Vigilantism

Definition: Illegal assumption of law-enforcement responsibilities by organized groups of private citizens

Significance: Vigilantism still exists in parts of the world where law enforcement is weak or corrupt, but no nation has ever developed a vigilante tradition as strong as that of the United States.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a tradition of vigilantism developed on America’s Western frontier because of the slowness with which authorized law enforcement caught up with new settlements. This situation contrasted with that of Canada, where the forerunners of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived in frontier towns to provide order almost as quickly as the towns arose. One reason for this difference was that law enforcement was regarded as almost exclusively a local responsibility in the United States, and new settlements often lacked the resources to pay for their own policing. Where local law enforcement did exist on the frontier, it generally lacked the resources to pursue criminals beyond its own jurisdiction.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, approximately five hundred vigilante movements arose to dispense local justice in the United States and its frontier territories. During the nineteenth century alone, American vigilantes executed at least 700 suspected criminals and subjected many thousands of others to whippings and other corporal punishments and expulsions from communities.

Vigilantism has not been unknown in other nations, especially those that developed their own frontiers, such as nineteenth-century New Zealand. In nineteenth-century Russia, peasants formed vigilante committees to combat horse thieves. Even Great Britain had vigilante movements, and these gave rise to such terms as “Cowper law,” “Jeddart justice,” and “Lydford law.”

The Nature of Vigilantism

Vigilante groups, or “committees,” as they often called themselves, were usually not disorganized mobs. They tended to have organized hierarchical structures, with the most powerful and wealthiest men in communities serving as their leaders. Most members of vigilante groups were from the middle class. A typical vigilance committee included several hundred men. Vigilantes considered themselves to be upholding law and order. They thus differed from organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan in not wearing masks or disguises. Vigilantes occasionally even held formal trials before punishing the criminal suspects they captured, and sometimes their trials even produced acquittals.

Vigilantism is, by definition, a group activity. In the modern United States, the term “vigilante” is sometimes applied to lone citizens who take the law into their own hands to seek personal revenge on criminals or conduct private crusades against crime, but the term is not properly applied to individual action.

The Early Frontier

Some of the earliest documented American vigilantes appeared during the 1760s in the back country of South Carolina in response to the predations of gangs that kidnapped girls to live as their wives in outlaw communities and robbed, raped, and tortured their victims. As the back country had neither courts nor sheriffs, middle- and upper-class citizens formed a vigilante committee called the Regulators. Within two years, the Regulators destroyed the outlaw gangs and drove their survivors out of the area. However, the Regulators did not stop there. They abused their newfound power by whipping other people merely for such crimes as idleness. To oppose the Regulators, a new vigilante group called the Moderators was formed. The Moderators fought the Regulators until 1769, when South Carolina’s colonial government finally provided local courts and sheriffs.

During the Revolutionary War of the late eighteenth century, Virginia vigilantes were led by Colonel Edward Lynch. Because rural Virginia then had no courts, Lynch set up his own courts to try people who were suspected of aiding the British. When his unofficial courts convicted suspected traitors, lynch mobs formed to whip the offenders and drive them out of town.

Vigilantism in the West

Soon after the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, a variant of vigilantism arose in the development of the anti-horse thief movement, which arose in the East and spread throughout the country rapidly. In many states anti-horse thief associations became official adjuncts of professional law-enforcement bodies and helped to combat the serious crime of horse stealing. As late as the early twentieth century, branches of the movement claimed hundreds of thousands of members, but the movement died out as automobiles displaced horses in transportation.

Meanwhile, the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 represented an important change in American political values. Common citizens became more confident in their ability to administer the government and less deferential toward elites. The years of Jackson’s two terms in office saw a great increase in vigilantism, and President Jackson himself even applauded vigilantism at one point. During his presidency, many towns along the Mississippi and other major navigable rivers suffered from the vices associated with gambling rings, which also promoted robbery and murder. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, for example, vigilantes drove out gamblers and killed some of them. An antigambling crusade inspired other vigilante movements up and down the Mississippi and its tributaries.

More typical, however, were vigilante groups that arose in response to specific local problems and disbanded as soon as the local problems were resolved. For example, during the early 1840s, outlaw gangs controlled several northern Illinois counties, whose legal governments were too weak to oppose them. In response, a bank president and a wealthy settler organized middle-class farmers into a committee called the Illinois Regulators. They used whippings and executions to break the power of the outlaw gangs.

