Lynchings and Hangings in American History

Lynchings & Hangings - Page 4

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Virginia City, Nevada, 1866, Lawrence & Houseworth.

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However, not all of the hangings in the Wild West were performed by vigilantes. One such instance was the hanging of John Millan in Virginia City, Nevada on April 24, 1868. Millan was accused of killing a popular prostitute named Julia Bulette. Bullette who began her one-woman operation in 1861 was so popular among the locals that she rode in the Fourth of July Parade and was made an honorary member of the local fire department. On January 20, 1867, Julia was found strangled in her home with her jewels and furs missing. On the day of her funeral, every mine in the area shut down, and 16 carriages filled with the town's leading men followed the hearse to the cemetery. Several weeks later, John Millan was arrested for her murder. While awaiting trial, Virginia City wives treated him like a hero, bringing him cakes and wine in jail. Found guilty, he was sentenced to hang. On April 24, 1868, crowds gathered from all over the state to watch Millan die on the gallows that were constructed one mile outside town.

Back in the turbulent South, Wyatt Outlaw, a town commissioner in Graham, North Carolina, was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan on February 26, 1870. Outlaw, who was the president of the Alamance County Union League of America (an anti Ku Klux Klan group), helped to establish the Republican party in North Carolina and advocated establishing a school for African Americans. The Klan hanged him from an oak tree near the Alamance County Courthouse. Dozens of Klansmen were arrested for the murders of Outlaw and other African Americans in Alamance and Caswell Counties. Many of the arrested men confessed, but, despite protests by Governor William W. Holden, a federal judge in Salisbury ordered them released.

Elizabethtown, New Mexico Later the same year, on the raw frontier of the West, gunfighter Clay Allison sat brooding about a locally convicted murder by the name of Charles Kennedy. While drinking in an Elizabethtown, New Mexico saloon on October 7th, he soon stirred up sentiment against Kennedy. In no time, he led a lynch mob across the street to the jail, where they dragged Kennedy screaming from his cell. He was then taken to a local slaughterhouse where he was hanged and his body was mutilated with huge knives used for butchering cattle. Allison cut the body down, and using an ax, chopped Kennedy's head off and jammed it onto a pole. Allison then rode his horse all the way to Cimarron where he put the head on display on the bar of Henry Lambert's saloon. Later, someone stuck it on the corral fence at the St. James Hotel where it remained for months and eventually mummified.

During this time, former slaves and free black men continued to be executed such as ten black men on October 19, 1870 in Clinton, South Carolina. In November four black men were lynched in Coosa County, Alabama; four were lynched in Noxubee County, Mississippi, and a federal revenue agent was hanged in White County, Georgia.

Lynchings continued in earnest in the South and the Old West over the next couple of years. In 1873, Klansman laid siege to the small town of Colfax, Louisiana, which was defended by black veterans of the Union army. On Easter Sunday, April 13, armed with a small cannon, the whites overpowered the defenders and slaughtered 50 blacks and two whites after they had surrendered under a white flag.

James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok, State

Historical Society of Wisconsin

While hangings were taking place all over the South and the Wild West, one of the most famous was that of Jack "Broken Nose" McCall on March 1, 1877. Having gone to Deadwood, South Dakota in 1876, using the name of Bill Sutherland, he sat in on a poker game with Wild Bill Hickok. Losing all his money, Wild Bill generously gave him back enough to buy breakfast, but advised him not to play again until he could cover his losses. Humiliated, McCall shot Hickok in the back of the head the very next day. He left Deadwood after killing Hickok, but was later arrested in Laramie, Wyoming, brought back to Yankton and put on trial for Hickok's death. Found guilty, he was sentenced to hang. On March 1, 1877, he stood trembling on the scaffold, begging for someone to save him. He was buried in Yankton in an unmarked grave with the rope still around his neck.

