The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching

5. The Civil War and Reconstruction and the Remaking of American Lynching

5. The Civil War and Reconstruction and the Remaking of American Lynching The remaking of the nation during and after the Civil War was a national process, not merely a southern one. Northerners and westerners, along with southerners, responded to and remade social, political, economic, and legal arrangements in the wake of emancipation, the extension of rights to African Americans, and the expansion of federal and state authority in the 1860s and ’70s. The transformation of the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction was a complex, fitful process, with interconnected local, regional, and national dimensions.1 Violence, including the collective violence of lynching and vigilantism, was an important aspect of this process, a visceral means of seeking to resist and to redirect the dynamics of social, political, and legal change. Historians have long interpreted Congressional Reconstruction as an era in which white southerners unleashed collective racial violence in resistance of an expansion of governmental authority that sought to promote racial equality.2 Yet collective violence that responded to the war’s social and legal alterations had emerged soon after Ft. Sumter, and it transcended regional boundaries in the Civil War and Reconstruction, occurring in both the South and in the North. American lynching had arisen in the decades before the Civil War in the regions beyond the Alleghenies as localized conflict pitting the state’s efforts to extend the protections of due process law versus the claims of neighborhoods committed to defending notions of race, ethnicity, class, kin, honor, and crime control. The Civil War’s myriad transformations of legal and political structures and social relationships, not least of them emancipation, led some northerners (most notably Irish Catholic immigrants) and white southerners to further recast lynching into a central weapon of reaction against an emergent state, chamPfeifer_Roots text.indd 67 2/7/11 10:17:31 AM pioned by Republicans, that sought to extend the promise of racial equality. With the retreat from Reconstruction, the lesson seemed clear, particularly for the white southerners who had employed massive lethal violence to reclaim political power in “Redemption” and who had turned lynching into a familiar means of policing the everyday racial conflicts of postemancipation life. The lesson of Reconstruction, especially for the postbellum white South, was that lynching violence was a more reliable instrument for the perpetuation of racial control than a fragile and unreliable state that made abstract promises of legal fairness. The Upper Midwest and the Northeast Historians have charted the rise of racial ideologies among working class whites, particularly Irish Catholics, in tandem with class and political formation in the antebellum North, and their participation in large-scale racial violence in the 1863 New York City Draft Riots. But the Draft Riots, which included numerous mob beatings and hangings of African Americans, constituted merely the highest tide of reactionary racial violence in the North during the Civil War and Reconstruction.3 Analysis of wartime racial lynchings4 in Milwaukee and Newburgh, New York, offers an additional vantage point for apprehending the dynamics of racial violence in the urban North in the Civil War era. In Milwaukee and Newburgh, Irish Catholic ethnic solidarity was as pivotal as a developing concept of “whiteness.”5 Competing with African Americans for social status and jobs at the lowest rungs of northern society and influenced by the racial slogans and ideology with which the Democratic Party sought to link southern planters and northern workers in defense of white supremacy, Irish Catholic communities in the North enacted homicidal collective violence that sought to avenge Irish kinfolk victimized by alleged African American criminality. In the process, Irish American lynchers sought to vindicate Irish immigrant communities that viewed themselves as diminished by nativism and racial egalitarianism that sought to elevate blacks. Reflecting the profoundly hybrid, transnational characteristics of the northern United States in the mid–nineteenth century, Irish American lynchers reinterpreted Old World practices of communal violence in an unfamiliar and seemingly hostile American legal and social context by resorting to collective murder as retaliation for crimes against fellow Irish. As they did so, Irish Americans transposed traditions of community violence that had been manifested in Ireland in highly localistic legal cultures that distrusted and sometimes nullified British laws.6 Perhaps influenced by knowledge of white southerners’ 68 chapter 5 Pfeifer_Roots text.indd 68 2/7/11 10:17:32 AM collective burning and hanging of slaves and free blacks in the antebellum era...