Lynching Beyond Dixie
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Lynching Beyond Dixie

American Mob Violence Outside the South

Michael J. Pfeifer, Michael J. Pfeifer

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eBook - ePub

Lynching Beyond Dixie

American Mob Violence Outside the South

Michael J. Pfeifer, Michael J. Pfeifer

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In recent decades, scholars have explored much of the history of mob violence in the American South, especially in the years after Reconstruction. However, the lynching violence that occurred in American regions outside the South, where hundreds of persons, including Hispanics, whites, African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans died at the hands of lynch mobs, has received less attention. This collection of essays by prominent and rising scholars fills this gap by illuminating the factors that distinguished lynching in the West, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. The volume adds to a more comprehensive history of American lynching and will be of interest to all readers interested in the history of violence across the varied regions of the United States. Contributors are Jack S. Blocker Jr., Brent M. S. Campney, William D. Carrigan, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Dennis B. Downey, Larry R. Gerlach, Kimberley Mangun, Helen McLure, Michael J. Pfeifer, Christopher Waldrep, Clive Webb, and Dena Lynn Winslow.

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Year
2013
ISBN
9780252094651

PART I

The West

1

“Who Dares to Style This Female a Woman?”

Lynching, Gender, and Culture in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. West

HELEN McLURE
The iconic image of a lynching in the nineteenth-century western United States is probably a white man dangling from a tree limb, summarily executed by a group of other white men because of his alleged theft of horses or cattle. Women and children are usually nowhere to be found in this primal scene of masculine frontier justice, either as victims or participants. Western scholarship and popular mythology generally have agreed that women, especially white women, virtually never died at the hands of lynch mobs. However, many more of these cases occurred than has previously been understood, and the victims were drawn from every major racial and ethnic group in the region. The nineteenth-century collisions of Euro-American settlers with the Native peoples on successive frontiers, including mass murders of nonhostile, even acculturated, Native men, women, and children, contributed to the development of a regional culture of punitive collective action in the service of “self-preservation.” White settlers who justified lethal mob attacks on “squaws” and “papooses” because all Indians purportedly posed a threat to white women and children later cast white female lynching victims as twisted caricatures of proper womanhood—masculinized, castrating, even demonic figures who preyed on husbands and children and polluted their entire society. Euro-Americans extralegally executed white women and women of other races and ethnicities for murder, theft, arson, and other crimes, while Latino and Native American mobs typically accused women in their own communities of witchcraft. While most of these tragedies have been forgotten, they sometimes aroused intense controversy and opened brief spaces for wider discussions of the economic, political, and social forces transforming the lives of all Westerners.
Yet the lynching of women has long been shrouded by a kind of historical amnesia. In part, this is due to the limited sources; many of the cases received only cursory newspaper coverage and very few generated court records. Modern scholarship has also relied heavily on the annual lists of lynchings published by the Chicago Tribune, the Tuskegee Institute, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These did not begin until 1882 with the Tribune’s first inclusion of eighty-six “hangings” in the newspaper’s annual compilation of disasters, epidemics, murders, and suicides across the country.1 However, most midwestern and western states experienced their highest rates of lethal mob violence several decades earlier. Approximately 75 percent of Colorado’s 175 lynchings occurred prior to 1882; 297 of California’s 352 known lynching victims perished before 1882–212 just between 1850 and 1860.2 As historians have pointed out, the traditional periodization of modern lynching scholarship, which usually focuses on extralegal violence in the South between 1880 and 1930, also excludes much of the long history of mob violence against people of Mexican origin or descent.3 The Tribune culled its cases from copies of smaller papers it exchanged for copies of the Chicago newspaper. If the source newspaper described a killing as a “lynching,” the Tribune added it to the list.4 Thus, it appears that the editors usually did not include accounts of lethal mob violence that local newspapers did not explicitly identify as a lynching. Extralegal executions that took a less “traditional” form, or that occurred in remote locations or among minority populations, typically never were recorded by the annual lynching lists at all. Recent scholarship has documented a sizable number of previously unrecorded collective killings of women and children both before and after 1882.5
