurred beyond the South), so imitation across regions may have played a role.
Lynchers' ideology revolved around the protection of communities through the efficient redress of greivous wrong. For example, more than two-thirds of Iowa lynchings involved an accusation of homicide. These crimes, often described hyperbolically as the "most brutal" or "most horrible" in memory, provoked community anger and motivated the formation of mobs. Particular circumstances could give homicide a more pronounced taint. Madison County lynchers and their defenders in June 1883 accused John Hamner of murdering Billy Newell, an elderly man, in a "peculiarly atrocious" way: shooting him from behind with a revolver, cutting his throat, and bashing him with a rock.11 W.L. Horn shot his wife dead outside a church service in Appanoose County as churchgoers listened in December 1903. Churchgoing men formed a posse and pursued him unsuccessfully for the next twenty-four hours with the intention of lynching him. Horn thwarted them by committing suicide.12
Lynchers and their defenders argued that their actions, while outside the purview of law, were actually socially and morally beneficial because they afforded a degree of justice that the criminal justice system could not or would not provide. Accordingly, a mob of at least several hundred in Darlington, Wisconsin in September 1891 hanged Anton Sieboldt, a farm laborer who, after a quarrel, had murdered and then severely mutilated the body of a young farmer.13 A newspaper from a neighboring locale soon argued that the lynching served to enhance the security of the community.While Judge Lynch is a dangerous confidant there are cases where one hesitates to censure severely, especially where the law does not sanction capital punishment [Wisconsin had no death penalty]....Siebolt was a dangerous character, his brother dying a few years ago from injuries inflicted by him, and he once made a desperate assault on his father. He was ugly and quarrelsome, and the lynchers have the sympathy of the community who feel relief that this desperado is placed beyond doing further harm.14
Another southwestern Wisconsin editor cogently expressed the rough justice critique of the criminal justice system.
It is not infrequent that lynch law is evoked not because of a desire to override and defy the law of the land, but because the people desire a better and more rigid enforcement of law. Thus it appears, that while in the abstract lynch law is to condemn without stint, it must be looked upon very often not as the result of the lawlessness of the people of the community, but rather as a result of the lawlessness of the law of that same community.15
Midwestern and western lynchings also had significance as profoundly cultural events. Mobs engaged in practices which amplified the meaning of punishment of particular offenses for an avid audience, local residents. In a sense, then, mob executions were performances enacting what some persons perceived as the values of a community. Through gratuitous, patterned practices, lynchers could broadcast a message and a larger segment of the population could in some measure participate.
By the 1880s, legal executions in Iowa were private affairs, concealed from public view and limited to a select group of witnesses. This reform sanitized the public spectacle that had attended the gallows in antebellum Iowa, when thousands from a surrounding region sometimes observed what was clearly a popular event rich in implications of public justice. In contrast, Iowa lynchings more fully indulged a communal fascination with death, the spectacle of execution, and the consequences of terrible crimes. Large crowds, representative of a cross-section of a local population, watched mob killings in the counties of Bremer and Shelby in 1883, Wapello in 1884, Taylor in 1889, Monroe and Wapello in 1893, and Harrison in 1894.16
Theatrical elements in these acts of collective homicide linked diverse incidents. The site chosen for the execution often was important, emphasizing the values lynchers wished to enforce. Most strikingly, mobs sometimes took their victims to the places where they had allegedly committed crimes. For example, a small mob in Wapello County in December 1884 lynched Pleasant Anderson from a tree facing the house where he had allegedly murdered Christopher McAllister. A large mob of miners in Monroe County in March 1893 hanged William Frazier near the spot where he had killed his wife and injured his daughter. In other instances, a lynching in view of a courthouse may have signified a defiance of legal institutions and the invocation of popular authority, as occurred in the lynching of an Indian called "Olaf," for rape in Taylor County in June 1889.17
Ritualistic trappings were also obvious in the final phases of Iowa lynchings. The method of killing was important. Modes of execution ranged from simple hanging to riddling a body with bullets fired by many individuals. The latter embodied a desire for communal participation and satiated communal vengeance in an act of overkill expressing power and prowess through the exercise of excessive force. Collective shooting also avoided individual responsibility for the murder of a mob victim. More rudimentary killing, such as a hanging, aligned with some Iowa lynchers' stated preference for "orderly" proceedings, a process as smooth as clockwork and ostensibly as systematic and legitimate as the judicial authority of the county district court. Hanging also mimicked the procedure in legal executions.18
