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By Root 781 0

mingled on the streets with the free citizens. Many slaves were allowed out in the evenings as well, and would often hold private gatherings known as darky parties. The committees would typically only stop and detain slaves for gross breaches of the peace. Thievery and public drunkenness were probably the most common offenses, followed closely by insolence. (In the plantation country there was a slightly different system of supervision, called the slave patrol, which searched for runaway slaves and was supposed to keep slaves from having any contact between plantations; service on the patrols was compulsory for white male citizens, but it was despised and widely evaded, and the enforcement of the rules was generally lax.)

Along the Mississippi, the main concern of the committees was the river people. The voyageurs had a bad reputation—partly for their rowdiness when they came onshore, but mostly for their casual, incessant, and universal thievery. The river made theft easy. If the crew of a boat saw something they wanted onshore—some plow or horse or cow, some cotton bale or wagonload of corn that had been left unattended, a stack of barrels on a deserted dock, a flock of sheep without a shepherd, whatever they could carry or push on board before they were noticed—they’d simply help themselves, adding it to the cargo bound for the New Orleans market. Even if they were spotted, there was little that the victim could do. There was no way of catching up with a boat once it was back in the current; there were no roads that would let a victim ride furiously to the next port town, no way of alerting the authorities downriver—when there were authorities downriver. The thieves were safe with their loot, just another anonymous boat in the armada, lost forever down the next bend.

This was one reason the boats congregated before the riverfront districts each night: they weren’t welcome anywhere else. It might seem, given how sparsely settled so much of the river was, that a boat could lay up almost anywhere and be undisturbed, but the banks away from towns were thought of as fantastically risky places for the river people. Farmers and plantation owners took for granted that anybody coming onto their property from the river was a thief. They hired regulators to patrol the banks, or else they armed their own farmhands—and none of them was shy about shooting trespassers. It could happen almost anywhere the voyageurs tried to beach a boat after sundown, in a secluded creek or a pristine wooded cove: they’d suddenly find themselves greeted by a bristle of shotguns. If they weren’t killed there and then, they’d quickly be conveyed to the local branch of the most powerful and most dreaded institution on the river—the courts of Judge Lynch.

The name came from a vigilante court that had been set up in Virginia during the Revolutionary War. The presiding judge had been a local planter named Charles Lynch; the defendants put on trial had been loyalists to the king. In the first few decades of the new Republic, the institution of the lynching court spread throughout the South and into the river valley. The judges were most often prominent local citizens—some of them justices of the peace, some of them at least with a smattering of legal training. The defendants were usually people who had been put on trial already in a government court and been found innocent when everybody knew they had done it, or else had been found guilty but given too light a sentence. Nobody thought of a traditional jury verdict as the last word. In the river valley it was sometimes cynically referred to as an “advisory opinion.”

Today we think the word “lynching” automatically means death by hanging. But that didn’t become the primary meaning till after the Civil War. Before then, it meant any sentence handed down by a lynching court. This might be a beating, or it might be a branding. Some of the lynched were tarred and feathered and rode naked out of town on a rail—a split wooden rail, and they rode the sharp edge: the punishment could leave the genitals permanently