Lynching

Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity

Ersula J. Ore

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781496821607
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2020 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award While victims of antebellum lynchings were typically white men, postbellum lynchings became more frequent and more intense, with the victims more often black. After Reconstruction, lynchings exhibited and embodied links between violent collective action, American civic identity, and the making of the nation.Ersula J. Ore investigates lynching as a racialized practice of civic engagement, in effect an argument against black inclusion within the changing nation. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community.Grounded in Ida B. Wells's summation of lynching as a social contract among whites to maintain a racial order, at its core, Ore's book speaks to racialized violence as a mode of civic engagement. Since violence enacts an argument about citizenship, Ore construes lynching and its expressions as part and parcel of America's rhetorical tradition and political legacy.Drawing upon newspapers, official records, and memoirs, as well as critical race theory, Ore outlines the connections between what was said and written, the material practices of lynching in the past, and the forms these rhetorics and practices assume now. In doing so, she demonstrates how lynching functioned as a strategy interwoven with the formation of America's national identity and with the nation's need to continually restrict and redefine that identity. In addition, Ore ties black resistance to lynching, the acclaimed exhibit Without Sanctuary, recent police brutality, effigies of Barack Obama, and the killing of Trayvon Martin.

CHAPTER ONE

CONSTITUTING THE “CITIZEN RACE”

Blacks are the objects of a constitutional omission which has been incorporated into a theory of neutrality. It is thus that omission is really a form of expression, as oxymoronic as that sounds: racial omission is a literal part of original intent; it is the fixed, reiterated prophecy of the Founding Fathers.

—PATRICIA WILLIAMS, Alchemy of Race and Rights¹

The aim of rhetorical enterprise, explains Kenneth Burke, is to reduce dissimilarity, to find ways of demonstrating likeness or sameness for the purpose of inducing cooperation, building alliances, and establishing community. This aim is assisted by what Burke refers to as rhetorical identification, a practice in which social actors render themselves consubstantial, or similar to each other with the intention of inducing attitude and moving each other to action.² Acts of identification give shape and substance to the imagined community that is “the people.” Its role in constituting a social collective, however, employs language that is inherently divisive. While using language and other forms of symbolic action to give shape and substance to an imagined “us,” identification simultaneously gives shape to a “them,” against which we—that is, “us”—is constituted. This is inevitably the other half of Burke’s dialectic: to rhetorically identify with one is to rhetorically disidentify with another. In the case of nation building, “we the people” is rhetorically constituted through language that distinguishes the existence of an “us” through comparison with, or juxtaposition to, that of an imagined or constructed “them.” As the logic goes: “There can be no sense of us without a sense of what and who we are not, and to determine what and who we are not is, at the same time, to determine who they (“others”) are.” Typically referred to as the “us/them” dialectic, this form of social organizing, fostered by acts of identification, is most often employed in the service of political mobilization. Its rhetorical power resides in its ability to establish a definitional profile that, through the act of naming difference or threat, legitimates action against it and, in so doing, enacts the ideological boundaries requisite for social and political collectiveness.

The founding documents, legal provisions, social performances, and language used to articulate American national identity between 1776 and 1870 are directly guided by appeals to sameness that employ narratives of a common past, homogeneity, and religious secularism meant to foster a sense of collectivism among an otherwise nebulous population, and to nurture a definition of civic identity predicated upon ideological beliefs in natural right and racial superiority. In this chapter I discuss how the “us/them” dialectic manifest in the laws governing US citizenship, the behavior used to enact it, and the language employed by those inscribed by it culminated in the racial codification of the American citizen. Laws constituting citizenship were directly guided by appeals to an “us” that figured “the people” as a racially homogeneous group and “them” as a collection of subhuman nonwhite others. In this chapter I demonstrate how legislative appeals to a racially exclusive citizenry coupled with a vested interest in retaining a white racial state instigated conditions that made the lynching of black citizens a revered performance of white citizenship identity. What I hope to trace here is a rhetoric of enemyship³ that outlines how social actors legislated a white ideal through various ways of racializing the enemy. Chief to this analysis is how founding and landmark legislation mapped an “us/them” dialectic onto appeals to founders’ intent to legally codify citizenship as a “whites only” designation, and how this discourse erected a rhetorical border⁴ that constructed blacks as antithetical to citizenship, their eventual inclusion within the nation as a perversion of democracy, and their symbolic expulsion through the ritual violence of lynching as a performance of American civic identity.

