Violence

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Collective violence bracketed the Civil War and was important both to events leading up to the war and to its results.

In an upsurge of rioting in the mid-1830s, proslavery mobs predominated. Northern and Southern rioters attacked African Americans and abolitionists, attempting to silence the latter, but differences in sectional mob patterns laid the foundation for the coming struggles. Northern mobs commonly attacked property, and authorities checked them if they grew brutal or murderous; most of the people killed were rioters. Southern riots usually aimed at persons and were often sadistic or deadly, especially if the victims had been labeled abolitionists or insurrectionists. Authorities more often supported than controlled Southern mobs, so rioting became a communally sanctioned system of terror that quelled internal questioning of slavery.

In the 1850s, Catholic immigration and slavery were the primary explosive issues that resulted in violence. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which required Northern authorities to aid in the capture of runaway slaves, led mobs to attempt rescues of captured slaves. Intensifying sectional furies led to the collapse of the Whig Party in 1854, and the American Party (1849–1856; often called the Know-Nothing Party) briefly replaced it and tried to defuse the issue of slavery by directing anger against Catholics and immigrants. This led to deadly election rioting between Know-Nothings and Democrats in the border and river cities of Baltimore, Washington, Louisville, St. Louis, and New Orleans.

The Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 increased the level of social violence. Southern proslavery and Northern antislavery forces moved into the territory of Kansas, turning it into a battleground when, in a prelude to the Civil War, partisan bands on both sides carried out deadly raids. On May 21, 1856, a proslavery mob sacked the town of Lawrence, which was known as a hotbed of abolitionists. A few days later, in retaliation, John Brown led a small band that killed five proslavery men in an incident that became known as the Potawatomie Massacre. Because of the violent partisan conflict, Kansas became known as "Bleeding Kansas."

In May 1856, violence spilled onto the floor of Congress when South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks caned Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner senseless at his Senate desk in response to Sumner's speech "The Crime against Kansas." The South reveled

in the caning and in Brooks's claim that "it would not take much to have the throats of every abolitionist cut." Northerners recoiled at his demonstration of the South's violence against anyone who questioned slavery.

The start of the Civil War did not end mob violence. Insurrection panics continued in the South, draft riots erupted in the North, and guerilla bands devastated both the South and the border states. In 1865, peace brought renewed rioting against African Americans in the South, including insurrection scares and widespread urban mobs, the deadliest of which were in Memphis and New Orleans. The war's devastation and political uncertainties, the military occupation of the South, and the sudden transformation of chattel into free people fostered some violence on all sides, but the predominant pattern quickly became white mobbing to enforce the subordination of African Americans. Economic concerns and social subjugation motivated much of the antiblack violence, but the terror was primarily a political tactic to destroy all efforts to give African Americans full rights as citizens. Many groups were involved in this communally sanctioned terrorizing of blacks, but the best known is the Ku Klux Klan. Many able black leaders, and many whites who promoted interracial cooperation, were murdered. Slavery-related violence before the war claimed more than 600 victims, but many thousands were murdered by mobs during Reconstruction, and countless thousands more were whipped, humiliated, brutalized, maimed, raped, robbed, and driven from their homes. With Southern whites securely in power, the number of African Americans killed by lynching rose steadily in the 1880s and 1890s, ensuring that African Americans had no pretensions to equal rights or the protection of law.

Mobbings over African-American issues were far from the only social violence in the decades surrounding the Civil War. Before the war, major ethnic, land, and urban riots occurred, and anti-Catholic mobs were numerous, especially in New England. Catholic-Protestant hostilities climaxed in Philadelphia in 1844. Mobs drove Mormons from their homes in Missouri and Illinois. The Mormons settled in Utah in 1847, where a decade later they perpetrated the nation's largest single mob murder at Mountain Meadows. Elsewhere in the West, vigilantes killed hundreds of victims. After the war, anti-Chinese riots and Indian wars and massacres showed the reach of American intolerance of other races. The great railroad strikes of 1877 initiated a half-century of violence, mostly against labor, giving the United States the world's deadliest industrial history, but the toll taken by this class rioting was still smaller than that of the nation's racial struggles.

Violence was part of American life in ways that went beyond fighting in wars. Violence increased as white Americans confronted other races and cultures, as they struggled and often fought over lands claimed by Indians and by Mexico in the West, as struggles became more common between workers and management, as whites in the South sought to maintain their supremacy over free African Americans, and as more deadly and accurate firearms were invented.

Indian Removal and Response; Ku Klux Klan; New York City Draft Riots.

Feldberg, Michael. The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Grimsted, David. American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Senkewicz, Richard M. Vigilantes in Gold Rush San Francisco. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.

Taft, Philip, and Ross, Philip, "American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome." In Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr. New York: New American Library, 1969.

Trelease, Allen W. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Tunnell, Ted. Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.

Wright, George C. Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and "Legal Lynchings." Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

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