Scholars of lynching debate its definition, some even
concluding that it is impossible to define, reported the High Country News. One commonly used, but still
contested, definition from 1940 listed several necessary conditions: “There
must be legal evidence that a person has been killed, and that he met his death
illegally at the hands of a group acting under the pretext of service to
justice, race, or tradition.” Because definitions are difficult and evidence
elusive, the precise number of lynching victims remains unknown. But the death toll
hovers somewhere around 5,000.
For many Westerners, the word “lynching” brings to mind the
vigilantes and what came to be known as “frontier justice.” The terms play on
the long-held mythologies of a violent frontier where the need for justice sometimes
preceded an established legal system. In this telling, men banded together to
fulfill community obligations, punishing those who transgressed the laws of
property (e.g., they stole livestock) or person (e.g., they raped women). White
men formed posses and delivered swift justice to the guilty. This storyline
goes back to some of the earliest Western historians, such as Hubert Howe
Bancroft, who found much to admire in these actions. In his two-volume “Popular
Tribunals,” in 1887, Bancroft characterized the San Francisco Vigilance
Committees as “virtuous, intelligent, and responsible citizens with coolness
and deliberation arresting momentarily the operations of law for the salvation
of society.” Lynchings were regarded as exercises of sovereignty, the will of
the people — as American as the frontier from which the nation supposedly
sprang. Not surprisingly, the reality was more complicated.
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