Mob Rule

During the 1850's, the white population of the southern United States suffered a collective psychotic break with reality. A faction of northern white men, known by their political sentiments as Copperheads, shared this emotional, intellectual, and psychic collapse. These people, led by racist incendiaries known as Fire Eaters, convinced themselves that a Republican victory at the polls would mean the forced miscegenation of the races. (Never mind that the institution of slavery, with its institutionalized rape of slave property, had already produced a vast population of mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons throughout the South.)

These psychotics wanted - insisted! - that the North adjust its laws to define slaves as property, the subject of Torts, never Equity, in court. They worked themselves up to a fever pitch of insanity over this issue. These Lords of Creation loudly asserted their victim status as second class citizens. Unless the North secured them in their slave property throughout the Union, northern concepts of equal rights were gross hypocrisy, they insisted. They seduced themselves with the notion that mob violence was simply a collective expression of their First Amendment right to free speech.

Mark Twain ably captured this collective descent into unreality in LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI: "... Sir Walter Scott... sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm... Most of the world has now outlived a good part of these harms... but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still... There the genuine and wholesome civilization of the 19th Century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense progressive ideas and progressive works mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried."

This jejune romanticism, mixed with racism, idealized mob rule.

In St. Louis, in April 1837, two free black riverboat sailors were stopped by police and asked for their identification papers. They did not have any such papers. A mulatto shipmate, Francis McIntosh, knowing they would be sold into slavery, intervened. The two men escaped, but McIntosh was captured. The two policemen cracked a few jokes about the lynching awaiting their prisoner, inciting McIntosh. He killed one of his captors and badly wounded the other. A white mob joined the sheriff to capture McIntosh. The sheriff took the prisoner to jail. Soon, another white mob showed up at the jail, assaulted the sheriff and liberated his keys. They hauled McIntosh out of his cell, took him outdoors and tied him to a tree at 10th and Chestnut Streets. A pyre was promptly constructed. As the flames lapped higher, McIntosh, his facial features altering in the heat, begged someone to shoot him and end his agony. One man, moved by pity, raised his gun. The mob, enjoying this roasting of human flesh, prevented the mercy killing. McIntosh suffered to the utmost extremity.

A Grand Jury was convened to look into the matter. A judge, appropriately surnamed Lawless, informed the jurors that he considered it his duty to state his opinion that they should not act at all unless they could determine whether the roasting of McIntosh was the act of the few or the act of the many. If the jurors could pin the crime on a small number of individuals separated from the mass, they should indict them all without exception. On the other hand, if the roasting of McIntosh had been the work of "congregated thousands, seized upon and impelled by that mysterious, metaphysical, and almost electric phrenzy... then, I say, act not at all in the matter. The case then transcends your jurisdiction. It is beyond the reach of human law." In other words, mob violence is the highest form of justice, beyond Appeal.

A newspaper publisher, Elijah P. Lovejoy, condemned this barbarism in St. Louis. Soon, the mob showed up and destroyed his printing press. He got a new press, which they promptly destroyed again. And, again. Lovejoy moved across the river to Alton, Illinois, where he continued his anti-slavery crusade. Three more times his press was destroyed. Finally, a mob (including many of the leading citizens of Alton) murdered Lovejoy after burning down his business.

At a memorial service for Lovejoy at Western Reserve College, Laurens P. Hickok succinctly stated the moral predicament for enlightened Northerners: "The crisis has come. The question now before the American citizen is no longer alone, 'Can the slaves be made free?' but, are we free, or are we slaves under Southern mob law?"

In 1853, an ambitious young man named George G. Vest graduated from Transylvania College in Lexington, Kentucky, well read in the Law. With the local bar oversupplied with attorneys, he decided to strike out for California. Along the way, he stopped for awhile in the hemp-growing, slave-owning region of central Missouri. The local judge appointed him to defend a black man accused of murder. He succeeded in getting the man acquitted. A mob formed, seized the black man, and, burned him at the stake. They very nearly applied the torch to young Mr. Vest.

A decade later, Missouri cast its ballots for Stephan A. Douglas in the 1860 election. In a somber mood after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, a convention gathered to consider an ordinance of secession. Mr. Vest, now a respected member of his central Missouri community, urged secession:

"I stand here today. come weal, come woe, sink or swim, survive or perish, to cast my political fortunes for all time, to give all that I have, and all that I am, to that people which is mine by lineage, by birth, and by institutions - the people of the South. The God who protected our forefathers, will protect the Southern people. We who live on the broad prairies of Missouri, with but few slaves around us, cannot appreciate the dangers that environ the men of the South, their wives and children... The horrors of a servile insurrection; their fear, and their hatred of a party which has elected to power a man who declares that slavery must be confined to the slave States, so that it may, like a scorpion, sting itself to death. How? In the blood and carnage of African lust and African rage."

Mr. Vest had never faced an African mob. After a decade of reflection, he blamed primitive Africans, the victims, for the violence of his own people. Clearly, the man had suffered a psychotic break with reality. And those who voted for secession suffered from the same delusions.

Again today, a significant percentage of the white population of the United States has suffered a collective psychotic break with reality. Led by the fire eaters of right wing talk radio, they nurse ridiculous grievances. Like the privileged slavemasters of the Old South, they argue that they are the victims of racism. Like the mob which formed to roast McIntosh, today's right wing nuts refused to exercise any self-restaint during the Professor Gates fracas. Like George G. Vest, they blame the victims for the evils of institutionalized racism. Like the Copperheads of Lincoln's day, they paint a wild, hate-filled caricature of the President and insist the office was obtained by illegitimate means. Collectively, they have gone berserk.

If the 1860's provide any guide for the rest of us, we should make preparations. Our mentally ill countrymen live in a world of dreams and phantoms, a subjective world they prefer, insulated from facts and reason. We outnumber them 7-3, but they are well-acclimated to violence. They own far more guns. Like the Secessionist rush to seize the arsenals in early 1861, they are hoarding as many guns as possible. Sales have skyrocketed since Obama was elected.

A psychopath can only be restrained by superior power. The raucous town hall meetings of August have filled them with delusions of grandeur. They must be reminded that we outnumber them. We must remain visible. It would be wise to spend some time at the shooting range, in groups, sporting t-shirts and bumper stickers identifying ourselves as supporters of progressive ideas. Hopefully, our visibility will sober them, enabling them to heed rational advice - such advice as Sam Houston gave his fellow Southerners as the storm gathered:

"... let me tell you what is coming. Your fathers and husbands, your sons and brothers, will be herded at the point of the bayonet... You may, after the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, as a bare possibility, win Southern independence... but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe in the doctrine of state rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche..."