Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T13:39:24.826Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Keeping Vigil: The Emergence of Vigilance Committees in Pre-Civil War America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2018

Jonathan Obert  and
Eleonora Mattiacci
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the formation of vigilance committees—that is, coercive groups organized in a manner not officially sanctioned by state law and with the purpose of establishing legal and moral claims. We argue that these committees were primarily intended to help create civic political identities in contexts of social ambiguity and institutional instability, what we call social frontiers. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analysis, we find that these committees were more likely to form in contexts where levels of ethno-nationalist heterogeneity were high and where political institutions had recently changed. Contrary to common wisdom, vigilance committees were much more than functionalist alternatives to an absent state, or local orders established by bargaining, or responses to social or economic conflict. They constituted flexible instruments to counteract environments characterized by social and political uncertainty.

Type
Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 600 - 616
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

A list of permanent links to Supplementary Materials provided by the authors precedes the References section.

*

Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MWGOZS

References

Abrahams, Ray. 1998. Vigilant Citizens: Vigilantism and the State. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Arellano, Lisa. 2012. Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs: Narratives of Community and Nation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Bancroft, Hubert Howe. 1887. Popular Tribunals. San Francisco: The History Company.Google Scholar
Barde, Alexandre. 1981. The Vigilante Committees of the Attakapas, ed. Edmonds, David C. and Gibbons, Dennis, trans. Rogers, Henrietta Guilbeau. Lafayette, LA: Acadiana Press.Google Scholar
Bates, Robert, Greif, Avner, and Singh, Smita. 2002. “Organizing Violence.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 46(5): 599–628.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bateson, Regina. 2013. “Order and Violence in Postwar Guatemala.” PhD diss., Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
Benton-Cohen, Katherine. 2009. Borderline Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benton, Lauren. 2002. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Blalock, Hubert M. 1967. Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Blau, Peter M. 1977. Inequality and Heterogeneity: A Primitive Theory of Social Structure. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M. and Jones., Bradford S. 2004. Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brasseaux, Carl A. 1992. Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803–1877. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Brooks, James F. 2002. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Richard Maxwell. 1975. Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers. 2004. Ethnicity Without Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. 1993. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Capozzola, Christopher. 2002. “The Only Badge Needed is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America.” Journal of American History 88(4): 1354-82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John L., eds. 2008. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Corzine, Jay, Creech, James, and Corzine, Lin. 1983. “Black Concentration and Lynchings in the South: Testing Blalock’s Power Threat Hypothesis.” Social Forces 61(3): 774– 96.Google Scholar
Cox, Isaac Joslin. 1913. “The Louisiana-Texas Frontier, II.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 17(1): 1–42.Google Scholar
de la Roche, Roberta Senechal. 1996. “Collective Violence as Social Control.” Sociological Forum 11(1): 97–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglas, Mary. 1986. How Institutions Think. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.Google Scholar
Doyle, Don Harrison. 1978. The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825–1870. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Dutta, Nandana. 2017. “Public Anger, Violence, and the Legacy of Decolonization in India.” In Global Lynching and Collective Violence: Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Vol. 1, ed. Pfeifer, Michael J.. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, Laura. 2009. The People and Their Peace. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Ellickson, Robert C. 1991. Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ethington, Philip J. 1994. The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fearon, James D. and Laitin, David D.. 1996. “Explaining Interethnic Cooperation.” American Political Science Review 90(4): 715–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernandez, Mark F. 2001. From Chaos to Continuity: The Evolution of Louisiana’s Judicial System, 1712–1862. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass. 2006. Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Daniel M. 2004. The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, Roger V. 2003. Collision of Wills: How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Martin Alan. 2005. Citizens Defending America: From Colonial Times to the Age of Terrorism. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Griffin, Harry L. 1914–1915. The Vigilance Committees of Attakapas Country; or Early Louisiana Justice. In Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, ed. Quaife, Milo M.. Vol. 8, 146–159. Available at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x030226440;view=1up;seq=9.Google Scholar
