The Roots of Rough Justice

by Pfeifer, Michael J.

• ISBN13: 9780252036132
• ISBN10: 0252036131
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

In this deeply researched prequel to his 2006 studyRough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 18741947,Michael J. Pfeifer analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history. Scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers,The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynchingoffers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era. Pfeifer examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. He addresses the transformation of ideas and practices of social ordering, law, and collective violence in the American colonies, the early American Republic, and especially the decades before and immediately after the American Civil War. His trenchant and concise analysis anchors the first book to consider the crucial emergence of the practice of lynching of slaves in antebellum America. Pfeifer also leads the way in analyzing the history of American lynching in a global context, from the early modern British Atlantic to the legal status of collective violence in contemporary Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Seamlessly melding source material with apt historical examples,The Roots of Rough Justicetackles the emergence of not only the rhetoric surrounding lynching, but its practice and ideology. Arguing that the origins of lynching cannot be restricted to any particular region, Pfeifer shows how the national and transatlantic context is essential for understanding how whites used mob violence to enforce the racial and class hierarchies across the United States.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Collective Violence in the British Atlantic	p. 7
Vigilantes, Criminal Justice, and Antebellum Cultural Conflict	p. 12
Racial and Class Frontiers: Lynching and Social Identity in Antebellum America	p. 32
Lynchers versus Due Process: The Forging of Rough Justice	p. 54
The Civil War and Reconstruction and the Remaking of American Lynching	p. 67
Epilogue	p. 88
Appendix: Lists of Confirmed Lynchings	p. 93
Lynchings of African Americans in the South, 1824-1862	p. 93
Lynchings in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, 1840-1877	p. 99
Notes	p. 109
Index	p. 141
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