Black Woman Reformer

Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism

Sarah Silkey

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780820345574
• eBook ISBN: 9780820346922
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

During the early 1890s, a series of shocking lynchings brought unprecedented international attention to American mob violence. This interest created an opportunity for Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist and civil rights activist from Memphis, to travel to England to cultivate British moral indignation against American lynching. Wells adapted race and gender roles established by African American abolitionists in Britain to legitimate her activism as a "black lady reformer"—a role American society denied her—and assert her right to defend her race from abroad. Based on extensive archival research conducted in the United States and Britain, Black Woman Reformer by Sarah Silkey explores Wells's 1893–94 antilynching campaigns within the broader contexts of nineteenth-century transatlantic reform networks and debates about the role of extralegal violence in American society.

Through her speaking engagements, newspaper interviews, and the efforts of her British allies, Wells altered the framework of public debates on lynching in both Britain and the United States. No longer content to view lynching as a benign form of frontier justice, Britons accepted Wells's assertion that lynching was a racially motivated act of brutality designed to enforce white supremacy. As British criticism of lynching mounted, southern political leaders desperate to maintain positive relations with potential foreign investors were forced to choose whether to publicly defend or decry lynching. Although British moral pressure and media attention did not end lynching, the international scrutiny generated by Wells's campaigns transformed our understanding of racial violence and made American communities increasingly reluctant to embrace lynching.

Chapter 1

BRITISH RESPONSES TO AMERICAN LYNCHING

When Ida B. Wells launched her transatlantic antilynching campaign in 1893, the British public was already well aware of the problem of American mob violence. From the first appearance of the phrase lynch law in the transatlantic press during the 1830s, British social commentators and newspaper editors enthusiastically joined Americans in debating the appropriateness of extralegal violence in American society. In her campaign, Wells played off of these pre-existing British concerns about American lawlessness. Therefore, in order to appreciate the impact of Wells’s activism on British public discourse, we must examine the evolution of British perceptions of American mob violence.

Lynching and lynch law were politically charged labels. American reporters applied these terms to distinguish particular incidents of violence from common criminal assault, murder, and rioting. What constituted lynching, however, was never clearly defined; instead, this rhetorical construct was constantly negotiated and renegotiated through a transnational public discourse. As a powerful rhetorical tool, the term lynching was employed by American and British commentators both to condone and to condemn acts of mob violence. Acting through the guise of “Judge Lynch,” the mythical personification of community-sanctioned justice, some Americans claimed the right to employ lynching as a form of extralegal punishment for perceived violations of the community peace. At the same time, some British commentators denounced lynching as evidence of public disregard for modern conventions of social behavior, minority rights, and the principle of due process. Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans remained sensitive to such British disapproval and strove to develop increasingly effective rhetoric to justify lynching as an honorable form of extralegal violence. In effect, lynching became the subject of a century-long public relations campaign waged by both opponents and apologists.

THE TRANSATLANTIC DEBUT OF JUDGE LYNCH

During the summer of 1835, news of two Mississippi lynchings spread throughout the United States and Great Britain and launched the first significant transatlantic debate about the acceptability of this novel form of extralegal violence. Vicksburg residents hanged five gamblers in an attempt to cleanse the town of their immoral influence, while seventy miles away in Madison County, a “lynch court” condemned and executed several white men and enslaved African Americans accused of fomenting insurrection.¹ These two cases created a sensation in the United States and attracted the attention of the British press. Although the terms Judge Lynch and lynch law had previously been used, at least informally, in the United States, British commentators appeared unfamiliar with the concept.² While violence had always been a part of American society, the Vicksburg and Madison County incidents established lynching as a part of American culture in British eyes.

From these early days, Americans defended their right to employ summary execution outside the system of judicial due process. Vicksburg residents were “proud of the public spirit and indignation against offenders displayed by the citizens” when they rallied together to banish professional gamblers from their community. Although regrettable, drastic measures were necessary to protect and purify their community from “a class of individuals, whose shameless vices and daring outrages have long poisoned the springs of morality, and interrupted the relations of society.” In the view of Vicksburg’s leading citizens, gamblers were outsiders “unconnected with society by any of its ordinary ties” and therefore lacked “all sense of moral obligations” to the community. They violated the community peace by encouraging young men to engage in dissipation: to drink alcohol, employ the services of prostitutes, and go into debt rather than becoming productive members of society. Finding the legal system “wholly ineffectual” in prosecuting these offenses, Vicksburg residents resolved to find another way to banish professional gamblers from their community. Facing armed resistance, residents concluded that simply expelling the gamblers would not be enough to maintain the community peace. Hanging five gamblers not only rid the community of the immediate menace but also sent a clear message that Vicksburg residents would not tolerate unsavory characters in the future. Most important, the residents of Vicksburg established lynching as an expression of community will. As one witness to the incident observed, “we have never known the public so unanimous on any subject.”³

Fears of an impending slave insurrection prompted Madison County’s white residents to take similar decisive action to protect their community peace. Participants in that lynching attempted to distinguish their actions from those of common mobs by conducting an investigation into the alleged insurrection plot, examining witnesses, and holding “something like a trial” in a hastily formed lynch court for the white men accused of masterminding the plan. The plantations’ relative isolation and the rapidly increasing number of slaves in the area—more than 40 percent of the county’s total population in 1830 and nearly 75 percent a decade later—created a tremendous sense of vulnerability among the county’s white citizens. Only four years after Nat Turner’s bloody rebellion claimed dozens of lives in Southampton County, Virginia, the threat of an alliance between poor white men and slaves against the slaveholding elite would have made the situation appear particularly menacing. Distrustful of lawyers and legal procedure, slave owners demanded the certainty of summary justice to put down what they feared was a massive plot. In the final tally, six enslaved African Americans and six white men were publicly hanged over three weeks.⁴

From the earliest applications of the term lynching, Americans sought to justify their resort to mob violence. In 1836, Thomas Shackelford, a local attorney, published a pamphlet arguing that the Madison County lynching had been an act of community self-defense. After two days of interrogations, the enslaved suspects had made full confessions that implicated several white men in the alleged plot. Although the confessions were probably obtained through physical violence, they were used as prima facie proof that the community’s actions were justified. Residents resolved to make examples of the enslaved “ringleaders” through summary execution to “strike terror among the rest, and by that means crush all hope of their freedom.” Because the evidence against the alleged white conspirators included hearsay and the inadmissible testimony of slaves, the regular courts would not have convicted the whites involved. Therefore, Shackelford insisted, bypassing the judicial system was justified “under the law of self-preservation, which is paramount to all law.” Shackelford praised the community for acting with “manly energy” to preserve “all which we hold most dear in this world.”⁵

Although Shackelford assumed that his reasoned and carefully documented account would receive public approval, his attempt to present lynching as a necessary and honorable method of community defense met with disdain in Britain. Just two years after the 1833 Emancipation Act abolished slavery throughout the British Empire, few British commentators had sympathy for American slaveholders who claimed the right to set aside the rule of law to protect their interests in human bondage. To a British audience, Shackelford’s “evidence” of an imminent slave insurrection seemed ludicrous, almost hysterical. Although any discontent openly expressed by a slave would have immediately alarmed southern slaveholders, The Times was not surprised that a slave might “utter the treason” that she was “tired of waiting upon the ‘white folks’” and “wanted to be her own mistress.” Charges against the alleged white conspirators appeared equally flimsy. While perhaps indicating regrettable personal preferences, “being out all night” without “satisfactory explanation,” “being deficient in feeling and affection for his second wife,” or “trading with the negroes … and enjoying himself in their society” hardly seemed to warrant death by extrajudicial hanging.⁶ Shackelford’s pamphlet clearly indicated that the participants in the Madison County lynchings acted with impunity, believing their actions to be both necessary and just. Yet in British eyes, if residents had the time, organization, and forethought to hold “trials,” record confessions, and conduct public executions, then they could have convened proper legal proceedings. If American lynching apologists wished to receive broad public approval, they needed to better substantiate the necessity of mob violence in American society.

In the 1830s, Britons were intrigued by all aspects of American society; the addition of lynching to the list of peculiar American folkways only piqued that interest. Europeans viewed the United States as a bold experiment in republican government and democratic equality. Curiosity about this new social and political experiment created a tourism industry that brought thousands of upper- and middle-class travelers to the United States. Intellectuals and social critics such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens toured the United States and then returned home to report their experiences. British travelers produced copious volumes on American society during the 1830s and early 1840s, discussing wide-ranging cultural issues in what have been described by some historians as the earliest sociological studies of the United States.⁷ The genre quickly became popular reading among the upper and middle classes in both Great Britain and the United States. As one contemporary commentator observed, “There is scarcely a theme with which English readers are more familiar than that of American manners.”⁸

Sociologist Harriet Martineau, former naval captain Frederick Marryat, novelist Frances Trollope, and other British visitors to the United States during this era witnessed one of the most violent periods in American history. Riots and other forms of mob violence increased suddenly and dramatically between 1835 and 1837. This apparent explosion in extralegal violence demanded attention, and American newspaper reports chronicling these outbursts made the violence appear epidemic, as though the hangings in Mississippi had unleashed a torrent of lynchings.⁹ Although British newspapers and travel narratives did not begin to describe extralegal violence in the United States as lynching until after the 1835 Vicksburg hanging, by the end of the decade, British authors who dissected American society for British readers routinely commented on lynch law. Trollope, for example, added a footnote to the 1839 edition of her popular travel narrative, Domestic Manners of the Americans, remarking, “It was not till after I had left the United States [in 1831] that the frightful details of Lynch law reached me. These details are now well known throughout Europe, and must surely be received as a confirmation of the … insufficiency of the laws, or at least of the manner in which they are enforced, for preventing and punishing crime.”¹⁰ In just a handful of years, British commentators had come to perceive lynching as an inextricable if regrettable component of American society.