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first section illustrates how the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution laid the foundation for a racialized definition of the citizen and how later provisions such as the Naturalization Act of 1790, Compromise of 1820, Dred Scott decision, and black codes of 1866 onward further solidified this definition. To clarify, the goal of this section is not to offer an exhaustive overview of the nation’s founding documents but rather to illustrate how appeals to sameness by way of rhetorically disidentifying with black humanity undergird laws codifying American civic belonging as a call to white solidarity. I conclude this section with an analysis of how Chief Justice Taney’s 1857 opinion in Dred Scott vs. Sanford, which legally codified America’s “citizen race” as white and male, reinscribed color-line logic through appeals to founders’ law and founders’ intent.

In the second section I examine antiblack lynching as a performance of American identity, one that construes citizenship belonging along racial lines. Rituals of citizenship belonging range from benign acts such as voting and observing the law to ritualistic performances of depravity and racialized violence such as lynching. Of particular importance to this section is how one’s sense of “place” within the polity is rhetorically constituted through lynching and customary acts of display and spectatorship associated with the practice. This chapter’s consideration of the racist constitution of “the citizen” in conjunction with everyday performances of citizenship identity manifest in antiblack violence sets the scene for the book’s larger consideration of how lynching functions as an argument against the inclusion of blacks within the nation.

We, the White People

Founding documents, declarations, and legal codes governing citizenship are indexes of motive in that they outline the desires and intentions of the communities they constitute. Legislation outlining the perimeters of citizenship belonging detail a motivational grammar that distinguishes the existence of an “us” through comparison with or juxtaposition to that of a constructed “them.” This “us/them” dialectic names the “other” or “enemy” through a combination of contrastive couplings that casts “us”—that is, “the people”—as imbued with the requisite criteria for citizenship, and “them”—non-white “others”—as the anticitizen, whose exclusion from the polity both “threatened and consolidated” its status as a white habitus. In 1776 Jefferson employed this dialectic to rhetorically construct Americans as “one people” driven by reason, united by an inalienable right to freedom, and directed by a deft opposition to tyranny.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness … But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity, which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.⁵

These first passages declaring “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” as the natural and “unalienable rights” of man, situate “the people” as a reason-driven collective, who, in comparison to the unreasonable tyrannous British king, are guided by virtue and a law of natural rights. As such, the web of juxtapositions including one people: another, citizen: subject, American: British, and natural: unnatural constructing Britain as the “enemy” against which Americans must defend, positioned revolution as a necessary and inevitable consequence of British despotism while figuring “the people” as a political collective constituted by a shared desire for freedom and a readiness to protect it.

Jefferson’s figuration of “the people” as inherently free influenced later legislation codifying citizenship as an exclusively white designation. At the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, state representatives hammered out questions over citizenship via debates over slavery. Of issue was how to count state populations so as to determine their representation in Congress. Northern delegates feared that counting slaves as part of these populations would result in a southern-dominated legislature.⁶ Also at stake was the possibility of secession; southern delegates refused to enter the Union unless northerners agreed to secure slavery as the constitutional right of white men.⁷ While the resulting Three-Fifths Compromise defining slaves as “three-fifths of all other persons”⁸ securing southern and northern interests, clarified the civic status of America’s slave population, it left the civic status of black freepersons unaddressed. The Naturalization Act of 1790 granting citizenship to nonblack immigrants offered a partial remedy to the issue. While the primary intent of the statute was to secure the allegiance of European immigrants who came to America in search of labor opportunities, its secondary was to more clearly define the color of citizenship.

… any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof on application to any common law Court of record in any one of the States wherein he shall have resided for the term of one year at least.⁹

While the racist rhetoric of the statute narrowed the constitutional loophole created by the Three-Fifths Compromise, it failed to address the condition of free native-born blacks because it presupposed that native-born individuals were already national citizens on account that they were neither alien nor slave. So, while the law solidified white as the color of federal citizenship, it did nothing to address the fact that US federalism endowed states with the power to grant or deny citizenship to whom they pleased.¹⁰ This discretionary power to bestow or deny civic status produced a black constituency that enjoyed varying degrees of citizenship. For instance, in parts of New England where the free black population was low, blacks were given voting rights; in areas of the mid-Atlantic region, propertied blacks both voted and served on juries.¹¹

