Vigilantism in the United States of America is defined as acts which violate societal limits which are intended to defend and protect the prevailing distribution of values and resources from some form of attack or some form of harm.[1]
In the new nation a citizen's arrest became known as a procedure, based on common law and protected by the United States Constitution when civilians arrest people whom they have either seen or suspect of doing things which are wrong.
The exact circumstances under which this type of arrest, also known as a detention, can be made varies widely from state to state.[2]
When the British set up the American colonies, they established law enforcement along British lines. Population growth was slow and the law enforcement system worked. One important exception came in North Carolina, where rapid migration to the frontier established a new western region without a strong local government. There emerged the only major vigilante movement in colonial America. The term "vigilante" was not yet in use, and the acitivists called themselves "regulators." The poor farmers bitterly resented the overpaid corrupt local officials appointed by a distant elite, By 1768 the decentralized movement was highly popular in the backcountry. When two local leaders were arrested, 700 Regulators turned out to free them. In 1771 the governor led a force of a thousand men into the heart of the uprising, but Regulators led twice that number into the Battle of Alamance. The insurgents lacked leadership and strategy. They were quickly routed with nine Regulators dead. Seven of the leaders were executed and others fled the state. When the American Revolution broke out four years later, North Carolina's elite supported the Patriot cause, while the Regulator districts were much more likely to be neutral or pro-British.[3][4]
San Francisco 1850s
Portsmouth Square in 1858, San Francisco Committee of Vigilance site of origin
The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance was a vigilante group formed in 1851 and reorganized in 1856 in response to rampant crime and corruption in San Francisco, California. The need for extralegal intervention was apparent with the explosive population growth following the discovery of gold in 1848. The small town of about 900 individuals grew to a booming city of over 20,000 very rapidly. This growth in population overwhelmed the small law enforcement system. The boss-controlled Democratic Party machine was dominant, and used Irish Catholic men to manipulate the precinct vote totals. The opposition Know Nothing movement represented the Protestant businessmen, and they formed the vigilance movement to counter the Democratic machine. The vigilantes hanged eight people and forced several elected officials to resign. The Committee of Vigilance formally relinquished power after three months, but its retired leaders ran the new Republican Party and controlled local politics for the next decade.[5][6]
The Night Riders was the militant, terrorist faction of tobacco farmers during a popular resistance to the monopolistic practices of the American Tobacco Company (ATC) of James B. Duke. On September 24, 1904, the tobacco planters of western Kentucky and the neighboring counties of West Tennessee formed the Dark Fired Tobacco District, or Black Patch District Planters' Protective Association of Kentucky and Tennessee (called "the Association" or PPA). It urged farmers to boycott the ATC and refuse to sell at the ruinously low prices being offered in a quasi-monopoly market.[7]
Groups of a more militant faction of farmers, trained and led by Dr. David A. Amoss of Caldwell County, Kentucky, resorted to terrorism—most notably, the lynching of the Walker family and the lynching of Captain Quentin Rankin and the kidnapping of Colonel R. Z. Taylor. Becoming known as the Night Riders, due to their night-time activities, they also targeted and destroyed the tobacco warehouses of the ATC. Their largest raid of this type was their occupation and attack on areas of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1907.[8]
Mexican border
Formed in 2000, Ranch Rescue was an organization in the southwest United States. Ranchers called upon Ranch Rescue to remove illegal immigrants and squatters from their property. It was shut down later.[when?]
Lynching was the most common form of vigilantism in the United States with several thousand episodes during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The great majority of victims were African American men in the South.[11]
In the 1750s, Gideon Gibson Jr. became a significant landowner in South Carolina. Due to various tax acts, some shareholders abandoned their lands along the Santee River, resorting to raiding others' farms for survival. With no help from the distant Royal Governor, the local farmers formed vigilante groups to capture and publicly punish these raiders, marking the rise of vigilantism in the area.
