Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South

8. Lynching in Late-Nineteenth-Century Michigan

• 8• Lynching in Late-NineteenthCentury Michigan Michael J. Pfeifer Michigan saw less lynching than the neighboring upper-midwestern states of Wisconsin and Minnesota and the adjoining lower-midwestern states of Ohio and Indiana. Lynchers claimed approximately seven victims in the history of Michigan but took the lives of seventeen in Wisconsin, twenty-two in Minnesota, twenty-eight in Ohio, and sixty-six in Indiana (see Appendix, “Lynchings in the Northeast, Midwest, and West”). The relative infrequency of lynching in Michigan was due to the Wolverine State’s somewhat earlier white settlement in the 1820s and 1830s, slightly before a prolonged culture conflict between “rough justice” and “due process” sentiments flared across extensive parts of the Midwest, West, and South.1 The comparative paucity of collective killing in Michigan also stemmed from its preponderance of Yankee settlers (from New England and Yankee-dominated upstate New York, to the extent that Michigan became known as “the third New England”), and from its smaller proportion of emigrants from the Upland South.2 Yet the Wolverine State did experience occasional acts of collective murder. Sporadic lynchings in Michigan drew meaning from varied contexts that included the highly racialized discourse that accompanied the social and political alterations of the Civil War and Reconstruction; the tenuous social order and reflexive masculine solidarities of the logging frontier, where allegations of rape or murder sometimes could have particular force; and a long-lived, if comparatively subdued, debate over the • 212 • Michael J. Pfeifer legally available punishment for homicide in a state that in March 1847 became the first English-speaking jurisdiction in the world to abolish the death penalty. In May 1846, after several years of legislative wrangling over whether capital punishment should be written out of Michigan’s criminal law and if so, under what terms, the legislature voted to abolish capital punishment for first-degree murder, stipulating instead a penalty of hard labor in solitary confinement. Antebellum opponents of the death penalty succeeded in the Wolverine State where they had failed in northeastern states such as Massachusetts and New York because reformist politicians in Michigan found easier ground within in a relatively small polity where conservative, Calvinistic denominations such as the Congregationalists held less influence to block humanitarian criminal justice reform.3 Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the murderous acts of late-nineteenth-century Michigan mobs typically elicited significant attention and criticism in a state whose nineteenth-century legal culture outstripped that of its midwestern neighbors in emphasizing legal regularity, the nonlethal punishment of serious offenders, and racial egalitarianism. The Civil War and Reconstruction transformed Michigan society and politics, mobilizing support for the Union and the war effort and then a far-reaching Reconstruction policy that would bring meaningful social and political change to the South, as well as greater rights for African Americans in Michigan itself. The state legislature abolished segregation in public education in 1867 and approved the Fifteenth Amendment and black male suffrage in 1869 (which was also narrowly endorsed by Michigan voters). Reversing national trends toward greater racial proscription after Reconstruction, the legislature removed a ban on interracial marriage in 1883 and enacted a Civil Rights Act in 1885 that forbade discrimination in public accommodations. During the postbellum years, the state supreme court repeatedly upheld the state legislature’s efforts to extend the rights of African Americans versus the efforts of local whites who resisted the color-blind laws.4 Yet the extension of racial egalitarianism in Michigan also precipitated reactionary collective violence that sought to reverse the trend toward greater racial equality.5 In one example, the social tensions fueled by the Civil War’s aftermath spiraled into lynching on August 27, 1866, in Mason, a village south of Lansing, when a mob of approximately three hundred white men seized an African American, John Taylor, from jail and hanged him. Taylor had quarreled over wages with the white farmer, John Buck, who employed him, and had left to work for other white farm- • 213 • Lynching in Late-Nineteenth-Century Michigan ers in the neighborhood, but he allegedly returned one night to attack Buck’s wife, mother-in-law, and daughter with an ax. Subsequent press reports suggested that all of the women recovered from their wounds and asserted that the lynchers came from “intensely ‘Democratic’ and anti-negro” districts south of Lansing. A vigorous statewide conversation that ensued interpreted the lynching of Taylor along intense partisan and ideological lines determined...