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By Root 1770 0

the common macho code in fancy dress. In the North, the dominant ethos stressed rigid morality and self-control. This was the message of the penal code, and the message from the pulpit. Working-class culture had a different flavor. There was a kind of code of violence and honor among unattached laborers and artisans—and also among family men who left wives and children at home when they made the rounds of saloons and gambling dens. Elliott Gom, writing about the culture of workingmen in mid-century New York City, described the code as a “fighting cock’s valor in the face of death, a bulldog’s relentless charge into a bear’s grasp, or a prizefighter’s capacity to give and take punishment.” These men followed a “combative, physical” way of life; they found “their deepest sense of individual identity” in the “strut and swagger of leisure-time activities,” centered on “saloons, theaters, boxing matches, pleasure gardens, sporting houses, boardinghouses, and brothels.”17

One purpose of the criminal justice system was to control this energy, to keep this rampant physicality within limits, and to patrol, violently if necessary, the borders of respectability, protecting it from too many of these eruptions. This kind of patrol was, for example, one of the roles of the police. Unlike the South, the North never accepted or condoned this macho code—at least, not offically.

The true blood feud crops up mainly in the mountain regions of the South. The feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys has entered into American legend. In Williamson County, Illinois (“Bloody Williamson”), between 1868 and 1876, a “bloody vendetta” broke out, initially over a card game. The county had a history of violence and homicide. Perhaps, as one contemporary thought, what festered in this county was the contact between the “code of the South” and the “knock-down style of the West.”18 Some of these feuds “rubbed nerves raw in animosities bred by the Civil War, others in obscure conflicts whose precise origins had long been forgotten.”19 The feuds seemed archaic in their adherence to an ancient code of honor defined along precise family or clan lines.

The Vigilante Movement

This is one of the most familiar chapters in the history of American justice (or injustice). An enormous amount has been written about the vigilantes, some of it true. Despite all the books, novels, and movies (perhaps because of some of them), there are many issues about the history and meaning of the movement that are still not resolved.

Richard Maxwell Brown, probably the leading expert on the subject, has defined vigilantism as “organized, extralegal movements, the members of which take the law into their own hands.”20 This definition is as good as any. Some eruptions that fit this definition occurred as early as the eighteenth century—notably, the South Carolina Regulator movement in the late 1760s—and in the early part of the nineteenth as well. It is no accident that the prime examples seem to come from the South. Formal law was weak in the South, and vigilantism flourishes in a culture where the formal law is flabby and where rival “codes” enjoy legitimacy. There was, for example, a vigilante group in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1820s called the “Regulating Horn.” Their specialty was to tar and feather “guilty” people and run them out of town.21 In South Carolina, abolitionists were the main target of vigilantes in the 1840s.

By any measure, however, these were only curtain raisers. The golden age of the vigilante movement came later. It began in the 1850s and continued until roughly the turn of the century; and the dry and rocky states of the American West were the natural habitat of the movement. The two San Francisco “vigilance committees” of the 1850s were the most famous of them all, and were perhaps the immediate source of the term, vigilante. The vigilantes of Montana have earned themselves a solid second place.

San Francisco in 1851 was raw and new—a boom town, transformed from almost nothing to a big city in a few short years. When an American ship, the Portsmouth,