During racial unrest in Newark, New Jersey, in the late 1960s, local activist Anthony Imperiale, later a city councilman and state legislator, founded a neighborhood safety patrol that critics claimed was a vigilante group.[14]
In a number of U.S. cities, individuals have created real-life superhero personas, donning masks and costumes to patrol their neighborhoods, sometimes maintaining an uneasy relationship with local police departments who believe what they are doing could be dangerous to the costumed crusaders themselves, or could devolve into vigilantism.[16][17][18][19]
In October 2011 in the United States, a vigilante operating in Seattle, named Phoenix Jones was arrested and forced to reveal his true identity, after a confrontation with two groups who were fighting.
Brian Thompson, the 50-year-old CEO of the American health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in Manhattan, New York, on December4, 2024. The shooting occurred early in the morning outside an entrance to the New York Hilton Midtown hotel. Thompson was in the city to attend an annual investors' meeting for UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare. Prior to his death, he faced criticism for the company's rejection of insurance claims, and his family reported that he had received death threats in the past. The suspect, initially described as a white man wearing a mask, fled the scene. On December9, 2024, authorities arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and charged him with Thompson's murder in a Manhattan court.[21] For further information, see Killing of Brian Thompson.
Posse comitatus, the "citizen enforcer" band is either capable of acting lawfully as an exceptional agent of justice; or it is in danger of deteriorating into lawlessness which is motivated by populistmalice
Bancroft, Hubert Howe. Bancroft's Works: Popular Tribunals vol. 1 (1887) online vol 1 covers San Francisco in 1850s.
Bancroft, Hubert Howe. Bancroft's Works: Popular Tribunals vol. 2 (1887) online vol 2, covers San Francisco in 1850s.
Brown, Richard Maxwell. Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (Oxford UP, 1975) pp 91–180.
a reprinting of Richard Maxwell Brown, "The American vigilante tradition." in Violence in America: Historical and comparative perspectives (1969): 1:121-169. online
Chang, Lennon YC, Lena Y. Zhong, and Peter N. Grabosky. "Citizen co‐production of cyber security: Self‐help, vigilantes, and cybercrime." Regulation & Governance 12.1 (2018): 101–114. online
Culberson, William C. Vigilantism: Political history of private power in America (Greenwood, 1990).
Dillon, Mark C. Montana Vigilantes, 1863–1870: Gold, Guns and Gallows (University Press of Colorado, 2018) online
Grimsted, David. "Rioting in its Jacksonian setting." American Historical Review 77.2 (1972): 361–397. online
Han, Lori Cox, and Tomislav Han, eds. Political Violence in America (2 vol, Bloomsbury, 2022).
Hernando, Matthew J. Faces like Devils: The Bald Knobher Vigilantes in the Ozarks (U of Missouri Press, 2015).
Hing, Bill Ong, "Vigilante Racism: The De-Americanization of Immigrant America" Donkeyphant, Vol. 9 (Summer 2002). online
Hoehne, Patrick. "" Murderous, Unwarrantable, and Very Cold": Mapping the Rise of Extralegal Collective Killing in the United States, 1783–1865." Journal of Digital History 2.1 (2022): 20211007. online
Jacobs, David, Chad Malone, and Gale Iles. "Race and imprisonments: Vigilante violence, minority threat, and racial politics." Sociological Quarterly 53.2 (2012): 166–187. online
Lancaster, Guy. "Lynching White Men in the Arkansas Delta: Understanding Vigilante Violence beyond the Racial Frame?" Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies (2022) 53#2 pp, 88–100.
McGrath, Roger D. Gunfighters, Highwaymen and Vigilantes (U of California Press, 1984)
Messner, Steven F., Eric P. Baumer, and Richard Rosenfeld, "Distrust of Government, the Vigilante Tradition, and Support for Capital Punishment," Law & Society Review (September 2006) online
Nisbett, Richard E. Culture of honor: The psychology of violence in the South (Routledge, 2018).
Noble, Madeleine M. "The White Caps of Harrison and Crawford County, Indiana: A Study in the Violent Enforcement of Morality" (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1973. 7415815).
Rosenbaum, H. Jon, and Peter C. Sederberg, eds. Vigilante politics (U of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), essays by experts on USA , Africa and Ireland. online
Rosenbaum, H. Jon, and Peter C. Sederberg. "Vigilantism: An analysis of establishment violence." Comparative Politics 6.4 (1974): 541-570. online
Shapira, Harel. "The Minutemen: Patrolling and performativity along the U.S. / Mexico border" in Vigilantism against Migrants and Minorities ed by Tore Bjørgo and Miroslav Mareš (Routledge, 2019) pp 151–163.
