What Virtue There Is in Fire; Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose (review)

On April 23, 1899, Sam Hose, a black Georgia man, was lynched in the sleepy little Georgia town of Newnan. Ostensibly, Hose was lynched because he had murdered a local white man, Alfred Cranford, raped Cranford’s wife in front of her dying husband, and assaulted one of his children. While Hose admitted that he had killed Cranford, he claimed that he had a good reason, and he denied that he had assaulted anyone. At the time when Hose was lynched, the question of his innocence or guilt was debated endlessly. What was not in dispute, however, was the brutality that Hose suffered on that Sunday afternoon in 1899 when he was burned alive, and pieces of his body were eagerly snatched as souvenirs by members of the crowd who attended the bloody spectacle.

The history of the South during the last quarter of the nineteenth century—christened the nadir by Logan, the legendary African-American historian, in his seminal work, The Betrayal of the Negro—is replete with numerous accounts of African American lynchings.¹ However, Arnold makes the case that the lynching of Hose was particularly noteworthy not only because of the brutality involved but also because of the powerful impact that it had on the consciousness of Hose’s contemporaries. At the outset of his study, Arnold makes it clear that his purpose in writing about this brutal episode is not to determine Hose’s guilt or innocence of the crimes for which he was lynched but rather “to give a close reading of the accounts that created the narratives of Sam Hose, his crimes, and his public death” (6). Along with the author’s examination of the various narratives surrounding Hose, he also attempts “to examine how different groups did and have continued to appropriate Sam Hose for their own purposes” (8).

Arnold succeeds admirably. He begins by placing Hose’s story in the broader context of local racial unrest that had already resulted in the lynching of African Americans in a neighboring town. In the midst of this unrest, white paranoia about the possibility of a race war reached alarming levels, setting the stage for the torture and murder of Hose as well as for the birth of the various narratives about him through which white southerners sought to demonstrate their continuing control of the large black minority. In an attempt to identify the conflicting perspectives, the author uses a variety of sources, including newspapers, oral interviews, and studies of cultural memory, which Arnold deftly weaves into a fascinating account. The richness and complexity of the Hose story is told through the opinions and pronouncements of a variety of contemporaries, from Rebecca Latimer Felton, a white women’s-rights activist who viewed lynching as perfectly justifiable to protect white women’s virtue, to Robert Charles, a black laborer in New Orleans, who advised “every negro to buy a rifle and keep it ready” (172).

As his study ends, Arnold evaluates the impact that the Hose story continues to have on American society in the new millennium as it struggles to adjust to a reality that none of Hose’s contemporaries could have ever envisioned—a black president of the United States. Indeed, the continued power of the narratives surrounding Hose serves as a reminder that much work remains to be done before the United States can claim to be a postracial society.