African Americans; Civil War Era

Pfeifer, Michael J. "The Northern United States and the Genesis of Racial Lynching: The Lynching of African Americans in the Civil War Era." Journal of American History, Vol.97, No.3 (2010): 621-635.

This article describes the brutal lynching of African Americans during the Civil War Era. Remaking of the nation during and after the civil war was a great challenge and not only a southern process but more so a national process. Southerners, Westerners, and Northerners decided to start living by their own rules and they did not agree with the extension of rights to African American people in the 1860s and 1870s. Most of these white southerners, northerners, and westerners retaliated and took their anger out on the African America people. A process called lynching had developed around this time due to the fact that the whites did not want African American people to have any rights. Lynching is a process in which violence is targeted on a group of people in this case the African American people and these people were either beaten to death or hanged by the whites.

This practice was mainly done by a group of people who were considered Irish Catholics. They were Northerners who had violent events called draft riots which were basically mob beatings and hanging of African American people but in the North they did not call these events lynching. Lynching did not get its name until the late nineteenth centuries. The northerners were the people who had a role in these events more than anyone else. They were the most crucial and developed many irrelevant reasons why there were executing all of these African American people. The hate that they endured was like no others. The most executions of African American people were reported in the North. The reasons they had used for their excuses were mainly accusation by the whites that really were sometimes true but most of the time they were lies.

Some of the reasons this article listed were ridiculous. The whites said that would execute a slave African American only if that slave raped, killed, or tried to become free. Really that was not true because these Northerners beat and killed these slave and even freed slave because they felt blacks should not have any rights at all. They considered the blacks property that they could sell, trade, or get rid of. Basically one would feel that these northerner people were selfish and needed to be taught a lesson but then one would realized they were not the only people who were torturing African American people.

This was also a major issue in the South but not as crucial as it was in the North. Everyone knows a little bit about slavery in the South and it was very unfair and kind of harsh but one would feel like it was better for the Southern slaves than the Northern slaves. Southern slavery in this article was bad but not so terrible. The southerners beat and also killed some slaves but there were also slave owners who treated