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2. Vigilantes, Criminal Justice, and Antebellum Cultural Conflict
- University of Illinois Press
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2. Vigilantes, Criminal Justice, and Antebellum Cultural Conflict On January 27, 1838, in his Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, the young lawyer Abraham Lincoln deplored the vigilante execution of gamblers and alleged slave insurrectionists in Mississippi in 1835 and the mob execution of an African American in St. Louis in 1836, asserting that the passions of mob law endangered American self-government.1 Lincoln rejected the arguments of apologists for vigilantism who insisted that the inadequacy of laws and ineffectiveness of legal institutions in thwarting dangerous criminality justified vigilante violence. Although his specific examples of mob violence came from the Mississippi River Valley, Lincoln argued that lawless mobs that substituted their judgments for those of legally constituted courts had become a national problem, “from New England to Louisiana. . . . they spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of southern slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits.”2 Lincoln believed that rampant mob violence unleashed social havoc by eroding the “walls erected for the defence of the persons and property of individuals.”3 In Lincoln ’s view, only “a reverence for the constitution and laws” that eschewed political passions and extremism and safeguarded individual rights could ensure the perpetuation of republican political institutions inherited from the American Revolution.4 As Lincoln understood, antebellum vigilantes and their opponents participated in an emerging discourse over the nature of law, criminal justice, the state, and individual rights. Drawing on an expansive and elastic notion of popular constitutionalism,5 an understanding of the right of the people to make and supervise laws that stemmed from the Anglo-American legal tradition and the American Revolution, vigilantes asserted the prerogative Pfeifer_Roots text.indd 12 2/7/11 10:17:27 AM of communities to usurp legal functions and to deploy violence to protect their neighborhoods from lawlessness. By contrast, those who criticized their actions argued, as had Lincoln, that only the observation of laws and the use of the political process to correct problems in criminal justice could safeguard social order and protect individuals from the dangers of “mob law.”6 As they disputed the boundaries of law and the proper response to criminality, vigilantes and those who criticized them pondered the legacy of the American Revolution and the challenges of republican government in the antebellum United States. Antebellum advocates of vigilantism in the Midwest, South, and West drew on Anglo-American and American revolutionary traditions of community violence that suggested that citizens might reclaim the functions of government when legal institutions could not provide sufficient protections to persons or their property.7 Trans-Appalachian vigilantes’ highly instrumentalist practice pulled into definition lines of social status and community , the now-respectable against the now-unrespectable versus alleged murderers and transgressors of property, such as slave insurrectionists, horse thieves, counterfeiters, and claims-jumpers.8 In their temporary, republican usurpation of the prerogatives of legal authority, vigilantes invoked popular sovereignty to reject a style and philosophy of criminal justice that had crystallized in the Northeast from the late eighteenth through the mid– nineteenth centuries. Legal changes emanating from the Northeast included a newly ascendant respect for the rights of the defendant (enshrined in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, holding that no citizen would be deprived of due process protections), a burgeoning interest in the potential for the reform of the criminal, and a fear of the effects of harsh punishments on the masses that enthusiastically viewed them. The reform of criminal justice in line with humanitarian considerations and a growing emphasis on legal rights and fairness accompanied capitalist transformation and middle class and working class formation in the Northeast from the American Revolution through the first half the of nineteenth century.9 The adversary system, in which lawyers dominated trials and vigorously contested criminal procedure, was also a recent development in the history of criminal justice, taking root in Anglo-American law only in the eighteenth century.10 As with movements to limit capital punishment, the adversary system took fullest root in the Northeast. In the Northeast, middle class persons committed to due process principles and the reform of criminal justice institutions and accepted the necessity of aggressive lawyering in the interest of legal fairness, although cohesive urban working class communities continued to acquit or convict defendants in line with traditional Vigilantes and Antebellum Cultural Conflict 13 Pfeifer_Roots text.indd 13 2/7/11 10:17:27 AM [44.211.117.101] Project MUSE (2024-03-28...