The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

8. Southern Politicians, British Reformers, and Ida B. Wells's 1893-1894 Transatlantic Antilynching Campaign

145 8 Southern Politicians, British Reformers, and Ida B. Wells’s 1893–1894 Transatlantic Antilynching Campaign Sarah L. Silkey As the United States and Great Britain grew closer together at the end of the nineteenth century, British social leaders placed pressure on their American counterparts to uphold common social, economic, and political standards. While minor deviations might be forgiven, American leaders needed to demonstrate the general respectability of American society in order to be treated as trusted business partners. The issue of American lynching, therefore, became increasingly problematic during the 1890s as the obvious disparity between British images of American lynching as “frontier justice” and the harsh reality of southern attacks on African Americans increased. Ida B. Wells’s 1893–94 transatlantic antilynching campaign highlighted this incongruity and encouraged British reformers to place pressure on American leaders, particularly southern state governors, to denounce lynching .1 As the global economic crisis that became known as the Depression of 1893 developed, southern leaders struggled to balance domestic and international interests within an increasingly transnational society. When Wells’s campaign elicited expressions of British moral outrage, the complex social, political, and economic landscape of the 1890s placed southern leaders in a difficult position—needing to uphold white supremacy, while simultaneously suppressing the mob violence it inspired in order to court outside investment.2 Once maintaining this precarious balance became untenable under British scrutiny, southern leaders were forced to choose whether to embrace the rhetoric of white supremacy to please their white constituents, 146 Sarah L. Silkey seek to impose law and order to reassure prospective international investors, or generate a viable strategy to abrogate Wells’s campaign. Despite fears of the potential social chaos it might foster, the practice of mob violence had been tolerated by Europeans—particularly Britons—as a peculiarity of American society throughout most of the nineteenth century. The British public had long embraced claims made by American lynching apologists that extralegal violence was necessary to maintain order in frontier communities. American newspaper reporters and social commentators wrapped mob violence in the language of American exceptionalism, claiming that Europeans, with their long histories and established traditions , simply could not understand the new social customs necessitated by life on the American frontier. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans (and their British sympathizers) argued that lynching supported the establishment of law and order in a young society by ensuring that swift and certain justice was delivered to those who would disrupt the common peace. The romantic appeal of this frontier justice narrative made it difficult to oppose, and the image persisted throughout the nineteenth century.3 Reinforcing these images, popular British publications relayed encounters with lynch mobs as colorful adventure stories about rural American folkways in the years after the Civil War. For example, in an 1887 edition of MacMillan’s Magazine, a British traveler, A. H. Paterson, recounted his participation in a calm, confident lynch party, comprised of the area’s most respected citizens, formed to protect their small western community from the threat of murderous anarchy. It is important to understand that lynching was not considered a secret or criminal act and, as such, did not require anonymity to be discussed in public. To British authors, lynching as “frontier justice” offered no moral ambiguity. Paterson was proud of the role he played in the lynching and defended lynching as a necessary evil that maintained order in a fragile frontier society.4 Such thrilling tales of heroic lynch mobs became so thoroughly engrained in popular depictions of frontier life that Buffalo Bill Cody even incorporated depictions of lynching in his traveling Wild West show during his “Farewell Visit to Europe” in 1892. British audiences were “entranced by these vivid representations of lynch law” targeting horse thieves and other desperados “in the Far West.”5 While frontier justice might be celebrated in transatlantic popular culture , the reports of American lynching that reached Europe by the early 1890s no longer fit this description. Lynchings in settled areas were becoming ever more frequent, and fears that lynching might undermine the judi- Southern Politicians, British Reformers, and Ida B. Wells 147 cial system began to trouble British observers.6 Such fears appeared justified after the March 14, 1891, lynching of Italian nationals in a New Orleans prison. Thousands of local citizens, displeased with the verdict of a murder trial, “broke” into the city jail and killed eleven Italian immigrants. Sparking...