Lynchings and Hangings in American History

Lynchings & Hangings - Page 3

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While the rest of the nation was busy fighting the Civil War, the deadliest campaign of vigilante justice in American history was erupting in the Rocky Mountains.

Fighting violent crime in a remote corner beyond the reach of the government, were the Montana Vigilantes. Sweeping through the gold-mining towns of southwest Montana, the armed horseman hanged twenty-one troublemakers in the first two months of 1864 alone. One of these so called trouble makers was elected Sheriff Henry Plummer, who was said to be the leader of a band of Road Agents called the Innocents.

After hanging Plummer and his two main deputies on January 10, 1864, the Vigilantes went on to hang more bandits in such places as Hellgate (Missoula), Cottonwood (Deer Lodge), Fort Owen and Virginia City.

Though these Montana Vigilantes are still revered in Montana as founding fathers, historians have provided evidence that the whole thing regarding Sheriff Plummer and his Road Agents may very well have been a fraud.

Vigilante Hanging

The evidence suggests that many of the early stories, on which the outlaw tale is based, were written by the editor of the Virginia City Newspaper, who was a member of the vigilantes and the story was fabricated to cover up the real lawlessness in the Montana Territory - the vigilantes themselves. Furthermore, the robberies taking place in Montana did not cease after the twenty-one men were hanged in January and February of 1864. In fact, after the "Plummer Gang" hangings, the robberies showed more evidence of organized criminal activity and the number of thefts increased.

Random lynchings continued in Montana Territory throughout the 1860s even though territorial courts were in place. Over a six year period, they lynched more than fifty men without trials until a back- lash against extralegal justice finally took hold around 1870. By late that same decade, however, Montana was again stirring with new settlement as railroad construction pushed westward and the vigilantes once again became active by making threats for “undesirables” to leave the territory. Reliance on mob rule in Montana became so ingrained that in 1883, a Helena newspaper editor advocated a return to “decent, orderly lynching” as a legitimate tool of social control.

Meanwhile, back on the Civil War battlegrounds, soldiers were being hanged by the dozens for crimes such as guerrilla activity, espionage, treason, but most often for desertion. One such major spectacle was between the dates of February 5th and Feruary 22nd, 1864, when twenty-two deserters were executed by hanging at Kinston, North Carolina.

Legal hangings were performed with regular frequency, the most public of which was the execution of the conspirators who were found guilty of killing Abraham Lincoln in 1865, just days after the close of the long and bloody Civil War. Mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth’s bullet, Booth escaped but was shot down 12 days later in his hiding place.

Mourning the loss of Lincoln, the government began a full scale investigation, identifying eight members of a conspiracy team, including one woman by the name of Mary Surratt. Four of these conspirators were hanged before hundreds of spectators on July 7, 1865 in the courtyard of the Old Arsenal Penitentiary in Washington, D.C. Mary Surratt was the first woman ever legally executed by the federal government of the United States.

These public spectacles of death for legal hangings and lynchings often took on a festival type atmosphere, as families attended with picnic baskets in hand, vendors sold souvenirs, and photographers took multiple photographs of the event, many of which wound up on penny postcards. It wasn’t to be until many decades later that public executions in the U.S. ceased in 1936.

Four of the Lincoln Conspirators are hanged before

hundreds of spectators on July 7, 1865 in the courtyard

of the Old Arsenal Penitentiary in Washington, D.C. Photo by

Alexander Gardener, 1865.

From the ashes of the ruthless and costly Civil War, a violent stage was set for outlaws, vigilante justice, and mob violence that killed thousands of men, women and children, most of them black. Upon the founding of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee, the lynching of African Americans grew to epidemic proportions. “Lynching” took on a whole new meaning as illegal hangings were soon attributed primarily to racist activities. From this time onward, mob violence was increasingly reflected in America’s contempt for racial, ethnic and cultural groups – especially those of the black population.

But, it didn’t stop there, these racial prejudices also extended to Native Americans, Mexicans, Asian immigrants and European newcomers.

Youth was no bar to execution by these vicious people, as on February 7, 1868, a 13-year-old African-American girl named Susan was hanged in Henry County, Kentucky for murder. Susan, who was babysitter, was accused of killing one of her charges.

The newspapers helped to make these hanging more public by reporting items such as this one that appeared: "she writhed and twisted and jerked many times." After her death many of the purportedly "solid citizens" asked for a piece of her hanging rope for a souvenir.

Lynchings during this time also targeted white men and women who were known to interfere with "Judge Lynch justice" against the blacks, those who had aided runaways, Union activists, and abolitionists.

Lynching in the Wild West also increased after the Civil War as it experienced its most brazen period of extralegal hangings. Though most often focused as either a deterrent to crime or a resolution in political disputes, there were waves of indiscriminate terror waged against Mexicans, Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans. In many of the western territories, no legal authority existed, so the vigilantes took it upon themselves to dispense justice. In others, these Old West pioneers were simply too enraged or impatient to await the legal decisions.

Continued Next Page

Ku Klux Klan rally.

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From the Rocky Mountain General Store

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