Copyright, Michael J. Pfeifer, 2002

Lynching, Law, and Region in the Postbellum United States
 

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
Summary of a paper to be presented at the Conference on Lynching and Racial Violence in America, Emory University,
Atlanta, Georgia, October 4-6, 2002
 

    Drawing on sources such as newspapers, the coroner’s inquest, criminal court records, and state government correspondence, the paper examines the relation between collective killings and cultural perspectives on the criminal law across regions of the postbellum United States.  South and west of the Alleghenies, lynchers failed to assimilate conceptions of due process law promoted by urban middle class reformers in the late nineteenth century.  Mobs instead enforced racial and class agendas through ritualized, communally-based punishment.  Lynching in the Midwest and West was socially significant, but it differed from the southern variety in its smaller scale incidence and in its predominantly, although not exclusively, nonracial character.  The Northeast, by contrast, where capitalist transformation, middle class formation, and support for due process law was most advanced, escaped a significant encounter with lynching.
    Midwestern, western, and southern lynchers all shared a commitment to “rough justice,” the harsh and often communal punishment of what was understood as serious criminal behavior.  Rural residents and members of the urban petty mercantile and working classes 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 that explicitly critiqued the adjudication of serious criminal cases.
    "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 humanitarian impulse and inclination towards social engineering, sought the amelioration of the death penalty through abolition or at least the physical segregation of executions behind four walls and limited witnesses.  Due process advocates attacked lynchings as atavistic, prone to miscarriages of justice, and destructive to the cause of law and (social) order.