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Daniel F. Littlefield Jr.’s Seminole Burning and the Historiography of the Lynching of Native Americans
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
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- Type
- Special Forum: Lynching in the New South A Quarter of a Century Later
- Information
- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 81 - 86
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
1 Fitzhugh Brundage, W., Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993 Google Scholar).
2 For the history of lynching across American regions, see Pfeifer, Michael J., Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1878–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Pfeifer, , The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
3 Situated awkwardly and complexly between the South and the West, Oklahoma and Texas, where a significant number of lynchings of Natives also occurred, are not included in the comprehensive inventory of confirmed Southern lynchings that Tolnay and Beck devised for their 1995 book A Festival of Violence and have subsequently expanded and refined. Tolnay, Stewart E. and Beck, E.M., A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995)Google Scholar. For detailed analysis of the history of lynching violence against Native Americans, see Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 86–87; Pfeifer, The Roots of Rough Justice, 6, 9–10, 46–50, 53; Pfeifer, Michael J., Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013 CrossRefGoogle Scholar), 2, 5, 8–9. For documentation of lynchings of Native Americans in midwestern and western states, see Pfeifer, Lynching Beyond Dixie, 261–317. For mapping of the lynchings of Native Americans, albeit based upon the incomplete data generated by sporadic and uneven scholarly attention to date, see http://www.monroeworktoday.org/explore/, accessed Aug. 8, 2018.
4 Gonzales-Day, Ken, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carrigan, William and Webb, Clive, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Villanueva, Nicholas Jr., The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017)Google Scholar.
5 For the underrepresentation of the American West and racially marginalized lynching victims that were not African Americans in the data collected by the anti-lynching movement and in the historiography of American lynching, see Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 44–48; and Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, xiv.
6 I am grateful to Benjamin Hoy, now of the University of Saskatchewan, for his crucial point that Americanist scholars have consistently erred by seeking to interpret Native violence against white settlers—violence which sometimes spiraled into retaliatory lynching by whites—through a vantage point of Euro-American law and culture rather than through an understanding of Native legal systems and culture. Benjamin Hoy, “Racial Violence and the Creation of National Spaces,” paper presented at the American Historical Association Meeting, New York City, Jan. 3, 2015.
7 For a key interpretation asserting the central role of violence in European imperial expansion and Native adaptation in the Great Basin of the Intermountain West, see Blackhawk, Ned, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
8 Littlefield, Daniel F. Jr., Seminole Burning: A Story of Racial Vengeance (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press 2006)Google Scholar.
9 Brundage’s highly influential taxonomy of lynch mobs is expressed in Lynching in the New South, 17–48.
10 Littlefield Jr., Seminole Burning, 6–8.
11 Littlefield Jr., Seminole Burning, 63–64.
12 Littlefield Jr., Seminole Burning, 171–72.
13 Littlefield Jr., Seminole Burning, 104–70.
14 For the characterization of the rural white proletariat as “shiftless,” see, for example, Littlefield Jr., Seminole Burning, 23, 25.
15 Carrigan, William D., The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 36 Google Scholar.
16 Carlson, Keith Thor, “The Lynching of Louie Sam,” BC Studies 109 (Spring 1996): 63–79 Google Scholar.
17 Carlson, “The Lynching of Louie Sam,” 79.
18 McIlwraith, David, dir., The Lynching of Louie Sam (Vancouver, BC: Wild Zone Films, 2004)Google Scholar; Stewart, Elizabeth, The Lynching of Louie Sam: A Novel (Toronto: Annick Press, 2012)Google Scholar. Resolutions expressing regret for the 1884 lynching of Louie Sam in Kilgard, Canada, were adopted by the Washington State Senate, Feb. 27, 2006, and by the Washington State House, Mar. 1, 2006. I participated along with Keith Thor Carlson in conversations with the Washington Lieutenant Governor’s Office and legislative staffers as the resolutions were drafted and also discussed the matter with several Canadian journalists at the time and those conversations inform my analysis here. For representative Canadian press coverage of the revival of interest in the Louie Sam affair in the mid-2000s, see “Only Lynching in Canada’s History,” Winnipeg Free Press, Nov. 27, 2005, and John Vaillant, “The Lynching of Louie Sam,” The Walrus, Dec. 12, 2008, available at https://thewalrus.ca/the-lynching-of-louie-sam/, accessed Aug. 7, 2018. For the history of mob violence perpetrated by English-speaking Canadians, including a handful of lynchings, see Brent M.S. Campney, “‘Canadians Are Not Proficient in the Art of Lynching’: Mob Violence, Social Regulation, and National Identity,” in Pfeifer, Michael J., ed., Global Lynching and Collective Violence, Vol. 2, The Americas and Europe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 115–43Google Scholar.
19 Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935.
20 Leonard, Stephen J., Lynching in Colorado 1859–1919 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado)Google Scholar; Campney, Brent M.S., This is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Berg, Manfred, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 123 Google Scholar.
22 For a brief survey of the periodization and patterns of Oklahoma lynchings although with little analysis of the lynching of Natives, see Dianna Everett, “Lynching,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, www.okhistory.org, accessed Aug. 9, 2018. For a non-scholarly but useful treatment of lynchings in Oklahoma, see Clark, Charles N., Lynchings in Oklahoma: A Story of Vigilantism, 1830–1930 (Oklahoma City: N.p., 2000 Google Scholar, 2008). Also see Estes, Mary Elizabeth, “An Historical Survey of Lynchings in Oklahoma and Texas” (MA thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1942)Google Scholar.
23 For an effort, albeit imperfect and incomplete, to document lynchings of Natives in a number of midwestern and western states, see Pfeifer, Lynching Beyond Dixie, 261–317.
24 Frank E. Vyzralek, “Murder in Masquerade: A Commentary on Lynching and Mob Violence in North Dakota's Past, 1882–1931,” North Dakota History 57:1 (1990): 23–24; Emmons County Record (Williamsport, ND), Nov. 19, 26, Dec. 3, 10, 1897; Erdrich, Louise, The Plague of Doves (New York: HarperCollins, 2008)Google Scholar.