These racist vigilantes inspired the Ku Klux Klan and battled state governments for years
Whitecappers went outside the law and terrorized at will
On May 4, 1893, a group of 75 armed men surrounded a courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi, to disrupt an ongoing trial. The mob — consisting mostly of poor farmers and laborers — assembled to intimidate the presiding judge, who had jailed nine members of the community without bail. Mississippi law did not permit bail for criminals charged with severe crimes like arson and attempted murder, but the crowd was uninterested in the finer legal details. After all, its members had long practiced their own kind of law and order in the county, as part of a decades-long tradition of vigilantism and violence in the United States known as whitecapping.
Whitecapping was a widespread practice of vigilante justice that expanded outward from Indiana in the late 19th century. The moniker derives from the white coverings its bandits would wear on their nocturnal rides. “In general,” writes historian Richard Maxwell Brown, “white capping was most prevalent as a sort of spontaneous movement for the moral regulation of poor whites and ne’er-do-wells of the rural American countryside.” Whitecaps favored whipping as their preferred method of punishment, and most often targeted characters who flouted community standards, such as abusive husbands, the visibly idle, licentious women, petty thieves, and drunkards.
Maxwell Brown traces the origin of Whitecaps to 1887, as partial inheritors of vigilante traditions as established by runaway slave patrols and anti-horse-thief committees, and of codes of secrecy and obedience inspired by the Klan of Reconstruction (which was around from the late 1860s to the early 1870s). From 1887 to 1900, no fewer than 239 instances of whitecapping occurred, encompassing whippings, beatings, arson, lynchings, and more. Their reach also spread far and wide — Whitecaps flourished as much in Massachusetts as in Alabama, in New Mexico as much as in Iowa.
Whitecapping, like any other movement, was a product of a particular time and place. In postbellum America, a handful of trends had converged that put poor, white rural citizens at disadvantages both perceived and real. With slavery abolished, black laborers competed in the market with whites for jobs, while a depressed agricultural economy thrust farmers into great stress and debt, sometimes forcing them to foreclose on their land. Historian Matthew J. Hernando credited the construction of railroads with undermining the economic independence of rural communities and contributing to the “general unsettledness of the times.” Thus came the need to reassert the old ways, and to do so with violence and terrorism if necessary. As William F. Holmes notes in one of his handful of historical studies on Whitecaps, “Whitecapping appears to have belonged to a broad pattern of collective violence in the South that was conservative and dedicated to maintaining traditional community values.”
The practices and concerns of Whitecaps varied by region. In Indiana, whitecapping took on the more traditional mode of policing morals and behavior. In Georgia, Whitecap members might be found flogging tattle tales who reported on a moonshiner’s untaxed still. In New Mexico, Whitecaps consisted of Mexican ranchers (las gorras blancas) who fought against the enclosure of land that they had used for collective grazing.
Yet there was, to small surprise, a significant racial element guiding this movement dedicated to asserting and upholding the status quo of the country, which was and remains inextricable from white supremacy. In Tennessee, for instance, night riders assembled to intimidate new black homesteaders, while in Mississippi, 16 men beat an industrious black sharecropper to near death. Like the Klan of Reconstruction, to which some Whitecaps had once belonged, Whitecaps were not keen on keeping records or making public pronouncements. But a manifesto published by Whitecaps based in Lawrence, Mississippi, provides a rare glimpse at their vigilante perspective—heavily conscious of the rural white worker’s descent down the ladder of wealth and status and preoccupied with casting enemies by way of racism and xenophobia:
“Our homes are covered with mortgages and our lands are fast concentrating in the hands of syndicates, Wall Street and European gold-bugs….The accursed Jews and others own two thirds of our land. They control and half bind the negro laborers who partly subsist by thefts from the white farmers, thereby controlling prices of Southern produce. We therefore pray the white farmers come together and gain control of the negro labor, which is by right ours, that we may tend the soil under white supremacy, and under no circumstances will the negro be allowed to cultivate a Jew or syndicate’s land.”
Whitecaps were not concocting a problem out of nowhere. Depressed crop prices and interstate capital thrust many farmers off their land, only to be replaced by tenants willing to work for a lower price. But we also know the dangerous direction in which consequent resentment leaned. In Texas, in 1904, a group of Texan Whitecaps were credited with having ignited a “race war” for attempting to drive out black employees of the lumber mills, compelling business owners to appeal to the federal government to prevent the vigilantes from exacerbating the labor shortage.
The tide finally turned against Whitecaps when leaders realized these very public tales of vigilante justice and violence were hurting the local pocketbook, driving away workers and inhibiting interstate investment. “The White Cap business is keeping capital and investors out of Santa Fe and Santa Fe county,” editorialized a local paper in late October, 1890. “It is the duty of every good citizen to destroy this unlawful movement on election day.”
The Whitecaps fought back, of course. Consider J.F. Thornton, editor of a small Alabama newspaper, who had made a reputation from denouncing the Whitecaps. On a December evening in 1896, he was assassinated at home, shot through his window while playing the mandolin.
In many states, there was a period of back-and-forth before the Whitecaps largely dissolved in the 1910s. In Indiana, their state of origin, and where 68 people were lynched by Whitecaps (48 white and 20 black), a deliberate effort was mounted against the vigilantes in 1889, only to be suspended by the new governor James Mount, who was a Whitecap himself. The policy was then reinforced by his successor, and Whitecaps in the state were dispersed following a fatal encounter with state militia outside a prison in 1902.
By 1910, it was clear that law and business interests won. The Whitecaps disappeared, though some members, already accustomed to night rides and white disguises, went on to join the regenerated Klan in 1915.
This article is part of our White Terror U.S.A. collection, covering the shameful history of white supremacy in America.
History shapes the world around us — from national elections to cultural debates to marches in cities across the country. At Timeline, we spread knowledge of the past to help shape a better future. If you want to do the same, please share this and other Timeline stories and join us on Facebook and Twitter.