Although Trollope’s commentary reveals a strong association between lynching and the punishment of crime, the contentious politics surrounding American slavery complicated the emerging debates about lynching. American abolitionists coming under attack by northern mobs appropriated the word lynching to label their persecution, conflating the violence in Vicksburg and Madison County with antiabolitionist riots in the North. Abolitionists constituted a small and intensely unpopular movement in antebellum America, important more for the social reactions they generated than for their influence on American political and social institutions. The strain of abolitionist ideology advocated by William Lloyd Garrison and his supporters, which included an immediate end to slavery with no compensation for slaveholders, was not widely supported in Great Britain, and such ideological cleavages led to serious ruptures in the transatlantic antislavery movement.¹¹ To slaveholders and those who profited from the fruits of slave labor in the North and Britain, abolitionists advocated “theft” of valuable property by aiding escaped slaves, threatening to incite widespread slave insurrections, and undermining the South’s economic welfare. Such a strategy, one American commentator concluded, “forced the good people” of the South to lynch the abolitionists. Confronted with growing hostility, abolitionists embraced the term lynching as a propaganda tool and identified the practice as a symptom of the moral and social disruption slavery caused in American society; if left unchecked, they argued, the spreading infection of southern immorality threatened to corrupt the body politic and create national anarchy. The abolitionist critique of lynching as evidence of slavery’s immoral influence would have resonated with many Britons during this period of intense reform activism, when similar concerns about the capacity of corrupt institutions to spread moral decay throughout society had prompted the restructuring of the British legal and penal systems and the elimination of British colonial slavery.¹²

Indeed, the concurrence of antiabolitionist attacks with the development of “lynching” raised British concerns about the general stability and morality of American society. In her 1837 travel narrative, Society in America, Martineau described a mob attack on Garrison and the ladies’ meeting of the Boston Anti-Slavery Society. Handbills had been posted at the City Hall threatening to kill “as sure as fate” any women who dared attend the meeting and offering a reward for tarring and feathering the guest speaker. Refused protection by local law enforcement, the meeting came under attack “by a howling, shrieking mob of gentlemen.” Although Martineau expected the mob to be composed of “a rabble of ragged, desperate workmen,” she was shocked to learn that the attackers were members of Boston’s elite. This revelation turned Martineau’s understanding of American mob violence on its head. While European riots typically involved members of the lower classes protesting their oppression by the aristocracy, American mobs seemed to be composed of, instigated by, and led by “gentlemen”—those who most clearly benefited from the existing social order. Garrison, who had escorted his pregnant wife to the meeting, was caught by the mob, pelted with brickbats, and dragged through the streets. Indeed, only the intervention of a working-class man saved Garrison’s life. In Martineau’s view, American society was seriously diseased if the upper classes were driven to riot and only the working classes could show compassion for human life. If American gentlemen could openly target defenseless (even pregnant) ladies for no crime other than exercising their constitutionally protected right to free speech, then the constraints of civil society had ruptured, and those entrusted to set the standards for American society might be capable of even greater horrors.¹³

From the American perspective, however, claims that the attack in Boston had been conducted by gentlemen rather than the lower classes gave credibility to the mob’s actions and calmed fears about the outbreak of social anarchy. Some Americans insisted that the disturbance in Boston could not by definition qualify as a “mob” attack. In the early 1830s, the term mob held two distinct connotations—either “rioters or destructive crowds” or “the lower orders in general.” Not until the end of Andrew Jackson’s turbulent presidency in 1837 did mob became specifically associated with violence and dissociated from the poorer masses. As one “eminent lawyer” from Boston explained to Martineau, “O, there was no mob … I was there myself, and saw they were all gentlemen. They were all in fine broad-cloth.” From this viewpoint, the rioters’ respectability excused their lawless actions. Indeed, antiabolitionist mobs generally consisted of “gentlemen of property and standing” who attacked organized antislavery to protect their elite status. Although prompted largely by self-interest, antiabolitionists often portrayed themselves as America’s best citizens, stalwart patriots who were defending society from those bent on its destruction.¹⁴ Martineau’s elite American informants felt sufficiently reassured by the equally elevated social status of the Boston mob’s members; after all, when well-heeled citizens took matters into their own hands, they did so to preserve rather than wreck the social order.

Because Martineau was a popular reformer and respected social commentator, her criticism received widespread attention that helped to popularize the connection between lynching and antiabolitionist riots and made lynching appear ungentlemanly; her influence can be measured in part by examining how Marryat countered her position in his narrative, A Diary in America.¹⁵ Marryat viewed Martineau with contempt for cultivating sympathy for disruptive abolitionists. Writing to his mother from the United States, he concluded that the United States was “a wonderful country” that had been unfairly ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 British Responses to American Lynching
• Chapter 2 The Emergence of a Transatlantic Reformer
• Chapter 3 The Struggle for Legitimacy
• Chapter 4 Building a Transatlantic Debate on Lynching
• Chapter 5 American Responses to British Protest
• Chapter 6 A Transatlantic Legacy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index