Tolnay, Stewart Emory, and Elwood M. Beck. A festival of violence: An analysis of southern lynchings, 1882-1930 (U of Illinois Press, 1995).
Vigilantism is the act of preventing, investigating, and punishing perceived offenses and crimes without legal authority.
Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged or convicted transgressor or to intimidate others. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle for maximum intimidation. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in all societies.
John Neely Johnson was an American lawyer and politician. He was elected as the fourth governor of California from 1856 to 1858, and later appointed justice to the Nevada Supreme Court from 1867 to 1871. As a member of the American Party, Johnson remains one of only two members of a third party to be elected to the California governorship.
A vigilance committee is a group of private citizens who take it upon themselves to administer law and order or exercise power in places where they consider the governmental structures or actions inadequate. Prominent historical examples of vigilance committees engaged in forms of vigilantism include abolitionist committees who, beginning in the 1830s, worked to free enslaved people and aid fugitive slaves, in violation of the laws at the time. However, many other vigilance committees were explicitly grounded in racial prejudice and xenophobia, administering extrajudicial punishment to abolitionists or members of minority groups.
The Black Patch Tobacco Wars were a period of civil unrest and violence in the western counties of the U.S. states of Kentucky and Tennessee at the turn of the 20th century, circa 1904–1909. The so-called "Black Patch" consists of about 30 counties in southwestern Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee. During that period this area was the leading worldwide supplier of dark fired tobacco. It was so named for the wood smoke and fire-curing process which it undergoes after harvest. This type of tobacco is used primarily in snuff, chewing and pipe tobacco.
The San Francisco Committee of Vigilance was a vigilante group formed in 1851. The catalyst for its formation was the criminality of the Sydney Ducks gang. It was revived in 1856 in response to rampant crime and corruption in the municipal government of San Francisco, California. The explosive population growth following the discovery of gold in 1848 was cited as the source of the alleged need for the revival of the committee. The small town of about 900 individuals grew to a booming city of over 20,000 very rapidly. Founders alleged that the growth in population overwhelmed the previously established law enforcement, and led to the organization of vigilante militia groups.
Internet vigilantism is the act of carrying out vigilante activities through the Internet. The term encompasses vigilantism against alleged scams, crimes, and non-Internet-related behavior.
The Banditti of the Prairie, also known as The Banditti, Prairie Pirates, Prairie Bandits, and Pirates of the Prairie, in the U.S. states of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio and the Territory of Iowa, were a group of loose-knit outlaw gangs, during the early to mid-19th century. Though bands of roving criminals were common in many parts of Illinois, the counties of Lee, DeKalb, Ogle, and Winnebago were especially plagued by them. The new crime wave in the region of the frontier Midwest may have occurred following the crackdown on Southern outlaws by the rising vigilante-regulator movement and the breakup of the criminal syndicate of John A. Murrell and his gang, the "Mystic Clan", in the Southern United States. In 1841, the escalating pattern of house burglary, horse and cattle theft, stagecoach and highway robbery, counterfeiting and murder associated with the Banditti had come to a head in Ogle County. As the crimes continued, local citizens formed bands of vigilantes known as Regulators. A clash between the Banditti and the Regulators in Ogle County near Oregon, Illinois resulted in the outlaws' demise and decreased Banditti activity and violent crime within the county.
Anti-pedophile activism encompasses social actions against pedophiles. It also includes acts of anti-pedophile citizen vigilantism conducted by vigilante groups, some of which have operated alongside government agencies in countries such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
The Night Riders was the name given by the press to the militant, terrorist faction of tobacco farmers during a popular resistance to the monopolistic practices of the American Tobacco Company (ATC) of James B. Duke. On September 24, 1904, the tobacco planters of western Kentucky and the neighboring counties of West Tennessee formed the Dark Fired Tobacco District, or Black Patch District Planters' Protective Association of Kentucky and Tennessee. It urged farmers to boycott the ATC and refuse to sell at the ruinously low prices being offered in a quasi-monopoly market.
