Reflecting older Anglo-American custom, vigilantes justified their violence by emphasizing a community’s right to self-protection. While this included physical protection against alleged criminals and other threats, it could also include perceived threats against a community’s moral or social system. This right could be invoked when members of the community felt the formal legal system failed to adequately dispense justice, as was the case in 1784 South Carolina. An ex-loyalist named Love returned to his community after fighting in the Revolution under the command of the notorious “Bloody Bill” Cunningham. Love had allegedly tortured and killed family members of local residents during the war, and was summarily arrested for murder upon returning to the area. Residents brought Love before Judge Aedanus Burke, who rendered an acquittal. Burke recounted that the crowd, while preserving “every appearance of respect towards the Judge,” seized Love, brought him to the woods, tied a rope around his neck, “and bid him prepare to die.” Ignoring the former loyalist’s pleas, the vigilantes hanged Love and quietly dispersed back to town (Ward 1846, 586). As Love’s case demonstrates, extralegal collective violence, while often directed against outsiders to a given community, could take the form of what Senechal de la Roche terms “communal lynching,” or lynching directed against insiders (Senechal de la Roche 2001, 133). Not only had Love served on the wrong side of the war, he had allegedly killed kin of his fellow community members in a cruel manner. These accusations meant that locals could not tolerate Love’s re-entry, and the acquittal rendered by the formal legal system left extralegal collective killing as the community’s final form of recourse.
While vigilante killing could ostensibly stem from communities seeking justice or self-protection, they were also a potent means of controlling outsiders or the less powerful. By at least the 1820s, vigilante executions of African Americans began to emerge as a potent form of racial terror. The extralegal killings of African Americans, distinguished by extreme and cruel ritual, provided a gruesome warning against disrupting White control or challenging the institution of slavery. Whether enslaved victims of vigilante killings were guilty of their alleged crimes is immaterial. The purpose was not justice, but a ritualized and bloody assertion of White authority. A mob in Charleston, South Carolina burned a young enslaved person alive in 1824 for supposedly committing murder (Pfeifer 2011, 96). Three years later, in Perry County, Alabama a crowd at least 70 persons burned another enslaved African American to death for allegedly stabbing a White man. The mob brought the man before a judge, who waived his formal legal authority and summarily “acted as president of the mob.” According to the newspaper account, the horrifying scene was far from an isolated act of brutality, as the victim was the second African American “who has been thus put to death without Judge or Jury in that country” (Horrid Occurrence 1824). That these mobs burned their enslaved victims to death was no accident, but reflected the older Anglo-American legal tradition of punishing, in Pfeifer’s words, “petit treason, the reversal of the patriarchal order of the household through the revolt of wife against husband or slave against master” (Pfeifer 2011, 41). While not all instances of vigilante violence in the early republic were lethal or racially-motivated, the brutality and ritual of these Southern killings hinted at the terror which would become increasingly widespread in the years to come.