Source: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1868, "Report of Outrages Committed upon Citizens [of the] State of Georgia from Jan 1st to Nov 15th, 1868." Located in Governor Bullock's Correspondence, Georgia State Archives (RG-SG-S: 1-1-5, box 56), Morrow, GA, August 2010. Scanned by Georgia State Archives; coded and analyzed by author. Nevertheless, few of the events that produced the victimizations enumerated in the report would qualify as vigilantism or lynching. Generally, it is more appropriate to consider these as crimes perpetrated against the Freedmen of Georgia. As seen in Table 10, only 28% (101) of the 355 outrages were murders. Of these, only 45 entailed three or more perpetrators. Most, in fact, were the actions of individuals, who took the law into their own hands, disciplining freedmen in the same way that they had punished slaves. Beating and whipping accounted for 31% of all outrages. Table 11 Race of Perpetrator (including groups) in Outrages Reported by Freedman's Bureau in Georgia, January-November 15, 1868 (N=425) Race percent N Black 6% 26 White 66% 280 Unknown 28% 119 Total 100% 425 Source: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1868, "Report of Outrages Committed upon Citizens [of the] State of Georgia from Jan 1st to Nov 15th, 1868." As seen in Table 11, whites committed most (66%) of these outrages. In fact, we can assume that all of the victims were Freedmen, since this is the report of outrages against the Freedmen of Georgia, and we can assume that virtually all of the unknown assailants were white. Table 12 Percent Arrested by Race of Perpetrator (including groups) in Outrages Reported by Freedman's Bureau in Georgia, January-November 15, 1868 (N=425)
in the early day of Jacksonian America. In fact, even outside the South it appears that lynching, during the Populist and Progressive Era, was both more barbaric and more racial, approaching Southern lynching in that regard, just as antebellum Southern lynching approached the Western model (hanging rather than burning) as the Civil War approached. The history of lynching, 1830-1930, includes at least two distinct models of collective violence: vigilantism and terrorism. Vigilantism tends to be associated with frontiers and political interests, such as cattlemen or farmers hanging rustlers or horse thieves in Colorado or in Indiana during Reconstruction. Terrorism tends to be associated with regions of refuge, such as Border States and racial or status-based political interests, in the antebellum South and West between 1830 and 1849. The extermination of Native American Indian claims to the West entailed terrorism and military as well as paramilitary expeditions, in Indiana shortly after the War of 1812 and before Jackson, an Indian Fighter in his own right, began to challenge both Jeffersonian and Southern ideals of Democracy. At the same time, in Southern Colorado, the associates of Saint Vrain and Bent’s Southwestern Empire waged running battles with the Utes, including the Pueblo Massacre. In California and New Mexico, the war of conquest waged against the Native and Mexican people was part of a frontier experience that colored vigilantism often mixed with terrorism. Learning to Lynch The invention of lynching as vigilantism and terrorism, in defense of class and status interests, was a product of the general transformation of the American republican capitalist system between 1830 and 1930. When and where lynching appeared in what form depended on
Republicans and capitalists who brought their slaves or Coolies into production that could no longer support independent artisans or yeomen. The economic threat to independent artisans, be they farmers or miners, was similar, but the culture of the Georgia Upcountry, Appalachia, and Cumberland Plateau was qualitatively different from the culture of Colorado mining camps. The Regulator tradition notwithstanding, the black slave was not a foreigner or even an invader in the same way as the Chinese were. Black slavery was a Southern tradition, and planters hired non-planter whites to discipline the master’s slaves and to catch runaways for generations before the lynching repertoire emerged. White yeomen learned to lynch in that context. Unlike the Chinese, the Negro was familiar as the detested other. Once the yeomen were no longer capturing runaways in service to the planter but defending their homes and their families from “fiends,” the brutality paralleled the holy wars, in this struggle between good and evil. This holy war of extermination had some parallels in the West, with the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, during the Civil War, but the situation was different, since only Easterners were inclined to defend “the savages” from military or paramilitary extermination efforts, largely supported by Southern as well as Western Democrats (Daily News and Tribune 1872b). Source: Savannah Daily News and Tribune 5 August 1872, p. 2 In the South, however, it was obvious that blacks would be required as laborers if not slaves. Thus declining barbarism and attempts to legitimate ante bellum lynching as vigilantism
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