'In hot blood': White-on-white lynching and the privileges of race in the American South, 1889--1910

This dissertation explores the role that white-on-white lynching played in defining the privileges and responsibilities of whiteness during the southern white supremacy campaigns of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The random and trivial nature of black lynching served to suppress efforts by blacks to challenge their place in society. White lynching, however, typically followed the victim's abuse of the privileges, or abandonment of the responsibilities, of whiteness. By examining the reasons that whites lynched other whites, this study uncovers the political, social, racial, and religious ideologies that both defined and threatened white society in this period.; Southern white supremacists of the period increasingly believed that the newfound political activism of white agrarians imperiled their own dominance. They feared that Populist insurgents might unite with other Democratic foes to form an electoral block capable of overwhelming the Democratic majority and thus, white supremacy. As a result, southern white supremacists sought to unify the white electorate along racial lines. That effort required that they define whiteness and police its boundaries, creating in effect a pageant in which whites were expected to perform their whiteness as a sign of racial fidelity.; The supremacists found southern courts, especially appellate courts, unwilling to take part in this pageant, preferring instead to administer the law without regard for the dictates of whiteness. In the courts' stead the supremacists policed the borders of race themselves. In so doing, they used extra-legal violence to impose their ideal of a social hierarchy based on both racial and class differences upon the mass of southern society.; By 1910, however, white supremacy had been legally enshrined by various constitutional disfranchising schemes. With the racial order no longer endangered, the burgeoning economic order jeopardized by unchecked violence, and white officials increasingly inclined to prosecute white lynchers as a result, white-on-white violence all but disappeared, and lynching became an almost exclusively white-on-black phenomenon.