Although firm conclusions are obviously problematic, given the very sparse nature of primary sources for this topic, a marked increase in lethal collective violence against women and juveniles of all races and ethnicities appears to have been a key feature of nineteenth-century western expansion. Only two cases of lethal mob violence against Euro-American women prior to the nineteenth century have been discovered to date. In 1780, four vengeful New York Patriots “beat and abused” Tory Philip Empy’s wife, who died of her injuries several days later.6 In Philadelphia in July 1787, a mob rode an elderly woman named Korbmacher on a rail through the streets and pelted her with refuse, rocks, and other missiles.7 She, too, suffered fatal injuries, and a local newspaper attributed the attack to her neighbors’ belief that Korbmacher was a witch who had caused the death of a child, and their opinion that she was “the pest and nightmare of society.”8 Very possibly other lethal mob attacks on Euro-American women occurred during this period that left no traces at all in the historical record.
As settlers scattered along a succession of frontiers in the Ohio Valley and beyond during the early decades of the nineteenth century, Euro-Americans punished thieves and other criminals with what one traveler in 1819 called “Lynch’s law, that is, a whipping in the woods.”9 Famed naturalist and wildlife painter John James Audubon greatly admired the “honest citizens” who joined together as the “Regulators” and praised their methods for dealing with “the refuse of every other country” found in “many parts of America.”10 Audubon described his own encounter with apparent villains in the early spring of 1812, as he crossed “one of the wide Prairies” between his home in Hendersonville, Kentucky, and Sainte Genevieve, Missouri.11 He stopped for the night at a log cabin inhabited by two hunters and their mother, a tall woman with a “gruff” voice.12 Inside the cabin, he found another guest, a young Indian man who had been injured in a hunting accident earlier in the day. When Audubon took out his gold watch to check the time, it caught the woman’s eye, and he allowed her to examine it. She wrapped the watch chain around her “brawny neck” and declared “how happy the possession of such a watch should make her.”13 Audubon thought nothing of this, but the young Indian began to cast “expressive glances” at him and even surreptitiously pinched Audubon as the naturalist walked restlessly around the cabin.14 Suddenly the white traveler’s “senses [had] been awakened to the danger which I now suspected to be about me.”15
Audubon retrieved his watch, prepared a bed from bearskins, and pretended to fall deeply asleep. Soon the woman’s sons entered the cabin and held a whispered conversation with their mother. The three of them imbibed a large quantity of whiskey, and then the woman sharpened a large carving knife on a grindstone. When she was satisfied with its edge, “this incarnate fiend” declared, “There, that’ll soon settle him! Boys, kill you———, and then for the watch.”16 Audubon quietly cocked his gun as the “infernal hag” crept toward him.17 As his anxiety intensified he almost leaped up several times and shot her on the spot, “but she was not to be punished thus.”18 Two white men with rifles suddenly pushed open the door and walked inside the cabin. Audubon quickly informed them of his suspicions and the strangers helped him tie up the woman and her sons. The following morning the white men and the Indian took their prisoners “into the woods off the road” and “used them as Regulators were wont to use such delinquents.”19 The white men gave all the family’s hides, meat, and tools to the Indian, burned the cabin, and continued, “well pleased,” on their travels.20
And yet, it remains a tantalizing mystery—what did Audubon and his little mob actually do to the woman and her sons? Just pages later, in a chapter titled, “The Regulators,” he explained that these frontier vigilantes were “honest citizens, selected from among the most respectable persons in the district, and vested with powers suited to the necessity of preserving order on the frontiers.”21 The Regulators typically held “trials” and sentenced accused criminals to banishment on their first offense; the vigilantes punished repeat offenders by flogging them and burning their cabins.22 This appears to be the procedure followed by Audubon and his accomplices, although apparently they did not waste time on a trial. However, Audubon explained that the Regulators also believed that in cases of murder or repeated thefts, “death is considered necessary.”23 Did the murderous intentions of the backwoods trio prove fatal for themselves? Audubon, probably deliberately, leaves open the possibility that he participated in the extralegal execution of a woman, particularly with his earlier comment that he nearly shot her himself, but ultimately she was punished in a different fashion.
This little-known story pulls together multiple themes in the history of lethal mob violence against women in the early-nineteenth-century American West. Audubon’s nearly hysterical characterization of the hunters’ murderous mother introduced tropes that would become standard features of newspaper and popular accounts of the lynchings of Western white women. First he masculinized her: she was tall, with a brawny neck and a gruff voice. Then, he utterly demonized her as an “incarnate fiend” and “infernal hag” who cackled aloud about her murderous scheme as she honed her knife: as wicked and dangerous as the woman stoned to death for witchcraft in the streets of Philadelphia by a previous generation. In the following decades, newspapers and other sources would paint similar portraits of depravity of most of the Euro-American women lynched in the West and Southwest. Audubon’s unabashed claim to have participated in “Regulating” the woman and her sons reveals the ubiquity of the practice and also its lack of documentation in the text sources utilized by historians, particularly newspapers. Even if this small mob hanged the villainous trio, no local newspaper existed to report the event. Audubon’s tale suggests that there may have been at least a few similar instances that were not recorded for posterity.
If Audubon and his band of impromptu Regulators hanged or otherwise executed the frontier woman, it would be the only k...

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