Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs: Narratives of Community and Nation

1. From Street Brawls to Heroism: The Official Vigilante Histories

1 From Street Brawls to Heroism The Official Vigilante Histories The object of the writer in presenting this narrative to the public is twofold. His intention is, in the first place, to furnish a correct history of an organization administering justice without the sanction of constitutional law; and secondly, to prove not only the necessity for their action, but the equality of their proceedings. —Thomas Dimsdale, The Vigilantes of Montana When all is said and done, battles simply stamp the mark of history on nameless slaughters, while narrative makes the stuff of history from street brawls. —Michel Foucault, “Tales of Murder” E arly in his 1865 account of an 1864 vigilante movement in Montana, Thomas Dimsdale asserts, “It is probable that there never was a mining town of the same size that contained more desperadoes and lawless characters than did Bannack during the winter of 1862–63.”1 His assertion about the lawless conditions in this little mining settlement is followed by a corollary claim that the formation and actions of a vigilance committee were inevitable: Reviewing the long and bloody lists of crimes against persons and property, which last included several wholesale attempts at plunder of the stores in Virginia and Bannack, it was felt that the question was narrowed down to “kill or be killed.” “Self-preservation is the first law of nature,” and the mountaineers took the right side. We have to thank them for the peace and order which exist today in what are, by the concurrent testimony of all travelers, the best-regulated new mining camps in the West.2 20 Chapter 1 Dimsdale elected to thank the vigilante miners by writing a “correct history” of the committee’s proceedings; that is, by making their actions into, to borrow Michel Foucault’s words from the epigraph, “the stuff of history.”3 Dimsdale’s assertion of unique criminal conditions aside, there is nothing singular about the crimes he describes, the vigilante response to this (perceived ) lawlessness, or Dimsdale’s account. From 1830 to 1890, vigilante committees in every region of the United States and its territories engaged in extra-juridical community regulation in response to real or perceived criminal conditions.4 Dimsdale’s account of the Montana committee is only one of a number of such narratives about these vigilante uprisings. On the basis of the prevalence of these narratives in archives along with their formal similarities, I have come to understand these narratives as belonging to a genre: the “official vigilante history.” On the surface, and by self-description, these narratives are historical—designed to record events as they transpired—but they are also characterized by a conspicuous self-consciousness in each writers’ stated and manifest intent to ensure that the vigilantes were regarded properly in a fardistant , imagined future.5 The narratives all tell the same story in the same, highly stylized form: An ideal vigilance committee convened and acted in an organized and evenhanded manner in response to uncontrolled criminal conditions and was roundly supported and applauded by its community for doing so. This formula can be distilled into five basic elements: extraordinary criminal conditions, a failure of the state, a valorous vigilante response, orderliness, and public popularity. This chapter and the next look at each of these five features to understand both their individual function and the way that they worked together to produce the vigilante narrative of justification. The Voice of the People: Vigilantes, Regulators, and Popular Democracy The vigilante histories are all characterized by a central tension between the local and the universal—a tension that is definitional of the paradoxical logic of vigilante narratives of justification. On the one hand, vigilantism could only be legitimated—either in practice or in written narratives—through reference to specific and extraordinary conditions. At the same time, the narratives were formally universal and drew on abstract, nearly mythical ideals of criminality and heroism, particularly as these mythical characteristics were made manifest in the context of an expanding nation and national identity. In this respect, vigilantism resonated with other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of popular organizing that were simultaneously extra-governmental and rhetorically nationalistic. From Street Brawls to Heroism 21 Yet while other forms of popular organizing undoubtedly served to make vigilantism coherent, or even compelling, to its practitioners, there were also important differences between vigilantism and its closest analogues. For example , while vigilante organizations from Florida to California called them...