What happened after the death of a victim in Iowa was also an integral part of the lynching event. In a common feature, county authorities left a corpse hanging for a number of hours afterward, allowing large crowds, sometimes thousands, to come and view the victim's body. Curiosity was certainly a strong motive, and the opportunity to gawk at a lynched corpse may have been a diversion in areas of southern and western Iowa that were remote and which saw little professional entertainment in the late nineteenth century. Viewing the aftermath of a lynching may also have offered for some a vicarious role in a spectacle of retributive justice. An execution by a small mob could become quite public once a victim had expired. In Harlan in 1883, for example, a courthouse guard summoned townspeople by bell. If the message of a mob killing was not explicit enough, some lynchers tried to clarify their broadcast by affixing signs to a site. A small mob in Harrison County attached a sign to Reddy Wilson's corpse that read "Public Library." Apparently, however, Iowans were less inclined to take souvenirs, pieces of rope or even body parts that might serve as trophies, than were crowds in the South or the West.19
A characteristic element in western lynching was the appearance of sadism in the ritualistic mistreatment of victim's bodies and in the morbid curiosity devoted to artifacts associated with a victim's death. The degradation of a corpse apparently signified the victor's privilege in the satisfaction of western masculine honor, the ultimate humiliation of a personal foe or communally-defined villain. Examples of this kind of behavior abounded in Wyoming. When a private mob of landholders murdered poachers Nathan L. Adams and Charles Putzier in the "Snake River Country" of Carbon County in October 1888, they gouged out their eyes and mutilated their bodies.20 At the legal execution of Charles Miller in Cheyenne in April 1892, a witness made a modest proposal to Sheriff Kelley: he wished to skin Miller's corpse. The sheriff angrily refused.21 In March 1902 Natrona County residents also cut up the rope used to lynch Charles Woodard, who had murdered the sheriff, and spliced tags from his effects to carry home as mementoes.22 In this respect, western lynching bore a significant resemblance to southern lynch mob practice with its occasionally sadistic, participatory tendencies. These actions may have intensified the experience and memory of illegal and legal executions.23
Finally, certain patterns are evident in the social composition of western and midwestern mobs and the social status of their victims. Lynchers were either rural residents or members of the growing urban mercantile or working class. Rural lynchers might be farmers, ranchers, cowboys, sheepworkers, or fishermen, but they generally enjoyed middling or lower-to-middling status in agrarian, range, or maritime society. They were socially distant from the marginal folks--vagrants, hired hands, professional criminals-- who most often ended up the victims of lynching. Similarly, urban lynchers were usually members of the petty mercantile class or the nascent working class. They may have been recent emigrants from the countryside, states out East, or Europe, but their socioeconomic position was less precarious than that of the individuals from the urban underclass--who worked as day laborers, in lowly service professions (for example, as porters), or who made a living in criminal enterprises. Frank Wigfall, an African American lynched in October 1912 by inmates at the state penitentiary in Rawlins, Wyoming, after he was placed there for protection from a lynch mob of townspeople angered by his alleged rape of an elderly white woman, was an itinerant laborer and ex-convict.24 Sam and Charles Vinson, a father and son lynched by "prominent farmers and business men" in Ellensburg, Washington, in August 1895 for murdering two men in a saloon quarrel, had previously been accused of participating in a robber gang that held up a Northern Pacific Train.25 There were exceptions to this pattern of class and status relations. In August 1903, a mob of approximately a thousand in Asotin County in southeastern Washington hanged William Hamilton, a wealthy young rancher who had raped and murdered a girl.26
In sum, lynching in the postbellum Midwest and West was a substantial social movement rooted in competing visions of the nature of criminal justice. Similar in some respects to lynching in the South, it varied in its smaller scale incidence and in its predominantly, although not exclusively, nonracial character. Owing to differential cultural and class formation, collective violence in the Midwest and West radically diverged from the experience of the postbellum Northeast.27 This interregional gap in perspectives on criminal justice was described, with some exaggeration, by a Ft. Collins editor following the September, 1883 hanging of Henry Mosier by a mob of 500 in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Mosier, a freighter, had attacked his wagon companions with an axe and had shot and killed one of them.The crimes of this man [Mosier] were most cruel and wanton, and his death at the hands of an indignant and outraged populace was an extreme though inadequate penalty. Eastern philanthopists may lift their hands in horror at this violation of the written law, but they must remember that there is an unwritten law that in many cases is more just than the written law. In the east, foul and brutal murderers are saved from the gallows by the interposition of the law, trial after trial, and oftentimes acquittal being had upon flimsy technicalities...Cold-blooded murders may be committed in the east and the people let the matter pass with a mere comment. The murderer may be arrested and brought to trial. If his crime is of an extra heinous character he will be petted. His prison life may be brightened by the visits of fair women bringing bouquets and delicacies. He may be convicted and by some quibble secure a stay of proceedings and a new trial. Perhaps he may be acquitted on the emotional insanity plea, or some other thin excuse, and go free to kill again. The people of the west will not stand any such nonsense. They are both of a sympathetic and practical turn of mind.28
