This book explains how lynching arose precisely out of an ideology of the sense of the rights accrued to someone possessing democratic freedom, and the sense that those rights were directly and formally a product of the earliest and most essential mandates of a slave society. Lynching can be broadly defined as the extralegal pursuit of vengeance against an offender of communal moral standards. The rationales and justifications that lynchers and their apologists produced to tease out the defenses of lynching reveal about American political discourse of all kinds are examined in this book. The m ... More

This book explains how lynching arose precisely out of an ideology of the sense of the rights accrued to someone possessing democratic freedom, and the sense that those rights were directly and formally a product of the earliest and most essential mandates of a slave society. Lynching can be broadly defined as the extralegal pursuit of vengeance against an offender of communal moral standards. The rationales and justifications that lynchers and their apologists produced to tease out the defenses of lynching reveal about American political discourse of all kinds are examined in this book. The most recent manifestations of the American political discourse has been African American public figures who have described their political ordeals as a high-technology lynching, and media coverage of a legal indictment for perjury as exhibiting an unethical, illegal lynch mob mentality. In more regular ways, frequent metaphorical employments of lynching are used as a way of terrorizing black Americans. The book demonstrates that the practice of lynching in American history is not only shameful but also central, and recognizes the ways in which lynching is both a metaphor and literal continues to haunt the republic.