Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947 by Michael J. Pfeifer is an excellent work of both breadth and depth. Breadth, in that that he covers a wide span of time, more than 50 years – and a variety of geographic locations: Iowa, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Washington, California, Louisiana, and New York. And depth, because from there, he examines events and patterns in each of these geographic locations in extraordinary detail.

Pfeifer is diligent about statistics and excellent at using newspaper coverage. He provides close examinations of the politicians, alleged victims of crime, alleged offenses, and alleged perpetrators, who became victims themselves when lynched. Pfeifer reveals a dynamic portrait of lynching culture, belief, and norms which operated in each of the states he examines. In doing so, he reveals a surprising variety of potential causes, class conflicts, racial or ethnic conflicts (not just whites vs. blacks), economic insecurity, and social instability which were contributing factors to lynching in the various locales.

Of course, my primary interest in this work is his examination of lynching in Louisiana. He divides the state into several subregions, which all have their own lynching, social, class, economic, and cultural patterns. I concentrated on the area known as the Cotton Belt – the Red River and Ouachita River valleys (including the areas of Shreveport and Monroe), and the Mississippi Delta – the northeast part of the state bordering the Mississippi River, which is the vicinity of Milliken’s Bend.

How this work relates to Milliken’s Bend:

Although Pfeifer’s book focuses on violence from the mid-1870s forward, I nevertheless found it very useful for my study of the same areas in Louisiana before, during, and after the Civil War. His study shows that in the Delta, where whites were vastly outnumbered by African-Americans, lynching was most often prompted by labor disputes.  Farther west, in Monroe and Shreveport, there were larger communities, with well-established white elites. African Americans made up a smaller proportion of the total population. And, it would seem, they were more vocal, politically active, and resistant to white oppression. Black activists often paid with their lives.

Pfeifer points out that not all lynching victims were blacks at the hands of white mobs, but he shows that by the late 19th century, lynching had become so commonplace that the court system did not even place some crimes on the docket. The judge and attorneys knew “justice” would take its own course, outside of the law, and they need not interfere.

What struck me as most significant about Pfeifer’s book, as it relates to the story of Milliken’s Bend, is that it demonstrates that northern Louisiana was an extraordinarily violent place in the latter half of the 19th century. Racial violence and intimidation was omnipresent in many areas, as was resistance. Too often, this latter point is forgotten. Although his book concerns the time period after the Civil War, it nevertheless gave me an understanding of the culture of the region, and there was no reason to think it would have been any less hostile during the upheaval of the Civil War – or when former slaves were seen throughout the region wearing the uniform of a Yankee soldier.

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Full citation: Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947
by Michael J. Pfeifer (Urbana: Univ. Illinois Press, 2004).