1 San Francisco Chronicle, April 12, 14, 1891.
2 This analysis defines a lynching as experts on mob violence did at Tuskegee, Alabama in 1940: "there must be legal evidence that a person has been killed, and that he met his death illegally at the hands of a group acting under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition," with a group defined as "three" or more persons. Generally, late nineteenth century lynchers gathered more or less spontaneously and did not possess the formal organization that vigilante committees in the early and mid nineteenth century did.
3 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Terrence Finnegan, "'At the Hands of Parties Unknown': Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881-1940," Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1993.
4 Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Hubert Howe Bancroft, Popular Tribunals (San Francisco: The History Company, 1887). Brown, Strain of Violence, 113-118, analyzes the roots, components, and uses of the ideology of vigilantism.
5 Iowa mobs killed 22 persons in total from 1878 through 1907, when the state’s last lynching occurred in Charles City. This figure, like all figures given here, includes only lynchings that I have documented in newspaper sources or coroner’s inquests. For detailed lists of confirmed lynchings from these states, see Michael J. Pfeifer, "Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1878-1949 (mss. in revision)," Appendix.
6 Wyoming mobs killed 35 persons in total, including four African American men, from 1878 through 1918, when the state’s last lynching occurred in Green River.
7 Louisiana mobs killed 396 persons in total from 1878 and 1919.
8 The key difference between southern, and midwestern and western, lynching involved the role of collective violence in southern race and labor relations. The southern planter class reserved for itself the police powers associated with disciplining an African American labor force. Thus criminal justice agencies languished in the cotton belt in favor of informal “rough justice” administered by the planter elite. Many lynchings in north Louisiana, for instance, followed altercations over labor authority and autonomy among white employers and black subordinates; a “murderous assault” or homicide in such circumstances often resulted in a collective hanging intended to reinforce racial order among an overwhelmingly black labor force. Lynching declined only after a substantial middle class interested in northern investment and the free flow of capital emerged in north Louisiana towns and cities after 1900. This urban middle class opposed lynching and advocated instead efficient trials and legal executions of black murderers or rapists. Pfeifer, "Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1878-1949 (mss. in revision)," Chapter 5.
9 See Brown, Strain of Violence, 145-179, for a discussion of the dichotomy of crime repression versus due process law in perspectives on the function of criminal justice, and for the advocacy of crime control among a significant segment of the late nineteenth century legal elite.
10 Only the states of New England and the mid Atlantic avoided this prolonged cultural conflict, waged everywhere else in newspaper columns and courtrooms by day, and on tree limbs outside courthouses by night. In the Northeast, concentrated capitalist transformation in the antebellum period created powerful middle classes who reshaped legal institutions and public opinion in such a way by the late nineteenth century that “rough justice” sentiments could be channeled into a reformed, and allegedly sanitized, but nonetheless prolific death penalty. Between 1866 and 1899, 185 legal executions occurred in Pennsylvania, 155 in New York State, 55 in New Jersey, 24 in Massachusetts, and 16 in Connecticut. By comparison, authorities in the same years executed four in Iowa, none in Wisconsin (which did not have a death penalty), six in Wyoming, 20 in Washington Territory and State, and 135 in Louisiana. M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla, Executions in The United States, 1608-1991: The Espy File, bcomputerfilec, 3rd ICPSR ed. (Ann Arbor: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1994).
11 (Des Moines) Iowa State Register, June 5, 1883.
