“A Madman’s Deed—A Maniac’s Hand”: Gender and Justice in Three Maryland Lynchings

Because the majority of lynchings in the United States claimed African American victims, historians have generally constructed lynching as a phenomenon primarily based on divisions of race and caste. White-on-white mob violence, however, claimed approximately twenty-five percent of all lynching victims. This article examines Maryland’s three white lynchings, which occurred in the period 1886–1896, and argues that incidents of extra-legal violence constituted a ritualized response to transgressions against community codes, and suggests further that such acts occurred within carefully prescribed, if tacit, norms. Two of the state’s white lynchings reflected outrage at the murders of white women, and local news accounts framed their condemnation of the murders, and justification for the lynchings, in language consistent with Southern “honor killing.” Gender, not race alone, provoked lynch mobs, who demanded retribution for violations of the traditional code which demanded that white men protect white women. Mob violence claimed not only African Americans, not only itinerant workers, deviants, or newcomers, but respected members of the white community. Even outside the old Confederacy, vigilantism, supported by local press and protected by community silence, created a parallel system through which Americans sought a form of justice they did not trust their courts to provide.