Vigilantism

American vigilantism flourished for more than a century, from 1767 until around 1900. There were precedents in Europe, but no vigilante tradition developed in the Old World. American vigilantes took the law into their own hands to establish order and stability in newly settled areas, and to ensure the safety of person and property. The original term was regulator, but in the mid-nineteenth century, it was gradually replaced by the word vigilante. The tradition arose on the colonial South Carolina frontier, in response to the presence of criminal bands in the 1760s. Congregating in their own villages, these bands proceeded to rob the prosperous and rape and abduct women. Lacking county courts and sheriffs, some 5,000 to 6,000 “regulators” took the law into their own hands, shattered the outlaw villages, and destroyed a network of horse thieves stretching from South Carolina to Virginia; they also flogged the idle and immoral. Their campaign took sixteen lives from 1767 to 1769. [Page 1447]This prototypical vigilante technique—often referred to as “lynch law”—spread westward to the Pacific Coast during the nineteenth century.

From 1767 to 1909, there may have been as many as 500 local vigilante movements, but a conservative estimate documents 326 such bands. About one-third of them operated in the eastern half of the nation, with the remainder in the western states and territories. Strongest in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, the eastern vigilantes preyed chiefly on horse thieves and counterfeiters, while mining camp and boomtown desperadoes, as well as cattle and horse stealers, attracted the fatal attention of the western vigilantes. The three most active vigilante states were California, Montana, and Texas. Among California's forty-three vigilante episodes, one in San Francisco featured the biggest and most powerful of all American vigilante movements. In 1856, its 6,000 to 8,000 members destroyed a political machine of Irish Catholics accused of corruption. In Montana, the vigilante mystique was more entwined with pioneer society than it was anywhere else. There a well-chronicled vigilante movement of relentless ferocity killed thirty outlaws who attacked travelers in the 1860s. Generating fifty-two vigilante bands that took a toll of 140 lives, Texas was home to more such movements than any other state; one of them dominated San Saba County for sixteen years.