William Lynch Speech - William Lynch

William Lynch

Forewords attached to some online versions of the speech credit the narrator's name as the source of the terms "lynching" and "Lynch law", despite the narrator specifically advocating against lynching. A man named William Lynch did indeed claim to have originated the term during the American Revolutionary War, but he was born in 1742, thirty years after the alleged delivery of the speech. A document published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1836 that proposed William Lynch as the originator of "lynch law" may have been a hoax perpetrated by Edgar Allan Poe. A better documented early use of the term "Lynch law" comes from Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the peace and militia officer during the American Revolution.