Jack Powers, whose real name was John A. Power, was an Irish-born American outlaw who emigrated to New York as a child and later served as a volunteer soldier in the Mexican–American War in the garrison of Santa Barbara, California. During the California Gold Rush, he was a well-known professional gambler and a famed horseman in the gold camps as well as in San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.
The Planters' Protective Association (1904–1908) was an agrarian organization formed in the Kentucky and Tennessee "Black Patch" dedicated to fair business and the protection of farmers' economic interests in light of the market dominance of the American Tobacco Company.
White caps were groups involved in the whitecapping movement who were operating in southern Indiana in the late 19th century. They engaged in vigilante justice and lynchings, with modern viewpoints describing their actions as domestic terrorism. They became common in the state following the American Civil War and lasted until the turn of the 20th century. White caps were especially active in Crawford and neighboring counties in the late 1880s. Several members of the Reno Gang were lynched in 1868, causing an international incident. Some of the members had been extradited to the United States from Canada and were supposed to be under federal protection. Lynchings continued against other criminals, but when two possibly innocent men were killed in Corydon in 1889, Indiana responded by cracking down on the white cap vigilante groups, beginning in the administration of Isaac P. Gray.
Captain Newton Jasper Wilburn was a Kentucky National Guard officer who played a crucial part in ending the Black Patch Tobacco Wars, the most sustained and violent civil uprising in America since the Civil War.
The history of vigilante justice and the Montana Vigilantes began in 1863 in what was at the time a remote part of eastern Idaho Territory. Vigilante activities continued, although somewhat sporadically, through the Montana Territorial period until the territory became the state of Montana on November 8, 1889. Vigilantism arose because territorial law enforcement and the courts had very little power in the remote mining camps during the territorial period.
Cow vigilante violence is a pattern of mob-based collective vigilante violence seen in India. The attacks are perpetuated by Hindu nationalists against non-Hindus to protect cows, which are considered sacred in Hinduism.
La Matanza and the Hora de Sangre was a period of anti-Mexican violence in Texas, including massacres and lynchings, between 1910 and 1920 in the midst of tensions between the United States and Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. This violence was committed by Anglo-Texan vigilantes, and law enforcement, such as the Texas Rangers, during operations against bandit raids known as the Bandit Wars. The violence and denial of civil liberties during this period was justified by racism. Ranger violence reached its peak from 1915 to 1919, in response to increasing conflict, initially because of the Plan de San Diego, by Mexican and Tejano insurgents to take Texas. This period was referred to as the Hora de Sangre by Mexicans in South Texas, many of whom fled to Mexico to escape the violence. Estimates for the number of Mexican Americans killed in the violence in Texas during the 1910s, ranges from 300 to 5,000 killed. At least 100 Mexican Americans were lynched in the 1910s, many in Texas. Many murders were concealed and went unreported, with some in South Texas, suspected by Rangers of supporting rebels, being placed on blacklists and often "disappearing".
Jose Antonio Garcia was a Californio bandit, born in Santa Barbara, Alta California, Mexico. He was suspected by the San Luis Obispo Vigilance Committee of being part of the gang of Pio Linares, and he was hung after making a confession exposing other members and the leadership of the gang as the participants in an 1857 robbery and murder of two French Basque cattlemen.
The history of homeland security in the United States covers specific issues and programs designed to protect the United States from foreign enemies or domestic terrorism. It also includes public attitudes regarding specific fears. Coverage is from the colonial period to the present.
The Regulator Movement in South Carolina was a successful effort to control crime and obtain more government services. It was launched by local leaders in the newly settled areas of western South Carolina in the late 1760s. The local elite organized and petitioned, and also worked to suppress crime and operate some missing government functions such as courts. Back in far-off Charleston the royal governor and the elected assembly agreed as to the wisdom of the demands and in 1769 enacted the appropriate legislation. The regulators then disbanded Organizations of citizens were formed to regulate governmental affairs and eventually operated the courts in some districts. At about the same time a movement in newly settled areas of western North Carolina also used the name "regulator." The two movements were not in contact, The regulators in North Carolina mobilized an army to fight the colonial militia but they were decisively defeated at the Battle of Alamance in 1771.
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