“We Have Them Whipped Here”: Lynching and the Rule of Law in Lima, Ohio

In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the small industrial city of Lima, Ohio, was deeply shaken by two different incidents of racial violence. The stories of both incidents—one in 1888 and a second in 1916—are intertwined. Together they illustrate, this essay will argue, a good deal about such fundamental matters in Ohio history as Gilded Age–and Progressive Era–race relations, a cultural clash between older and newer models of justice, and the final, emerging triumph of the rule of law.

Patterns of extralegal violence were not uncommon in nineteenth-century Ohio, and their emergence in Lima was not especially unique. As scholars of lynching like Michael Pfeifer make clear, extralegal violence had a history in the Midwest that predated the Civil War and accelerated after it. One scholar counted 28 lynchings in Ohio between 1856 and 1932, 45 in Illinois, and a staggering 66 in Indiana during roughly the same period.¹ Such violent expressions were the surface manifestations of American racism, grinding away like cultural tectonic plates deep beneath the nation’s political/cultural surface. The same forces produced the legal structures of Jim Crow segregation—de jure in the South, de facto across much of the North and West—and the subsequent relegation of African Americans to a secondary and subordinate place in American life. Indeed, it is possible to read Lima’s first episode of overt racial violence, the Election Day riot of 1888, as a local reflection of these wider cultural and legal patterns.

However, it is Lima’s response to a second and more massive outbreak of racial violence—two attempted lynchings in late August 1916—that sent its history down a different channel. Certainly, the initial story proceeded along the usual channels, with a perceived sexual assault, a hate-filled mob screaming for the blood of the offender, and some authorities too cowed or overpowered to intervene. Yet at that point Lima’s story deviated from the grim and nightmarish conclusions that such narratives usually arrived at elsewhere. No bodies ended up swinging from trees or lampposts. Courts and prosecutors swung into motion and packed the ringleaders of the mob off to prison. Moreover, the events of that night became a critical turning point; these were the last such attempted lynchings in state history.² In this manner, the story of that August night in Lima, and subsequent developments that cemented the rule of law in the state, suggests the city might yet stand as a more hopeful beacon on the bleak landscape of American racism.

Over the past two or more decades, the historical scholarship of lynching has undergone a metamorphosis that casts new light on the significance of events in Lima. As late as 1990, several historians have recently argued, the field of lynching scholarship languished in “oblivion” before a new set of scholars emerged. They reinvigorated the field by pushing their explorations in new directions, both conceptually in the reconstructed South and then beyond it. A host of new analyses have appeared: of lynchings of Mexican Americans in the West and Southwest; of Latino, Asian, and working-class whites by western vigilante mobs; and of white and African American victims across the Midwest.³ A key conceptual breakthrough in recent years has been the increased attention paid to the victims of lynchings, and a more careful scholarly sifting of the various subcultures out of which both mob violence, and resistance to it, emerged.⁴

One of the foremost recent interpreters of American lynching has argued persuasively that its slow and final decline across the country in the later nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries represented the final triumph of the rule of law. The process was slow, uneven, and its final victory was by no means assured. The rule of law, Michael Pfiefer argues, only triumphed after a long struggle between two contending groups of political/cultural combatants. Its “due process” advocates were “lawyers, entrepreneurs, clergy, and some editors,” propelled by new humanitarian commitments and an “inclination toward social engineering.” Some of them moved...