One of the most famous vigilante groups of the nineteenth century was the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance that formed in 1851 in response to the growing violence caused by the huge influx of drifters attracted to the city by California’s gold rush. The city’s criminal justice system was unable to cope with the violence, and criminal gangs—such as the Sydney Ducks from Australia—so terrorized the city that law-abiding citizens became afraid to testify against them. Eventually, the city’s vigilantes arrested ninety-one people; they executed four of them, whipped one, sent fourteen back to Australia, and drove fourteen others out of California. Of the remaining fifty-eight whom they arrested, fifteen were handed over to government authorities, and the rest were released.

Although the 1851 San Francisco vigilantes were generally praised at the time, modern historians have taken a more critical view of their activities. They point out that one of the effects of the city’s vigilantism was to wrest control of San Francisco politics away from Irish Catholics and deliver it to the middle- and upper-class Protestants who formed the nucleus of the vigilantes.

In 1856, San Francisco saw the formation of the largest American vigilance committee ever created in a single area. During the six months before the vigilantes assembled, about one hundred murders occurred in the city. During the three months that the new vigilante committee was active, only two murders took place, and four people were executed by the committee.

During the early 1860s, Bannack, Montana, faced a unique crime problem because the town’s own sheriff was the head of a local criminal gang. In response to that situation, citizens of Bannack and nearby Virginia City formed vigilance committees that met openly, chose officers by election, arrested suspects, and conducted trials. During the winter of 1863–64, these committees hanged thirty criminals, including Bannack’s sheriff.

Acts of vigilantism continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the 1960s, a local activist in Newark, New Jersey, founded a neighborhood safety patrol during a time of racial unrest that critics later claimed was a vigilante group; in 1981, an unknown person fatally shot Ken Rex McElroy, a known criminal, in Skidmore, Missouri, in front of forty-five witnesses, none of whom would identify the shooter; and in 2000s, the vigilante group Ranch Rescue formed in the southwest US to remove undocumented immigrants and squatters from ranches in the area. In addition, many individuals created real-life superhero personals in order to enact vigilante justice in their neighborhoods and cities.

In the late 2021, several news sources reported that the smartphone app Citizen, formerly known as Vigilante, which is intended to keep users informed of criminal events in their area, was instead reigniting vigilantism in the US. The app allowed users to share information and take part in accusing and looking for suspects of various crimes.

Vigilantes as Heroes

One of the Montana vigilante leaders, Wilbur Fiske Sanders, later founded Montana’s state bar association and was one of the first two men that Montana elected to the US Senate when it became a state in 1889. Other vigilante leaders elected to high office included Wyoming governors Fennimore Chatterton and John Osborne, Missouri senator Francis Cockrell, New Mexico governor and congressman George Curry, Illinois governor Augustus French, Louisiana governor and senator Alexander Mouton, and California governor and senator Leland Stanford, Sr., who also founded Stanford University. Another former vigilante, Idaho governor and senator William John McConnell, published an autobiography, titled Frontier Law: A Story of Vigilante Days (1924), that was acclaimed as a model of good citizenship for American youth.

Bibliography

Abrahams, Ray. Vigilant Citizens: Vigilantism and the State. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. Print.

Brown, Richard Maxwell. Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.

Dimsdale, Thomas J. The Vigilantes of Montana: Being a Correct and Impartial Narrative of the Chase, Trial, Capture, and Execution of Henry Plummer’s Notorious Road Agent Band. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1953. Print.

Grabar, Henry. "How an App Is Fueling a New Form of Vigilantism."Slate, 8 June 2021, slate.com/technology/2021/06/citizen-arson-suspect-interview.html. Accessed 30 June 2021.

Moses, Norton H. Lynching and Vigilantism in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport: Greenwood, 1997. Print.

Neely, Richard. Take Back Your Neighborhood: A Case for Modern-Day “Vigilantism". New York: Penguin, 1990. Print.

Obert, Jonathan. "Vigilantism, again in the News, Is an American Tradition." The Conversation, 27 Aug. 2020, theconversation.com/vigilantism-again-in-the-news-is-an-american-tradition-141849. Accessed 30 June 2021.

Stewart, George R. The Committee of Vigilance: Revolution in San Francisco, 1851. Boston: Houghton, 1964. Print.