At the same time, though, because state jurisdiction ceased beyond state boundaries, states unsupportive of black citizenship were under no obligation to recognize or honor the civic liberties granted free blacks by other states. Rejecting black citizenship were states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, which outright denied freepersons residence, and states like Maryland, Tennessee, and North Carolina, which recognized black citizenship but later came to revoke it.¹² State laws ignoring, denying, curbing, and outright revoking the citizenship rights of black freepersons worked to geographically ensure the separation of slaves and free blacks. White racial logic reckoned freepersons a threat because they infected slaves with the spirit of freedom. Establishing geographical barriers to divide these populations, then, was tactical in that it sought to ward off insurgency. Planned revolts led by Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture (1791), South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey (1822), and Virginia’s Nat Turner (1831) provided further impetus for white America’s suspicion of free blacks, their assumed ability to influence black slaves, and the ever-constant need to monitor and police the movements of both. As one South Carolinian put it, all blacks

should be watched with an eye of steady and unremitted observation, … Let it never be forgotten, that our Negroes are freely the JACOBINS of the country; that they are the ANARCHISTS and the DOMESTIC ENEMY: the COMMON ENEMY OF CIVILIZED SOCIETY, and the BARBARIANS WHO WOULD, IF THEY COULD, BECOME THE DESTROYERS OF OUR RACE.¹³

Here a rhetoric of enemyship similar to rhetoric employed by Jefferson to distinguish “the people” from Britain is utilized to distinguish “Negroes” from “OUR [WHITE] RACE.” Rhetorically juxtaposing “Jacobin,” which denotes a political extremist or rebel, and “civil society,” which within the context of the statement figures American whites as potential victims of ill-intending Negroes, crafts a vision of national community through ardent appeals to white solidarity and violent collective action against a black foe. Such discourse races patriotism white and antiblack, while politically charged terminology like “Jacobins,” “Anarchists,” and “domestic enemy” politicizes “our Negroes” as America’s internal “enemy.” The juxtaposition of “civilized society” and “destroyers [read: “blacks”]” further exaggerates this claim by stressing dissimilarity to legitimate the use of violent force.

Rhetorically figuring blacks as the enemy within continued as legislators worked to more clearly define citizenship as a “whites only” category. The landmark decision of the Dred Scott case illustrates this best through its intent to settle mounting concerns over the color of democratic citizenship. In 1857 a slave named Dred Scott sued in both the state and federal courts of Missouri for recognition as an emancipated, native-born black man. Scott had been the slave of John Emerson, a US Army surgeon, and accompanied him on several trips from the slave state of Missouri to the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin. His first suit in 1846 was brought against Irene Emerson, the widow of John Emerson and inheritor of Scott after the death of her husband. Scott’s counsel successfully argued that his two-year residence in Illinois and four-year residence in the Wisconsin territory made him free; however, this decision was later overturned in 1852 following the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and precedent set in Strader v. Graham (1851). Strader v. Graham reiterated the Fugitive Slave Act in that it nullified the power of free states to grant freedom to slaves who had relocated to free states or territories. The slave law itself, which also targeted free blacks,¹⁴ was essentially a federal permit authorizing slave masters and white citizens to pursue and seize runaways even after they had crossed into free territory. As the law of the land, the Fugitive Slave Act, then, not only forced free states to concede to the jurisdictional power of slave states even as they operated beyond the boundaries of their own regions, but also made the profiling, surveilling, policing, and seizing of blacks by whites a mandated practice of white citizenship. In 1853 Scott tried again to gain his freedom by suing Irene Emerson’s brother, John Sanford, who had purchased him in 1852, but Scott again lost. Following the jurisdiction laws decided in Strader v. Graham (1851) and the precedent set in Scott v. Emerson (1852), the US circuit court sided with Sanford on the basis that Scott’s previous and current residence in Missouri made him a slave.

While a debate over states’ rights and state jurisdiction was central to the concluding decisions in Strader v. Graham (1851) and Scott v. Emerson (1852), they were not the reigning concerns occupying justices when the case reached the Supreme Court in 1857. Of chief concern instead was the political status of America’s enslaved, emancipated, and freeborn black populations. Forwarding a traditionalist interpretation of the Declaration and Constitution that cited slavery as the constitutional right of white men, Chief Justice Roger Taney concluded that blacks were not and never could be citizens—that is, one of “us”—because Founding Fathers had deemed them inherently inferior and, thus, “unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”¹⁵ Who founders conceived to be “the people,” he continued, was evidenced by the Constitution, which had drawn a clear “line of division … between the citizen race, who formed and held the government, and the African race, which they held in subjection and slavery, and governed at their own pleasure.” Scott’s lawsuit was therefore moot, because he was not and never could be a citizen. Because the founders had conceived of blacks as chattel and thus “persons” excused from the protections of the Constitution, they had, by design “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”¹⁶ Taney’s majority ruling utilized an unambiguously racist rhetoric that nullified future petitions for black citizenship by rendering blackness the antithesis of citizenship, “the people” synonymous with “white,” and “white” synonymous with the “citizen race.” Such discursive bordering, explained one critic, illustrated that Americans were not “entitled to liberty … because of abstract ideals of univ...