12 Des Moines Register and Leader, December 22, 1903.
13 Darlington (Wis.) Journal, September 23, 30, 1891; Milwaukee Journal, September 21, 1891.
14 Lancaster (Wis.) Herald, quoted in Darlington Journal, September 30, 1891.
15 Lancaster (Wis.) Teller, quoted in Darlington Journal, September 30, 1891.
16 For the public spectacle of an antebellum execution attended by approximately ten thousand persons, see the account of the legal hanging of William Hinkle on August 13, 1858 in Appanoose County, Ia., in Pioneer History Of Davis County, Iowa (Bloomfield, Ia.: The Bloomfield Democrat, 1927), 374-378.
17 (Des Moines) Iowa State Register, January 31, 1884; Des Moines Weekly Leader, March 30, 1893; Paul Walton Black, "Lynching Research Notes," Taylor County Folder, Box 2, Archives, State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City.
18 Lynchings solely by hanging occurred in Bremer and Shelby Counties in 1883, Wapello County in 1884, Adams and Decatur Counties in 1887, Taylor County in 1889, Monroe County in 1893, Harrison County in 1894, and Floyd County in 1907. Riddling with bullets occurred in the counties of Cass, Madison, and Shelby in 1883, Audubon and Hardin in 1885, and Dallas in 1895. See Black, "Lynchings in Iowa," Iowa Journal of History and Politics 10 (1912), 233-249.
19 This occurred after lynchings by small mobs in Madison and Shelby Counties in 1883, Audubon and Hardin Counties in 1885, and Harrison County in 1894. Atlantic (Ia.) Daily Telegraph, June 5, 1883, July 24, 1883; (Des Moines) Iowa State Register, July 25, 1883; Council Bluffs (Ia.) Nonpareil, February 7, 1885; Black, “Lynchings in Iowa," 242-243; Missouri Valley (Ia.) Daily Times, May 1, 1894. The recreational aspect of the lynching event was also obvious in Bremer County in 1883, when vendors sold out of mass-produced photographs of the hanged outlaws, the Barber brothers, who had murdered three people. Dubuque Times, June 8, 1883.
20 (Rawlins) Carbon County (Wy.) Journal, October 20, November 10, 1888.
21 Cheyenne Daily Leader, April 23, 1892.
22 Cheyenne Daily Leader, March 28, 1902.
23 In another example, following the 1881 lynching near Rawlins of "Big Nose" George Parrott, who had murdered two law officers, Dr. John E. Osborne, who was later elected a governor and congressman from Wyoming, placed Parrott's corpse in a salt solution and eventually skinned it to make shoes and a skull cap, which were proudly displayed for many years. Coroner's Inquest on "Big Nose" George Parrott, March 23, 1881, Carbon County, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne; Rawlins (Wy.) Journal, March 26, 1881; (Denver) Rocky Mountain News, September 18, 1955; "Research Memorandum," dated December 14, 1960, "Big Nose George" Folder, Crime and Criminals Folder, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne. On the similarities between western honor and southern honor, see Richard Maxwell Brown, "Western Violence: Structure, Values, Myth," Western Historical Quarterly 24 (February 1993), 14-17. For southern honor, and the anthropological meaning of sadism in the performance of southern lynchings, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 453-61. On masculinity in southern fighting techniques, see Elliot J. Gorn, "'Gouge and Bite: Pull Hair and Scratch': The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry," American Historical Review 90 (February 1985), 18-43.
24 Coroner's Report on Frank Wigfall, Filed October 5, 1912, Carbon County, Wyoming State Archives, Cheyenne; Rawlins (Wy.) Republican, October 3, 10, 1912; Cheyenne State Leader, October 3, 5, 1912.
25 San Francisco Chronicle, August 15, 1895.
26 San Francisco Chronicle, August 5, 1903.
27 Eventually the rural and working class “rough justice” enthusiasts who endorsed mob murder in the Midwest, West, and South compromised, I argue, with the bourgeois advocates of due process law. In the early twentieth century, states in those regions, aping the punitive innovations of northeastern states, revamped the death penalty into a comparatively efficient, technocratic, and highly racialized mechanism of retributive justice, and lynchings ceased. Pfeifer, "Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1878-1949 (mss. in revision)."
28 Fort Collins (Co.) Express, reprinted in Cheyenne Daily Leader, September 22, 1883.