Lynching in The United States - Frontier and Civil War

Frontier and Civil War

There is much debate over the violent history of lynchings on the frontier, obscured by the mythology of the American Old West. Compared to the myths, real lynchings in the early years of the western United States did not focus as strongly on "rough and ready" crime prevention, and often shared many of the same racist and partisan political dimensions as lynchings in the South and Midwest. In unorganized territories or sparsely settled states, security was often provided only by a U.S. Marshal who might, despite the appointment of deputies, be hours, or even days, away by horseback.

Lynchings in the Old West were often carried out against accused criminals in custody. Lynching did not so much substitute for an absent legal system as to provide an alternative system that favored a particular social class or racial group. Historian Michael J. Pfeifer writes, "Contrary to the popular understanding, early territorial lynching did not flow from an absence or distance of law enforcement but rather from the social instability of early communities and their contest for property, status, and the definition of social order."

The San Francisco Vigilance Movement, for example, has traditionally been portrayed as a positive response to government corruption and rampant crime, though revisionists have argued that it created more lawlessness than it eliminated. It also had a strongly nativist tinge, initially focused against the Irish and later evolving into mob violence against Chinese and Mexican immigrants.. In 1871, at least 18 Chinese-Americans were killed by the mob rampaging through Old Chinatown in Los Angeles, after a white businessman was inadvertently caught in the crossfire of a tong battle.

During the California Gold Rush, at least 25,000 Mexicans had been longtime residents of California. The Treaty of 1848 expanded American territory by one-third. To settle the war, Mexico ceded all or parts of Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wyoming to the United States. In 1850, California became a state within the United States.

Many of the Mexicans who were native to what would become a state within the United States were experienced miners and had had great success mining gold in California. Their success aroused animosity by white prospectors who intimidated Mexican miners with the threat of violence and committed violence against some. Between 1848 and 1860, at least 163 Mexicans were lynched in California alone. One particularly infamous lynching occurred on July 5, 1851, when a Mexican woman named Juana Loiza was lynched by a mob in Downieville, California. She was accused of killing a white man who had attempted to assault her after breaking into her home.

Another well-documented episode in the history of the American West is the Johnson County War, a dispute over land use in Wyoming in the 1890s. Large-scale ranchers, with the complicity of local and federal Republican politicians, hired mercenaries and assassins to lynch the small ranchers, mostly Democrats, who were their economic competitors and whom they portrayed as "cattle rustlers".

During the Civil War, Southern Home Guard units sometimes lynched white Southerners whom they suspected of being Unionists or deserters. One example of this was the hanging of Methodist minister Bill Sketoe in the southern Alabama town of Newton in December 1864. Other (fictional) examples of extrajudicial murder are portrayed in Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain.