The Hazards of the Flush Times: Gambling, Mob Violence, and the Anxieties of America's Market Revolution

Abstract

William Mills knew the residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi, would be criticized for what happened in their city in the summer of 1835. An argument at a Fourth of July barbecue escalated into a paroxysm of extralegal violence, achieving a frenzied climax two days later as a mob led by the local militia hanged five men accused of being professional gam blers. The victims' bodies dangled from a gallows for twenty-four hours before they were cut down and buried in a ditch. Reflecting on such a gruesome display of popular fury, Mills, an attorney and the editor of the Register, understood his neighbors' ac tions would meet with censure from those who had not an opportunity of knowing and feeling the dire necessity out of which it originated. But he made no apologies. On the contrary, Mills used his newspaper to justify the mob's behavior, arguing that gamblers so compromised virtue, honor, and the rule of law that only violence carried out by the most respectable citizens could bring public decency, moral integrity, and legal order to Vicksburg.1 Mills was right that not every American would see the imperative to hang five men without trial, no matter what their supposed crimes, and other accounts of the riot called into question whether its perpetrators could claim to be acting on behalf of decency and order at all. Despite Mills's efforts at vindication, the rioters found few sup porters outside the city. Instead, across the nation Vicksburg became a byword for un justifiable violence and the excesses of mob rule that threatened to undermine the author ity of the law, if not republican government itself. In just days the city had acquired a reputation for brutality that would take decades to live down. Critics' skepticism about how Mills framed matters was reasonable, as his defense of the gambling riot masked as much as it revealed about the social realities of the place and time that produced the rampage. Although the rioters proclaimed themselves defenders of sound economic and cultural values, was a boomtown created by the easy