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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: LUP-MAL |
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LYNCH LAW , a term loosely applied to various forms of executing rough popular justice, or what is thought to be justice, for the punishment of offenders by a summary procedure, ignoring, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law. The word lynching " originally signified a whipping for reformatory purposes with more or less disregard for its legality " (Cutler), or the infliction of minor punishments without recourse to law; but during and after the Reconstruction Period in the United States, it came to mean, generally, the summary infliction of capital punishment. Lynch law is frequently prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts where government is weak and officers of the law too few and too powerless to enforce law and preserve order. The practice has been common in all countries when unsettled frontier conditions existed, or in periods of threatened anarchy. In what are considered civilized countries it is now found mainly in Russia, south-eastern Europe and in America, but it is essentially and almost peculiarly an American institution. The origin of the name is obscure; different writers have attempted to trace it to Ireland, to England, to South Carolina, to Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
Halifax
In America during the 18th and 19th centuries the population expanded westward faster than well-developed civil institutions could follow, and on the western frontier were always desperadoes who lived by preying on the better classes. To suppress these desperadoes, in the absence of strong legal institutions, resort was continually made to lynch law. There was little necessity for it until the settlement crossed the Alleghany Mountains, but the following instances of lynching in the East may be mentioned: (1) the mistreatment of Indians in New England and the Middle Colonies in disregard of laws protecting them; (2) the custom found in various colonies of administering summary justice to wife-beaters, idlers and other obnoxious persons; (3) the acts of the Regulators of North Carolina, 17671771; (4) the popular tribunals of the Revolutionary period, when the disaffection toward Great Britain weakened the authority of the civil governments and the war replaced them by popular governments, at a time when the hostilities between " Patriots " and " Tories " were an incentive to extra-legal violence. In the South, lynching methods were long employed in dealing with agitators, white and black, who were charged with endeavouring to excite the slaves to insurrection or to crime against their masters, and in dealing with anti-slavery agitators generally. In the West, from the Alleghanies to the Golden Gate, the pioneer
quick
' The usual explanation is that the name was derived from Charles Lynch (1736-1796), a justice of the peace in Virginia after 1774, who in 1780, toward the close of the War of Independence, greatly exceeded his powers in the punishment of Tories or Loyalists detected in a conspiracy in the neighbourhood of his home in Bedford county, Va. Lynch was a man of influence in his community, was for many years a member of the Virginia legislature, was a member of the famous Virginia Convention of 1776 and was later (in 1781) an officer in the American army. See an article, " The Real Judge Lynch," in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. lxxxviii. (Boston, 1901). deepened prejudice. The numerous protective societies of whites, 18651876, culminating in the Ku Klux movement
Since 1882 the Chicago Tribune has collected statistics of lynching, and some interesting facts may be deduced from these tables.' During the twenty-two years from 1882 to 1903 inclusive, the total number of persons lynched in the United States was 3337, the number decreasing during the last decade; of these 2385 were in the South and 752 in the North; of those lynched in the East and West 602 were white and 75 black, and of those in the South 567 were white and 1985 black.2 Lynchings occur mostly during periods of idleness of the lower classes; in the summer more are lynched for crimes against the person and in the winter (in the West) for crimes against property; the principal causes of lynching in the South are murder and rape, in the North and West, murder and offences against property; more blacks than whites were lynched between 1882 and 1903, the numbers being 2060 negroes, of whom 40 were women, and 1169 whites, of whom 23 were women; of the 707 blacks lynched for rape 675 were in the South; 783 blacks were lynched for murder, and 753 of these were in the South; most of the lynchings of whites were in the West; the lynching of negroes increased somewhat outside of the South and decreased somewhat in the South. Lynching decreases and disappears in a community as the population grows denser and civil institutions grow stronger; as better communications and good police make it harder to commit crime; and as public sentiment is educated to demand legal rather than illegal and irregular infliction of punishment for even the most horrible of crimes. See James E. Cutler, Lynch Law (New York
York
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