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1. Collective Violence in the British Atlantic The legal and cultural antecedents of American lynching were carried across the Atlantic by migrants from the British Isles to colonial North America. Collective violence was a familiar aspect of the early modern Anglo-American legal landscape. Group violence in the British Atlantic was usually nonlethal in intention and consequence but it occasionally shaded, particularly in the seventeenth century in the context of political turmoil in England and unsettled social and political conditions in the American colonies, into rebellions and riots that took multiple lives. In the years before and after the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Americans transformed older British notions and practices of crowd action and imbued them with new meanings amid the egalitarian and reformist implications of the Revolution and the early American Republic. Though early modern crowd violence sometimes took on antiauthoritarian implications, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century crowd actions were rooted in a hierarchical conception of society as a corporate body linking gentry and plebeians in an English commitment to and participation in a “rule of law” that reputedly distinguished Englishmen from most Europeans. Such an understanding of an encompassing, participatory rule of law linked members of English and colonial American communities in institutions of criminal justice that included attendance at public punishments such as the pillory and the scaffold. Public spectacle executions meted out a “bloody code” intended to convey the consequences of serious crimes and the majesty of legal authority in a monarchical, hierarchical society. Around the British Atlantic, grass roots criminal justice was also manifested in the “hue and cry” communal apprehension of criminals and, increasingly in the eighteenth century, the posse Pfeifer_Roots text.indd 7 2/7/11 10:17:27 AM comitatus, which gave the sheriff the authority to call upon all physically able men to assist in capturing felons. Elites accepted, sometimes grudgingly, that under such a corporatist constitutional arrangement, commoners might occasionally turn to collective action to seek restoration of what they perceived as their customary rights. Crowd actions often took the form of rituals of misrule, performances that inverted social rank or gender in holiday processions or in charivari that temporarily overturned social arrangements in order to reaffirm conventional political or gender arrangements such as gentry domination of the polity or benevolent patriarchal control of the household (in correction of the aberrant behavior of cuckolds, wife-beaters, overly headstrong wives, or newlyweds of disparate ages).1 There is little evidence that informal group murder, that is, what would later become known as lynching, occurred with any frequency in the early modern British Isles or Colonial America, and certainly not sufficient evidence to argue that the practice ever became an aspect of a ubiquitous Anglo-American tradition of crowd violence, which seldom culminated in the deaths of the targets of crowd action. However, summary collective executions did occasionally occur in the early modern British Atlantic, typically in the heat of deep popular passions over situations characterized by perceptions of legal, social, or political injustice. In June 1628, a crowd of London apprentices murdered John Lambe “with stones and cudgels and other weapons.” Lambe, who was probably in his early eighties, worked as a “magical healer and counselor” and had escaped capital convictions for witchcraft and rape through a reprieve and a royal pardon. Significantly, Lambe was also an associate of the Duke of Buckingham, George Villiers, a favorite of Charles I who had become the focus of opposition in Parliament and would soon be assassinated. The crowd murder of Lambe can be read as an act of collective justice that sought to punish a convicted witch and rapist in light of the failure of the legal authorities to do so, but also as a “subversive” act of popular politics in an escalating conflict between Charles I and Parliament over the destiny of the English nation. Furious over the act of political disorder, the king ordered the City of London to punish the rioters and those that had failed to prevent their actions. The city jailed a number of law officers for failing in their duty, but no individuals were arrested for their participation in the crowd. The king responded by suing the city, and the court levied a £1,000 fine.2 A collective murder similarly inspired by legal and political anxieties occurred in Edinburgh in September 1736. Captain John Porteous had ordered militia to fire on a crowd that rioted at the gibbet after the hanging of a smug8 chapter 1...

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