... can only be an organism, complex element of society in which collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form. --Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (circa 1929-1935) Although Gramsci here discusses how Communist Party must go about organizing its base of power, his analysis serves as an apt description of how modern prince of white mob expressed collective will in South after Reconstruction and well into twentieth century. Gramsci provides an appropriate epigraph, because I find no better example of hegemony, defined by Gramsci as the `spontaneous' consent given by great masses of population to general direction imposed on social life by dominant fundamental group (12), than coercive power of white vigilante in post-Reconstruction South. The hegemonic power of white culture combined vigilante justice with legalized prejudice and segregation in order to dictate local qualifications for citizenship that superseded federal constitution. Historians long noted persistence and power of white mob in post-Reconstruction South. David Godshalk claims that mob formed collective will that had specific methods and goals: addition to its symbolic function in reaffirming power and dominance of white men, mob played powerful role in intimidating blacks, controlling black behavior, discouraging open black resistance against racial injustice, and preventing black economic competition (147). Certainly, landscape in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was riddled with racially-motivated violence, manifested by numerous riots and lynchings. In this article I will analyze one particular racial conflict that occurred in Hamburg, South Carolina in 1876, then compare it to Albion Tourgee's fictionalized version of race and mob in his 1879 novel, A Fool's Errand. My analysis of Hamburg riot and A Fool's Errand demonstrates that is used as weapon by whites in order to restrict or discourage elements of black citizenship. Furthermore, events of Hamburg delineate beginnings of ideology of redemption through violence, and A Fool's Errand operates as response to that ideology. We can view redemption through as something akin to regeneration through violence posited by Richard Slotkin in his seminal study of American frontier. Slotkin claims that first Europeans in America regenerated fortunes, their spirits, and power of their church and nation through violent conquest of native peoples (5). Slotkin details how that process was couched explicitly in religious terms: explorers and settlers of Americas were endowed with a sense of shared mission--a belief that their presence in New World was decreed from above with definite ends in view and that deviation from those ends was equivalent to mortal sin (37). That sense of shared mission evolved into Christian evangelism so prevalent in states in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with Civil War, many southerners were swept by furious religious revivalism (Faust 63). After political cause of Confederacy was lost, that revivalism was transformed into what Charles Reagan Wilson calls southern civil religion, culture steeped in ritual that saw way of life as Christian imperative for virtue and order (219ff). Amy Kaplan has theorized that reassuring order of domestic color line provided comfortable touchstone for soldiers fighting in Spanish-American War in 1898 (222). She contends that Rough Riders have been understood as unifying cultural symbol that healed conflicts of Civil War and Reconstruction (232). …