Faces Like Devils: The Bald Knobber Vigilantes in the Ozarks by Matthew J. Hernando (review)

The Bald Knobbers were practitioners of personal and political killings and assaults who terrorized southwestern Missouri in the 1880s. Numbering in the hundreds, these vigilantes punished wrongdoing as they saw it and inspired an opposition group (with the appropriate sobriquet, the “Anti–Bald Knobbers”) before being suppressed at the end of the decade. Matthew J. Hernando has produced what is probably their first critical history and also a commensurate contribution to the history of extralegal violence in an area of the country that might be termed a liminal portal between the New South and the Wild West.

In Faces Like Devils: The Bald Knobber Vigilantes in the Ozarks, Hernando identifies two related but distinct groups that the name “Bald Knobber” was applied to. Those operating in Taney County, Missouri, were mostly former Unionists and middle-class leaders in the Ozark Republican Party who “formed a vigilance committee in response to the perceived deficiencies of local law enforcement,” which were supposedly preventing the region from growing economically (p. 15). However, while the Bald Knobbers in Christian County and Douglas County on the Arkansas border were also dedicated to making locals conform to a traditional social order, they were usually poor farmers who “reacted to the inequities” produced by economic changes and corporate incursions (p. 16). In either case, they were misunderstood by “[b]ig city journalists” who “shade[d] the truth when dealing with southern hill folk as their subjects” (p. 177). Stakes were high, but not high enough to be appreciated as far away as Chicago.

Hernando relies on the work of Richard Maxwell Brown consistently enough for one to call Faces Like Devils theoretically derivative. Brown’s dictum that vigilantes were conservative jibes with Hernando’s findings. However, the book has other problems besides its reliance on Brown’s work. For example, the connection between the Bald Knobbers’ origins and the Civil War is never made completely plain. Drawing more attention to the tumultuous 1870s and to Reconstruction would have created a clearer picture of those connections. The Bald Knobbers were apparently whites attacking other whites, although it is never stated explicitly. Even if this was strictly intraracial “white on white” violence, it took place within a time and place where the essential motif of violence was interracial, and race should be addressed clearly.

For that matter, Hernando’s explanation of the nature of violence in the 1860s could be better. Wartime guerrilla fighting was quite horrible on Missouri’s southern border, and Hernando describes it in ghastly detail, although his moral revulsion reveals his misunderstanding of the guerrilla’s essential martial role; while the killing of male children and elderly civilians is morally indefensible, any student of military science could tell these murders did not “lack any military justification at all” (p. 39). Indeed, the harming of innocents is extremely effective in cowing insurgencies and demoralizing enemies. Hernando harbors an ingenuous belief in a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence that shapes his interpretation of the Bald Knobbers.

The book is repetitive but neglects to fulfill the conclusions that the said repetition suggests. For instance, Hernando mentions whitecapping multiple times, including in the introduction, as a tendency contemporary and analogous to the actions of the Bald Knobbers. He acknowledges that whitecapping took many different forms and purposes, but he never tumbles to the very likely possibility that the Bald Knobbers were part of that phenomenon itself. For this reason, Hernando has missed an opportunity by producing a local history of interest to a very limited audience. The 1880s were a remarkably violent decade all over the United States and its territories, and the actions of the Bald Knobbers should be viewed as one facet of a national phenomenon rather than a local curiosity.