Lynching Reconsidered

New Perspectives in the Study of Mob Violence

William D. Carrigan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138878211
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317983958
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The history of lynching and mob violence has become a subject of considerable scholarly and public interest in recent years. Popular works by James Allen, Philip Dray, and Leon Litwack have stimulated new interest in the subject. A generation of new scholars, sparked by these works and earlier monographs, are in the process of both enriching and challenging the traditional narrative of lynching in the United States.

This volume contains essays by ten scholars at the forefront of the movement to broaden and deepen our understanding of mob violence in the United States. These essays range from the Reconstruction to World War Two, analyze lynching in multiple regions of the United States, and employ a wide range of methodological approaches.

The authors explore neglected topics such as: lynching in the Mid-Atlantic, lynching in Wisconsin, lynching photography, mob violence against southern white women, black lynch mobs, grassroots resistance to racial violence by African Americans, nineteenth century white southerners who opposed lynching, and the creation of 'lynching narratives' by southern white newspapers.

This book was first published as a special issue of American Nineteenth Century History

Wisconsin’s Last Decade of Lynching, 1881–91: Law and Violence in the Postbellum Midwest

Michael J. Pfeifer

On 21 September 1891, scores of people poured into Darlington, Wisconsin from the surrounding countryside. Shortly before noon, the crowd of hundreds met a train bearing a 26-year-old prisoner, Anton Sieboldt, from Monroe, where he had been taken for safekeeping. Sieboldt, born to Prussian immigrant parents, was a hired hand who labored on a nearby farm. He had murdered a young farmer of Irish descent, James Meighan, as the two traveled together by wagon into Darlington for lumber. The previous Wednesday afternoon, the two had quarreled under the influence of whiskey. After severely wounding Meighan, Seiboldt reportedly obtained a wagon wrench from a woman at a nearby house and used it to kill Meighan with a blow to the skull. Authorities soon apprehended Sieboldt and lodged him in the county jail at Darlington, as talk of lynching began. The next night a large crowd assembled at the town’s stockyards, apparently planning to seize Sieboldt. Authorities outwitted potential mobbers by secreting Sieboldt in the county poorhouse, and then taking him the next morning to Dumbarton from where he was removed by morning train to Monroe.¹

As the train pulled into Darlington on Monday, several of the murdered Meighan’s acquaintances assured Sheriff John Lindsay that they would not make any trouble, and the sheriff went off to dinner. The sheriff later argued that he had offered some defense of the jail and prisoner, once he knew what was under way. In any case, a mob of 50, perhaps half of them Irish farmers from the vicinity of Meighan’s home in Willow Springs, six miles from Darlington, reportedly including Jim Lange, the town chairman and member of the Lafayette County Board, easily broke into the jail and used a sledge to break through the locks on Sieboldt’s cell. The mob placed a rope around Siebolt’s neck as he fought them; someone hit Sieboldt over the head with a sledge hammer; and the lynchers dragged their victim across the street to a small ash tree in a square at the intersection of Main and Catherine Streets. There, approximately a thousand men, women, and children (dismissed from school at noon) watched as Sieboldt died. Many more carefully examined the ‘gallows tree’ in the days that followed. The lynching site adjoined the Baptist, Methodist, and Congregational churches, with the high school across the street, and a monument to Lafayette County’s perished soldiers and sailors a short distance away.²

The last lynching in Wisconsin, in the southwestern county seat of 2000 persons ‘nestled in a bend of the Pecatonica river,’ was not an anomaly.³ Four lynchings had occurred in the state in the previous decade, another 12 in the 30 years after statehood in 1848.⁴ Wisconsinites remembered these previous mob killings as they praised and condemned the Darlington lynching. As had happened with each of the lynchings that had occurred in the 1880s, Wisconsinites re-examined the status of crime and punishment and social order, and their conversation revolved around the implications of the state’s abolition of the death penalty in 1853. The impetus for abolition of capital punishment in the northeastern United States had stemmed from concern over the effects of public executions on the masses that avidly viewed them. The movement eventually reached the growing Midwest, where anti-death penalty forces achieved their legislative aims in Michigan (1846) and Wisconsin. Several thousand had watched the public hanging of John McCaffary in Kenosha in 1851, leading a Madison editor to bemoan ‘Murder before the people, with the horrors removed by the respectability of those engaged in its execution.’ Assemblyman Christopher Latham Sholes, who published the Kenosha Telegraph, led the legislative campaign for abolition with Waukesha County farmer-legislator Marvin Bovee.⁵

However, some postbellum Wisconsinites argued that a criminal justice system that offered life imprisonment as its greatest penalty could not sufficiently deter murderers or protect communities. Lynching in Wisconsin, like the mob violence that plagued the southern, western, and lower midwestern portions of the United States in the mid to late nineteenth century, punctuated an extensive popular conversation over the goals of a changing criminal justice system.⁶ Lynchers and their defenders argued for a harsh, communal vision of the punishment of homicide, especially of those homicides aggravated by the maliciousness of the manner of killing, or the gender, generational, or social status of the murder victim. Wisconsinites who advocated ‘rough justice’ were often, but not exclusively, rural and working class residents. They expressed a profound suspicion of the deliberative and unpredictable nature of due process law, particularly of the insanity plea, which some well-publicized Gilded Age murders and trials had made suspect. Wisconsinites who deplored lynching were often middle class in outlook and lived in towns and cities. By contrast, they stressed the importance of the observance of due process for the protection of the rights of the defendant, the promotion of social order, and the flow of capital. While the state’s early abolition of the death penalty in a sense indicated the triumph of due process values, Wisconsinites who held rough justice values contested that victory over the next four decades through periodic lynchings that called into question the efficacy of a criminal justice system that eschewed capital punishment.⁷

