Lynching: I learned something new today

[Chefguy]

A couple of things, actually. I was reading this article about the woman who accused Emmett Till of unwanted sexual attention in 1955, resulting in his murder by a couple of cowards. She has apparently finally recanted her story after all these years.

The story relates the horror of his murder and calls it a lynching, which surprised me, as I’ve assumed for the past 60 years or so that lynching meant hanging. Turns out it basically just means any form of illegal retributive murder, although commonly associated with hanging. After doing a bit of google-fu, I also found out that the term has been traditionally attributed (at least in the US) to a Virginia Quaker named Charles Lynch, who was able to get the Congress to pass Lynch’s Law to prevent prosecution of someone who has committed acts of necessity during war time.

[RealityChuck]

They actual origin of the term is very unclear.

@OED

‘The origin of the expression has not been determined. It is often asserted to have arisen from the proceedings of Charles Lynch, a justice of the peace in Virginia, who in 1782 was indemnified by an act of the Virginia Assembly for having illegally fined and imprisoned certain Tories in 1780. But Mr. Albert Matthews informs us that no evidence has been adduced to show that Charles Lynch was ever concerned in acts such as those which from 1817 onward were designated as “Lynch’s law”. It is possible that the perpetrators of these acts may have claimed that in the infliction of punishments not sanctioned by the laws of the country they were following the example of Lynch, which had been justified by the act of indemnity; or there may have been some other man of this name who was a ring-leader in such proceedings. Some have conjectured that the term is derived from the name of Lynche’s Creek, in South Carolina, which is known to have been in 1768 a meeting-place of the “Regulators”, a band of men whose professed object was to supply the want of regular administration of criminal justice in the Carolinas, and who committed many acts of violence on those suspected of “Toryism”.’ (N.E.D.)

The particulars supplied by Ellicott, together with other evidence, clearly establish the fact that the originator of Lynch law was Captain William Lynch (1742–1820) of Pittsylvania in Virginia. According to Ellicott, ‘this self-created judicial tribunal was first organized in the state of Virginia about the year 1776’; an article in the Southern Lit. Messenger (1836) 2 389 gives the date definitely as 1780.

Lynchings were probably hangings at first; it was a convenient way to get the job done in 1817. But the term became generalized as the people got more sadistically creative (there was a photo in Life Magazine of a lynching victim who had been chained to a post and tortured to death with a blowtorch). Here’s the photo:

https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/objects/unidentified-man-tortured-with-blowtorch-and-lynched-mississippi

[Ukulele_Ike]

Hanging is the most economical way to do a lynching. You just take the rope down afterwards and use it for something else.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@Ukulele_Ike

Hanging is the most economical way to do a lynching. You just take the rope down afterwards and use it for something else.

Or , better yet, cut it into pieces and sell them as souvenirs – instant profit!