It's a Riot! Mob Violence in Antebellum America

Abstract

In 1837 mob violence roiled the usually peaceful community of Elmira in upstate New York. Visiting ministers attending an annual conference of Methodist churches organized an antislavery meeting of over three hundred people. [W]orthy and respectable citizens, including Elmira's leading business and civic leaders, tried to stop the gathering, arguing that it would create a public disturbance. Undeterred, abolitionist forces met in nearby Davis Island. Soon, a noisy rabble, armed with tin horns, . . . pans, ... rattles... and implements of rowdyism and riot, disrupted the meeting.' Elmirans' attack against abolitionists was not unique. Anti-abolitionist riots were a regular occurrence in the antebellum United States. So too were riots against prostitution, gambling, and drinking. Crusades against these alleged evils provoked rioting by men determined to keep practicing them. Partisan politics and theatrical performances also sparked mob violence as did conflicts among different class, ethnic, religious, and racial groups. The emergence of an urban youth culture in the early nineteenth century exacerbated rowdyism and rioting. Historians have made a good start in exploring mob violence in antebellum America. In 1970 Leonard Richards tackled the challenging task of identifying those who mobbed abolitionists in Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America. During the 1970s historians began exploring how class, ethnic, racial, and religious divisions prompted various kinds of rioting in the antebellum United States. Michael Feldberg, for example, authored two books on rioting, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study in Ethnic Conflict (1975) and The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (1980). The violence which characterized this nation in the 1960s and early 1970s whetted historians' interest in mob violence. So too did the work done by historians of European collective violence such as George Rude, E.P. Thompson, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Charles Tilly.2