Unlike its southern neighbor Iowa, where 21 died at the hands of lynch mobs from 1880 through 1907, Wisconsin was not a magnet for southern border state immigrants and their yeoman traditions of collective retribution for offenses that breached masculine honor.⁸ The Yankees, Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians that peopled Wisconsin resorted less often to mob killings.⁹ Although historians have devoted much attention to lynching in the South and some to mob violence in the West, only recently have historians begun to analyze the infrequent but socially significant collective killings that occurred in the upper Midwest.¹⁰ Despite the intense communalism and the substantial defense elicited by the five lynchings in Wisconsin in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the practice was never as deeply rooted in the upper American Midwest as it was in the lower Midwest, the West, and the South. A political culture rooted in the Yankee heritage of Wisconsin’s most influential residents that stressed probity, regularity, and communal governance, and a farm and industrial economy characterized by a vibrant capitalism, meant that respect for due process law and the promise that it might ensure social and economic order were strong counter-currents to the temptations of Judge Lynch.

The abolition of the death penalty in 1853 signaled that Wisconsin stood at the vanguard of the legal reforms that originally emanated in the humanitarian and perfectionist tendencies of a growing middle class in the Northeast. Yet Wisconsin was not immune to a characteristic nineteenth century American disease. In peculiarly traumatic circumstances of aggravated homicide, particularly in more recently-settled western counties, Wisconsinites sometimes brutally acted out a rough justice ideology shaped with reference to ethnic solidarities and to their state’s abolition of capital punishment. However, after 1891, Wisconsin authorities increasingly acted to avert lynching and to thus avoid the stain to the state’s reputation. Meanwhile, Wisconsinites of all stripes acquired a respect for abstract concepts of law and for the role of professionalizing law enforcement and penal agencies in safeguarding the public interest in crime control. Thus the ‘Neck-Tie Party’ which claimed Anton Sieboldt’s life in Darlington would prove the final of its kind.

Support for the lynching in Darlington in 1891 was substantial, particularly in southwestern Wisconsin, but it was not uniform or unqualified. The Darlington Democrat and Register reported that citizens in that city and county believed ‘the murderer got just what he deserved’ but nonetheless regretted the lynching ‘and especially the time and place it occurred - at high noon on a cloudless day – on our most public street – among our churches – near and in full view of our public schools.’¹¹ A letter writer from South Lamont styling himself HIRED MAN expressed little regret, arguing that ‘No one feels sorry for the man that was hung. I have never heard a person express a word of sympathy for him; all seem to think that he was a desparate [sic] criminal, a terror to whatever community he lived in.’¹²

The South Lamont writer stressed Sieboldt’s alleged lack of remorse, the heinousness of his crime, the suffering of his victim’s family, the protection afforded to the community by his removal from it, and the lessons for the personal behavior and morality of those who remained.¹³ Nearby, in the Grant County seat of Lancaster, editors found a rationale for the collective killing of Sieboldt in the supposed inadequacy of the punishment afforded to murderers in the state. The Lancaster Herald opined that ‘While Judge Lynch is a dangerous confidant there are cases where one hesitates to censure severely, especially where the law does not sanction capital punishment.’¹⁴ The Herald’s competitor, the Lancaster Teller, expressed a like mind, arguing that the Lafayette County lynchers possessed a vision of the law more perfect and demanding than that practiced in the courts, asserting that ‘It too often happens that lynch law is administered not so much as a vengeful punishment of crime and criminals, but because of a desire to express condemnation of the law’s inadequacy and delays.’ In the view of those in rural southwestern Wisconsin who defended the collective killing of Sieboldt, a criminal justice system that lacked the death penalty and which emphasized procedural safeguards could not sufficiently deter murder or keep communities secure.¹⁵

But dissenting voices were also heard. The Milwaukee Sentinel reported that some in Darlington wanted it to be known that town residents had not performed the lynching. Underlying a chasm of class and culture over the benefits of rough justice versus due process, in the town’s stores and saloons people tended to believe the lynching would ‘serve as a timely warning to ot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Reconsidering Lynching
• 1 Wisconsin's Last Decade of Lynching, 1881–1891: Law and Violence in the Postbellum Midwest.
• 2 Lynching in the Mid-Atlantic, 1882–1940.
• 3 Lynch Law Reversed: The Rape of Lula Sherman, the Lynching of Manse Waldrop, and the Debate over Lynching in the 1880s
• 4 'Raw, Quivering Flesh': John G. Cashman's 'Pornographic' Constitutionalism Designed to Produce an 'Aversion and Detestation', 1883-1904
• 5 Resolving the Paradox of Our Lynching Fixation: Reconsidering Racialized Violence in the American South after Slavery.
• 6 'Warranted' Lynchings: Narratives of Mob Violence in Southern White Newspapers, 1880–1940.
• 7 Lynching Photography and the Visual Reproduction of White Supremacy
• 8 The Lynching of Sicilian Immigrants in the American South, 1880–1910
• Conclusion
• Notes on Contributors
• Index