Grimsted, David. 1998. American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hadfield, Gillian K. 2017. Rules for a Flat World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hadfield, Gillian K. and Weingast, Barry R.. 2013. “Law without the State: Legal Attributes and the Coordination of Decentralized Collective Punishment.” Journal of Law and Courts 1(1): 3–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Lance Edward. 2004. The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Huggins, Martha K., ed. 1991. Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America: Essays on Extralegal Violence. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Lattimore, Owen. 1962. Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Leeson, Peter T. 2014. Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better Than You Think. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Little, Craig B. and Sheffield, Christopher P.. 1983. “Frontiers and Criminal Justice: English Private Prosecution Societies and American Vigilantism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” American Sociological Review 48(6): 796–808.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Makovi, Kinga, Hagen, Ryan, and Peter, Bearman. 2016. “The Course of Law: State Intervention in Southern Lynch Mob Violence 1882–1930.” Sociological Science 3: 860–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDowell, Andrea. 2004. “Real Property, Spontaneous Order, and Norms in the Gold Mines.” Law & Social Inquiry 29(4): 771–818.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGirr, Lisa. 2016. The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Melucci, Alberto. 1996. Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mihm, Stephen. 2009. A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Monkkonen, Eric. 1981. Police in Urban America, 1860–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montoya, María E. 2002. Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict Over Land in the American West, 1840–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mott, M. H. 1859. History of the Regulators of Northern Indiana: Published by Order of the Central Committee. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Journal Company.Google Scholar
Murtazashvili, Ilia. 2013. The Political Economy of the American Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nevels, Cynthia Skove. 2007. Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness Through Racial Violence. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.Google Scholar
Nolan, Patrick Bates. 1971. “Vigilantes on the Middle Border: A Study of Self-appointed Law Enforcement in the States of the Upper Mississippi from 1840 to 1880.” PhD diss., Department of History, University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
Obert, Jonathan M. 2018. The Six-Shooter State: Public and Private Violence in American Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Osorio, Javier, Schubiger, Livia I., and Weintraub, Michael. 2016. “Vigilante Mobilization and Local Order: Evidence from Mexico.” Presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, Chicago, April 7–10.Google Scholar
Pfeifer, Michael J. 2004. Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Pfeifer, Michael J. 2005. “Law, Society, and Violence in the Antebellum Midwest: The 1857 Eastern Iowa Vigilante Movement.” Annals of Iowa 64(2): 139–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pfeifer, Michael J. 2011. The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Pfeifer, Michael J, ed. 2013. Lynching beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Phillips, Brian J. 2016. “Inequality and the Emergence of Vigilante Organizations: The Case of Mexican Autodefensas.” Comparative Political Studies 50(10): 1358-89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pratten, David and Sen, Atreyee, eds. 2008. Global Vigilantes. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Rosenbaum, H. Jon and Sederberg, Peter C.. 1974. “Vigilantism: An Analysis of Establishment Violence.” Comparative Politics 6(4): 541–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. 2012. American Lynching. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryan, Mary P. 1997. Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Skarbek, David. 2016. “Covenants without the Sword? Comparing Prison Self-Governance Globally.” American Political Science Review 110(4): 845–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smångs, Mattias. 2016. “Doing Violence, Making Race: Southern Lynching and White Racial Group Formation.” American Journal of Sociology 121(5): 1329–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, Daniel Jordan. 2004. “The Bakassi Boys: Vigilantism, Violence, and the Political Imagination in Nigeria.” Cultural Anthropology 19(3): 429–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Nicholas Rush. 2015. “Rejecting Rights: Vigilantism and Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” African Affairs 114(456): 341–360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Rogers M. 1999. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Stovel, Katherine. 2001. “Local Sequential Patterns: The Structure of Lynching in the Deep South, 1882–1930.” Social Forces 79(3): 843–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stringham, Edward Peter. 2015. Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sugden, Robert. 1989. “Spontaneous Order.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 3(4): 85–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tilly, Charles. 2003. The Politics of Collective Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tolnay, Stewart E. and Beck, E. M.. 1995. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Troesken, Werner and Walsh, Randall. 2017. “Collective Action, White Flight, and the Origins of Formal Segregation Laws.” NBER Working Paper Series, no. 23691.Google Scholar
Waldrep, Christopher. 1998. Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–80. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Waldrep, Christopher. 2002. The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, David J. 1997. “Conflicts and Accommodations: Hispanic and Anglo-American Borders in Historical Perspective, 1670-1853.” Journal of the Southwest 39(1): 1–32.Google Scholar
Whitehead, Neil L, Fair, Jo Ellen, Payne, Leigh A, Goldstein, Daniel M, and Arias, Enrique Desmond, eds. 2010. Violent Democracies in Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Winter, John D. 1963. The Civil War in Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Wood, Amy L. 2011. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Zerbe, Richard O. and Leigh Anderson, C.. 2001. “Culture and Fairness in the Development of Institutions in the California Gold Fields.” Journal of Economic History 61(1): 114–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Obert and Mattiacci Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MWGOZS
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Obert and Mattiacci supplementary material

Appendix

Download Obert and Mattiacci supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 72.4 KB