James Miller, a 23-year-old man described as a "mulatto," was the first man to be sent to the gallows after Colorado achieved statehood in 1876. Miller, a former soldier, was convicted of shooting and killing a man who had earlier forced him, at gunpoint, to leave a dance hall reserved for whites. When Miller was hanged in West Las Animas on February 2, 1877 the trap door would at first not open.

When it eventually fell, the trap door detached and came to rest on the ground. Miller dropped, but the hanging rope was too long, and Miller’s feet came to rest on the trap door below. The trap door was then removed, so that Miller could swing freely. He then strangled for 25 minutes before expiring. The local sheriff, reportedly distraught over the botched execution, resigned and left town.

Back in the East, in what has become known as "Pennsylvania's Day With the Rope," eleven "Molly Maguire" coal miners were hanged by the state for murder and conspiracy. Their real crime was attempting to organize the mine workers. On June 21, 1877, all of them were hanged for their "obstinacy."

The “ethnic cleansing” of Chinese from the American West was another dark chapter in our nation's history. Writes John Higham in Strangers in the Land, “No variety of anti-European sentiment has ever approached the violent extremes to which anti-Chinese agitation went in the 1870s and 1880s.” Many of the estimated 200 American lynchings victimizing people of Asian descent occurred during this time.

In 1880, many Chinese lived in Hop Alley, Denver, Colorado's Chinatown. In October of that year an anti-Chinese riot resulted in the lynching of a Chinese man and the injuring of many others. A mob of approximately 3000 people had gathered in Hop Alley, consisting of “illegal voters, Irishmen and some Negroes.” Only 8 Policemen were on duty at the outbreak of the riot. Firemen, brought in to disperse the crowd, hosed them with water but this only made them angrier. The mob began to destroy Chinese businesses, loot their homes, and injure many of them. According to the Rocky Mountain News, the Chinese quarter was “gutted as completely as though a cyclone had come in one door and passed out the rear. There was nothing left...whole.”

It is difficult to identify the youngest person legally executed in American history, but records indicate that a ten-year-old Cherokee Indian boy was hanged for murder in 1885.

On October 28, 1889, Katsu Goto was a merchant, interpreter and lynching victim. He spoke fluent English and was a contract laborer who took over a store in Hanokaa, Hawaii, a plantation village. His customers not only were Japanese, as he was, but also Hawaiian and Haole (white). White plantation owners disliked him, and his popularity with the community created competition with shopkeepers loyal to the white Protestant overseers.

Nine days before he was lynched, on October 19th, a fire broke out at the nearby Overend Camp and Goto and seven other workers were accused of arson. Though he never had a trial, Goto was ambushed and killed by four men. His body was found swinging from a telephone pole the next day. After a lengthy investigation, the perpetrators were arrested, tried, and sentenced to O'ahu Prison.

After a black rape suspect was forcibly taken from a county jail and lynched in front of a crowd of 9,000 people in Ohio, The Cleveland Leader published this editorial on June 19, 1897 that echoed the sentiments of many of the American people.

“The people of Ohio have seen murderers tried and convicted of murder in the 1st degree two or three times over and finally set free. They have known many desperate and dangerous criminals to be sent to the penitentiary for long terms and released soon enough to make the whole costly process of the courts seem little better than a farce . . . That is the real reason why, once in a while, the passion and indignation of the masses break through all restraints and some particularly wicked crime is avenged . . . ”

In 1891, a number of Italian Americans were accused and arrested for the murder of the local police chief. At the news of the not guilty verdict, hysteria took hold of a crowd of several thousand citizens, who stormed the jail where the former suspects were held. On March 14, 1891, eleven Italian Americans were dragged into the streets, beaten and hanged. “Public opinion around America generally endorsed the action of the mob, applauding the citizens’ efforts to stop the mafia. As a result, President Benjamin Harrison was the first resident to request a federal law against lynching later that year. The incident in New Orleans and the recurring violence against African-Americans was becoming an international human rights embarrassment.

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