The Midwestern Making of Racial Lynching: The Lynching of African Americans in the Civil War and Reconstruction

The era of the Civil War and Reconstruction marked a turning point in the history of racial violence, especially lynching, in the United States. However, racially motivated lynchers were not only active in the South. The North, and in particular, the upper Midwest, was also an important setting for the emergence of a practice of racial lynching in the Postbellum United States. For instance, on September 6, 1861, in Milwaukee, a crowd of fifty to seventy-five Irishmen forced their way into the city jail and seized an African American, Marshall Clark, whom they hanged from a pile driver. Lynchers accused Clark of being an accomplice to a fatal assault on an Irishman. Another instance of racially motivated lynching occurred in Michigan in 1866. On August 27, in Mason, a town south of Lansing, a mob of approximately three hundred white men seized an eighteen-year-old African American "mulatto," John Taylor, from jail and hanged him. The mob alleged that Taylor had attacked three female relatives of his former employer with an axe. This paper will closely examine the social, cultural, and political contexts of the lynchings in Wisconsin in 1861 and Michigan in 1866 to suggest how the war's reconfiguration of racial, class, and political relationships led some white Midwesterners to use lynching violence to assert white supremacy, even as other white Midwesterners excoriated the resort to racial violence. The paper will argue that, just as the North and the Midwest pioneered segregation of public facilities in the Antebellum era and resisted the enfranchisement of African American men through the late 1860s, white Midwesterners lynched blacks, even before racial lynching became widespread in the South.