Organized Hatred: How Texas Lynch Mobs Operated Like Courts

The Lynch Law Legacy— Texas Vigilantes and White Supremacy, 1840–1915

In Antebellum Texas, (during slavery) and earlier, vigilantes instigated most lynching. Often acting under the leadership of the local elite, like a banker, sheriff, mayor, or some other white supremacist, the White vigilante mob usually handled its victims with considerable formality while imitating legal court procedure. The captured offender was “tried” before a vigilante judge and a jury consisting of either a select group of vigilantes or the whole of the assembled mob. Convictions most often resulted in whipping, followed by expulsion from the community, but at least seventeen vigilante organizations resorted to the noose, claiming some 140 lives in the 1800s.

Deadliest Vigilante Groups

The earliest of these groups, the Shelby County Regulators of 1840–44, killed at least ten people during the Regulator-Moderator War. The San Saba County lynchers, the deadliest of the lot, claimed some twenty-five victims between 1880 and 1896. Some Vigilante lynching decreased in the 1890s, but other varieties of mobs continued often by crazed racist citizens. This was quite common in East Texas where Blacks were burned alive in Sherman, Waco, Palestine, Slocum and other white supremacist towns.

Rise of Non-Vigilante Lynch Mobs

It is uncertain when the first of the non-vigilante lynch mobs appeared in Texas (those that were organized by crazed racists), but certainly they increased in frequency with the approach of the Civil War. In the five years preceding the war, mobs frequently sought out suspected slave rebels and White abolitionists. The most serious outbreak of this sort occurred in North Texas in 1860, when rumors of a slave insurrection led to the lynching of an estimated thirty to fifty slaves and possibly more than twenty Whites. The stresses of the Civil War, such as white supremacy, regional loyalties, political factionalism, economic tension, and the growth of the abolition movement, inured people to violence in a way that seemed to make lynching increasingly easy to contemplate. The ignorant ruled the roads. War generated tensions produced the greatest mass lynching in the history of Texas. Many racists sought to kill anyone suspected of supporting freedom for Blacks or supporters of Abraham Lincoln. The most horrible of these acts was the “Great Hanging at Gainesville,” when vigilantes hanged forty-one suspected Unionists during a thirteen-day period in October 1862.

Lynchings During Reconstruction

The use of white supremacist terror by lynch mobs appeared in Texas during Reconstruction as the KKK and similar organizations resorted to violent methods of restoring white supremacy. The humiliation of defeat by the North, destroyed southern slave owning governments, and violence, mistrust of all levels of government, alteration of the traditional racial order, and the mostly invented fear of violence by African Americans all contributed to a great outbreak of lynch-mob activity and instilled in many Whites a belief in a “right to lynch.” The once wealthy slave owners were angry and sought racist revenge.

Post-Reconstruction and the False Rape Narrative

After Reconstruction, lynch law increased, using the false charge of rape of a White woman by a Black Man, and began to be characterized by events in which mobs removed victims from legal custody, sometimes with the cooperation of legal authorities. In 1885 an estimated twenty-two mobs lynched forty-three people, including nineteen African Americans and twenty-four whites, one of whom was female. After this the number of lynching victims generally decreased, dropping to five in 1893, but increased again to twenty-six in 1897. The number of victims continued to decline (to twenty-three in 1908 and fifteen in 1909) until 1915, when there were thirty-two. The goal was to strike fear in the Black population to prevent them from voting and to keep them in jobs that were manual labor intensive.