Id of the American Unconscious: Lynching and Mob Violence in Ohio, 1772-1938
David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker | Lynching and Mob Violence in Ohio, 1772-1938 | McFarland & Company | 2019 | 239 Pages
Donald Trump, who won Ohio handily in both 2016 and 2020, tapped into a primal element of the American spirit. He exploited a decades-long loss of faith in our civic institutions and portended a return to an era when extrajudicial violence was used to preserve the social order. Even before Trump’s 2016 campaign, reactionaries in many states had set the groundwork for widespread vigilantism in the form of open carry and stand your ground laws, but Trump threw gas on the fire by nodding approvingly to extremists such as Kyle Rittenhouse, the Proud Boys, and January 6th insurrectionists.
In the wake of the Trump presidency, with an eye to the damage done to public confidence in our governmental institutions, now is a good time to consider the importance of the rule of law in preventing and responding to vigilantism. With Lynching and Mob Violence in Ohio, 1772-1938, David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker help us do just that. Published in 2019, the book has even deeper resonance in the wake of January 6th. The authors compile a chronological summary of documented incidents of mob violence in Ohio from the colonial era through the Great Migration. The result is an important reference for anyone seeking to understand the vengeful id of the American unconscious and its role in one state’s history.
We often associate 19th century Ohio with the underground railroad and well-known Union officers such as Grant, Sheridan, Garfield, and Hayes, and former Confederate states with a culture of lynching. Meyers and Walker remind us that frontier justice was common in Ohio and other Midwestern states as well, and that all too frequently the targets here—just as in the South—were African Americans, women, and other marginalized people.
The authors point out that although Ohio was not immune from lynch mobs, the state showed leadership on the issue in 1896, when the Smith Act was passed by the Ohio General Assembly and signed by Governor Asa Bushnell. Designed to deter lynching by allowing victims and their families to sue county governments for failure to protect, the legislation was spearheaded by Harry C. Smith, a Black representative from Cleveland who was the founder and editor of the Cleveland Gazette, Cleveland’s long-running African American newspaper, and Albion Tourgée, a former Union officer born in Ashland County who settled in North Carolina after the war to become a bold—if frustrated—leader of efforts to reform Southern civic life during Reconstruction. Tourgée was also the attorney who argued unsuccessfully against segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson.
In their research, Meyers and Meyers Walker use newspaper archives, county histories, Ida B. Wells’ Red Record, and most importantly the Tuskegee Institute’s archive of lynching spanning the period of 1882-1968. The result is a record of brutality that is often hard to read. While many victims of mob violence were accused of crimes—often horrendous ones—the accused were always denied a trial or any due process. Justice was not served by these incidents in which alleged criminals were tarred and feathered, whipped, run out of town, or lynched for charges that were often minor and unproven.
In one of the early incidents of anti-Black racial violence documented in the book, the authors describe conditions in 1829 Cincinnati. As a growing number of free African Americans and escaped slaves began to settle in Hamilton County, white residents—especially poor immigrants—felt threatened and resorted to rioting. In August, 1829, a mob of some 300 Irish immigrants attacked Black-owned homes and businesses. Law enforcement failed to respond to the violence, and ultimately 1,200 African Americans fled to Canada.
The 1897 lynching of Charles Mitchell in Champaign County also exemplifies the pattern of racially-motivated extrajudicial violence. Mitchell, a young Black man who was first accused of beating a white woman, was later charged with rape. Mitchell pled guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in the Ohio Penitentiary, but even this was not sufficient punishment for locals who gathered around the courthouse and assaulted the rear doors of the jailhouse with sledgehammers. Although the Sheriff called on the Ohio National Guard to intervene, and the Mayor tried to calm the mob, officials ultimately stood aside, allowing a crowd estimated at over 1,500 to attack the jail and drag Mitchell outside, where he was beaten and hung from a maple tree. The book’s account is gruesome.
But not all incidents of mob violence were racially motivated. The authors cite Tuskegee data which shows that the Ohio lynching victims represented in their dataset were 38% white. Appendix data suggests an even higher percentage of white victims when other forms of mob violence are included. Victims were also targeted for a variety of real or perceived social ills, such as drunkenness, as in the case of Thomas Humphreys, who was dragged out of his home near East Liverpool one night in 1895, “savagely beaten and left hanging by his wrists from a tree;” miscegenation, as in an 1894 Ross County incident in which a 17-year-old white girl who had a Black boyfriend was stripped of her clothing and tarred and feathered by a mob of “some fifty men;” and abortion, as in an 1898 incident in Hocking County, in which a mob attempted to lynch a doctor alleged to have performed an abortion that resulted in the death of the mother. Among the most haunting incidents described in the book are the accounts of children “playing” at lynching, such as in 1902 when a group of boys ages 10-14 strung up a five-year-old boy in Toledo. The boy was found by workmen, “hanging from a tree limb, his face purple, and his tongue protruding.”
