Extralegal Violence and Law in the Early Modern British Isles and the Origins of American Lynching

Eric Monkkonen, “Homicide: Explaining America’s Exceptionalism,” American Historical Review 111, no. 1 (February 2006): 76–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Pieter Spierenburg, “Democracy Came Too Early: A Tentative Explanation for the Problem of American Homicide,” American Historical Review 111, no. 1 (2006): 104–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Pieter Spierenburg, A History of Murder: Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008).Google Scholar

Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994).Google Scholar

Elizabeth Dale, “Criminal Justice in the United States, 1790–1920: A Government of Laws or Men?,” in The Cambridge History of Law in America, Vol. 2: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1789–1920, ed. Christopher Tomlins and Michael Grossberg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 133–167.Google Scholar

For an argument that the United States developed elevated rates of homicide (the highest among Western nations) as a product of the disruption of social hierarchies, political instability, and a lack of confidence in government from the mid to the late nineteenth century, see Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 16–26, 297–385. For extensive documentation of governmental surveillance of “popular disturbances” in England in the early nineteenth century that reflects, in significant contrast to the United States, Britain’s development by that time of a national, centralized state that claimed a full monopoly on violence, see British Home Office Records on Disturbances, HO 41, National Archives, London.Google Scholar

Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1983), 1–19, 47–48.Google Scholar

Carolyn A. Conley, Melancholy Accidents: The Meaning of Violence in Post-Famine Ireland (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 1–6.Google Scholar

Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protests and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1988).Google Scholar

John Brewer and John Styles, An Ungovernable People: The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 14–20.Google Scholar

Martin Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘Reform of Popular Culture’ in Early Modern England,” Past & Present no. 105 (1984): 79–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 17–24.Google Scholar

Norma Landau, Law, Crime, and English Society, 1660–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4.Google Scholar

Douglas Greenberg, “Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America,” American Journal of Legal History 26, no. 4 (1982): 293–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” William and Mary Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1970): 4–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 7–33.Google Scholar

William Pencak, Matthew Dennis, and Simon P. Newman, eds., Riot and Revelry in Early America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). For a discussion of Anglo-European antecedents and the role of women and children in American collective violence from the colonial era through the early twentieth century, see Helen McLure, “‘I Suppose You Think Strange of The Murder of Women and Children’: The American Culture of Collective Violence, 1652–1930,” Ph.D. diss. (Southern Methodist University, 2009). The discretionary and symbolic qualities of the administration of criminal justice on one periphery of the Anglo-American world can be discerned through reading the comprehensive files of mid eighteenth century criminal cases adjudicated by the Scottish high court. Justiciary Court Records, JC 26/141, National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh.Google Scholar

Alastair Bellany, “The Murder of John Lambe: Crowd Violence, Court Scandal and Popular Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present no. 200 (2008): 37–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

The events surrounding the crowd execution of Porteous are documented in Sir Walter Scott, The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818, reprint.Google Scholar

T. A. Critchley, The Conquest of Violence: Order and Liberty in England (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 76.Google Scholar

James Axtell, “The Vengeful Women of Marblehead: Robert Roules’s Deposition of 1677,” William and Mary Quarterly 31, no. 4 (1974): 647–652; Gilje, Rioting in America, 19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

For a discussion of language describing localistic, small-scale practices of summary justice in medieval and early modern England and Scotland, “Lydford law,” “Halifax law,” “Cowper justice,” and “Jeddart justice,” see James Elbert Cutler, Lynch Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (1905, reprint; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 7–9. Cutler argues that the usage of these particular terms was not widely dispersed in the British Isles, that they denoted practices that did not completely eschew formal legal proceedings (as later American lynchings would), and that the American term “lynching” originally described flogging, not capital punishment, and thus the word “lynching” could not have evolved from these British terms that referred to summary execution.Google Scholar

Gilje, Rioting in America, 38–48; Cutler, Lynch-Law, 20–76; Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority,” 28; Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music.” Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 13–25, is the definitive treatment of the origins of the terms “lynch-law” and “lynching.” For regulation in the Carolinas.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Gregory H. Nobles, “Breaking into the Backcountry: New Approaches to the Early American Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 4 (1989): 659–662.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Rachel N. Klein, “Ordering the Backcountry: The South Carolina Regulation,” William and Mary Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1981): 661–680.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

For the evolution of American politics and society from the Revolution through the early Republic, see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).Google Scholar

Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).Google Scholar

Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

For the transformation of capital punishment from colonial America through the early Republic, see Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 53–111. For the ambiguous and contested constitutional legacy of the Revolution with regard to popular vio-lence, see Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority,” 33–35; Gilje, Rioting in America, 38.Google Scholar

For a summary of interpretations of regulator violence in the Carolinas in the eighteenth century, see Nobles, “Breaking into the Backcountry,” 658–667; Gilje, Rioting in America, 38. For North British folkways and their transposition to the American backcountry, see David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 605–782, esp. 765–771.Google Scholar

For important critiques, arguing that Hackett Fischer elides the complexity of cultural transformation over time in the pre-emigration British Isles and in North America, consult Jack P. Greene, “Transplanting Moments: Inheritance in the Formation of Early American Culture,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1991): 224–230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Ned C. Landsman, “Border Cultures, the Backcountry, and North British Emigration to America,” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1991): 253–259. For an early treatment of eighteenth and early nineteenth century regulation movements and their relationship to the origins of the collective violence that would come to be known as “lynching,” see Cutler, Lynch-Law, 38–105, esp. 88–89. Reviewing eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century collective violence, Cutler found that its emphasis tended to be nonlethal and only rarely included capital punishment.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

“John Chappell’s Diary,” Cedar County (Ia.) Historical Review (1984): 97–98. For an extended discussion of the 1859 Eastern Iowa vigilante movement, see Michael J. Pfeifer, “Law, Society, and Violence in the Antebellum Midwest: The 1857 Eastern Iowa Vigilante Movement,” Annals of Iowa 64, no. 2 (2005): 139–166.Google Scholar

David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: The Making of the American Working Class, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 1997).Google Scholar

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish became White (New York: Routledge, 1995) emphasize Irish American racial formation in the antebellum United States in the context of labor markets in which Irish Americans com-peted with free blacks. For Roediger’s response to his critics, who have asserted that his interpretation reified whiteness, over-simplified working-class identity, and over-emphasized race to the detriment of class or ethnicity, see Wages of Whiteness, 185–189.Google Scholar

I am indebted to Carolyn Conley for helping me to think about this point; email exchange with the author, February 8, 2009. Conley, Melancholy Accidents, 1–6. For treatments of the mid-nineteenth century emigration from Ireland and Irish community formation in North America, see Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

Lawrence J. McCaffrey, The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America (1976; Reprint, Washington: Catholic University Press of America, 1997).Google Scholar

McCaffrey, Textures of Irish America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

Kevin Kenny, The American Irish (New York: Longman, 2000).Google Scholar

Kevin Kenny, ed., New Directions in Irish-American History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).Google Scholar

David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Miller’s influential interpretation stresses the difficulty of Irish Catholic adjustment to American circumstances, a view disputed by McCaffrey and Gleeson, among others.Google Scholar

Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1983), 2–3, 47–48.Google Scholar

Richard N. Current, The History of Wisconsin, Volume II: The Civil War Era, 1848–1873 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976), 390.Google Scholar

John G. Gregory, History of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Vol. II (Chicago: Clarke Publishing Co., 1931), 784–785.Google Scholar

For more detailed discussion of the Milwaukee and Newburgh cases, see Michael J. Pfeifer, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 71–78.Google Scholar