Looming in the background of all these acts is, of course, the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK was just one of many “vigilance committees” practicing extrajudicial violence in late 19th and early 20th-Century America. Such acts were also perpetrated by any number of local organizations known as “regulators” or “White Hats,” pro-labor and pro-management organizations, crime syndicates, and immigrant organizations as well as groups with more specific missions.
A Tuscarawas County group known as the “Avengers” announced their intention to enact vengeance against wife abusers, and an anti-Klan group, the Knights of the Flaming Circle, burned circles in front of Klansman’s homes. Lynching and Mob Violence in Ohio includes some surprising heroes: small town lawmen who risked their lives to protect accused criminals from angry mobs, national guardsmen who surrounded courthouses and faced down armed crowds, and Ohio governors who spoke bravely and took action against mob rule.
There is a puzzling gap between the scope identified in the title (1772-1938) and the first chapter, which begins in 1792. This omits one of the most notorious incidents of mob violence in Ohio’s history, the Gnaddenhutten massacre of 1782, in which a band of Pennsylvania militiamen, in retribution for Indian attacks on white settlers, rounded up nearly 100 Delaware from a Moravian mission and systematically murdered them, leaving only two survivors. Perhaps some historiological and semantic dilemmas may have led to this exclusion: Do incidents perpetrated by militias count as mob violence or as war crimes? Does one include slaughter that occurred on the battlefield, such as in Anthony Wayne’s defeat of Indian forces at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794? Whatever the standard, it is important to include Ohio’s history of violence against Native Americans to a greater extent, given the fundamental role this violence played in the state’s settlement and founding.
The authors frame the story of lynching in the context of African American history, most clearly in the introduction and chapter titles (“Segregation,” “Separate but Equal,” “The Great Migration”). This framing provides an editorial lens for understanding these incidents, and this is appropriate, given that mob violence was so frequently a means of racialized terror. Within the chapters, however, the authors take a more objective tone in recounting events and seem to hold back on questioning sources in cases where there was not another source directly contradicting the narrative.
Still, there are some moments when one wonders whether the authors should have interrogated their sources more aggressively, such as when a newspaper account from the 1880s indicates that a Black lynching victim committed rape, where it seems misguided to assume that information is accurate. It is, after all, the same assumption of guilt without due process that led the lynch mob to commit its crime.
Readers may assume that the incidents described in this book were not representative of prevalent attitudes in Ohio at the time, but a scan of newspaper archives from the period gives insight into attitudes of many Ohioans towards extrajudicial violence. The pages include frequent mention of a popular horse named “Judge Lynch,” a cheeky reference to the personified figure used to represent mob violence. The Plain Dealer was a Democratic newspaper highly critical of Reconstruction and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. In describing lynchings, Plain Dealer editors in the 1870s frequently seemed to favor vigilantes over their victims, using tongue in cheek headlines appearing to wink at the perpetrators of mob violence: “Judge Lynch Will Settle the Case,” “A Job for Judge Lynch,” and “Where is Judge Lynch?” Perhaps most telling is an editorial item from August 26, 1874:
Judge Lynch is holding court all over the South, and has a full docket. The telegraph records, almost every day, instances of men taking the law into their own hands. In every instance the crime is a heinous one, and the plea is made that violence is used because of the absence of any moral possibility of securing justice in any other way. Seducers, horse thieves, and other vermin seem to be having a rough time in the South just now.
There is something familiar about this language: quick to pronounce guilt, dismissive of doubt, sympathetic to violence when perpetrated by the right kind of people. The rhetoric we hear from Trump and his supporters echoes 19th-century lynching apologists like some ghastly chorus.
As citizens of a northern state, and as denizens of the 21st Century, we distance ourselves from the history of violence at the core of our national character. In so doing, we attempt to distance ourselves from culpability. Meyers and Walker remind us that racism, xenophobia, and mob violence are chaotic forces that have never been contained by state borders or by the passage of centuries. However slow-moving and miopic our legal system can be, it is clearly better than quick accusal and blind rage.