followed by the final campaign of Chorrillos and Miraflores (1880), in which he led at first a brigade (as colonel) and afterwards a division under Baquedano. His services at the battle of Chorrillos led to his appointment to command the Army of Occupation in Peru. This difficult post he filled with success, but his action in putting the Peruvian president, Garcia Calderon, under arrest excited considerable comment. His last act was to invest Iglesias with supreme power in Peru, and he returned to his own country in 1883. Promoted rear-admiral, he served as Chilean Minister at Madrid for two years, and died at sea in 1886. Lynch is remembered as one of the foremost of Chile’s naval heroes.
LYNCHBURG, a city of Campbell county, Virginia, U.S.A., on the James river, about 125 m. W. by S. of Richmond. Pop. (1900) 18,891, of whom 8254 were negroes; (1910) 29,494. It is served by the Southern, the Chesapeake & Ohio and the Norfolk & Western railways. Its terraced hills command fine views of mountain, valley and river scenery, extending westward to the noble Peaks of Otter and lesser spurs of the Blue Ridge about 20 m. distant. On an elevation between Rivermont Avenue and the James river are the buildings of Randolph-Macon Woman’s college (opened in 1893), which is conducted by a self-perpetuating board under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and is one of the Randolph-Macon system of colleges and academies (see Ashland, Va.). In Lynchburg, too, are the Virginia Christian college (co-educational, 1903), and the Virginia collegiate and industrial school for negroes. The city has a public library, well-equipped hospitals, public parks and the Rivermont Viaduct, 1100 ft. long and 140 ft. high. Lynchburg is the see of a Protestant Episcopal bishop. Tobacco of a superior quality and large quantities of coal, iron ore and granite are produced in the neighbourhood. Good water power is furnished by the James river, and Lynchburg is one of the principal manufacturing cities of the state. The boot and shoe industry was established in 1900, and is much the most important. In 1905 the city was the largest southern manufacturer of these articles and one of the largest distributors in the country. The factory products increased in value from $2,993,551 in 1900 to $4,965,435 in 1905, or 65.9%.
Lynchburg, named in honour of John Lynch, who inherited a large tract of land here and in 1757 established a ferry across the James, was established as a village by Act of Assembly in 1786, was incorporated as a town in 1805, and became a city in 1852. During the Civil War it was an important base of supplies for the Confederates; on the 16th of June 1864 it was invested by Major-General David Hunter (1802–1886), but three days later he was driven away by General Jubal A. Early. In 1908 the city’s corporate limits were extended.
LYNCH LAW, a term loosely applied to various forms of executing rough popular justice, or what is thought to be justice, for the punishment of offenders by a summary procedure, ignoring, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law. The word lynching “originally signified a whipping for reformatory purposes with more or less disregard for its legality” (Cutler), or the infliction of minor punishments without recourse to law; but during and after the Reconstruction Period in the United States, it came to mean, generally, the summary infliction of capital punishment. Lynch law is frequently prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts where government is weak and officers of the law too few and too powerless to enforce law and preserve order. The practice has been common in all countries when unsettled frontier conditions existed, or in periods of threatened anarchy. In what are considered civilized countries it is now found mainly in Russia, south-eastern Europe and in America, but it is essentially and almost peculiarly an American institution. The origin of the name is obscure; different writers have attempted to trace it to Ireland, to England, to South Carolina, to Pennsylvania and to Virginia. It is certain that the name was first used in America, but it is not certain whether it came from Lynch’s Creek, South Carolina, where summary justice was administered to outlaws, or from Virginia and Pennsylvania, where men named Lynch were noted for dealing out summary punishment to offenders.[1] In Europe early examples of a similar phenomenon are found in the proceedings of the Vehmgerichte in medieval Germany, and of Lydford law, gibbet law or Halifax law, Cowper justice and Jeddart justice in the thinly settled and border districts of Great Britain; and since the term “lynch law” came into colloquial use, it is loosely employed to cover any case in which a portion of the community takes the execution of its ideas of justice into its own hands, irrespective of the legal authorities.
In America during the 18th and 19th centuries the population expanded westward faster than well-developed civil institutions could follow, and on the western frontier were always desperadoes who lived by preying on the better classes. To suppress these desperadoes, in the absence of strong legal institutions, resort was continually made to lynch law. There was little necessity for it until the settlement crossed the Alleghany Mountains, but the following instances of lynching in the East may be mentioned: (1) the mistreatment of Indians in New England and the Middle Colonies in disregard of laws protecting them; (2) the custom found in various colonies of administering summary justice to wife-beaters, idlers and other obnoxious persons; (3) the acts of the Regulators of North Carolina, 1767–1771; (4) the popular tribunals of the Revolutionary period, when the disaffection toward Great Britain weakened the authority of the civil governments and the war replaced them by popular governments, at a time when the hostilities between “Patriots” and “Tories” were an incentive to extra-legal violence. In the South, lynching methods were long employed in dealing with agitators, white and black, who were charged with endeavouring to excite the slaves to insurrection or to crime against their masters, and in dealing with anti-slavery agitators generally.
In the West, from the Alleghanies to the Golden Gate, the pioneer settlers resorted to popular justice to get rid of bands of outlaws, and to regulate society during that period when laws were weak or confused, when the laws made in the East did not suit western conditions, and when courts and officials were scarce and distant. The Watauga settlements and the “State” of Franklin furnished examples of lynch law procedure almost reduced to organization. Men trained in the rough school of the wilderness came to have more regard for quick, ready-made, personal justice than for abstract justice and statutes; they were educated to defend themselves, to look to no law for protection or regulation; consequently they became impatient of legal forms and lawyers’ technicalities; an appeal to statute law was looked upon with suspicion, and, if some personal matter was involved, was likely to result in deadly private feuds. Thus were formed the habits of thought and action of the western pioneers. Lynch law, not civil law, cleared the western forests, valleys and mountain passes of horse and cattle thieves, and other robbers and outlaws, gamblers and murderers. This was especially true of California and the states of the far West. H. H. Bancroft, the historian of Popular Tribunals, wrote in 1887 that “thus far in the history of these Pacific States far more has been done toward righting wrongs and administering justice outside the pale of law than within it.” However, the lack of regard for law fostered by the conditions described led to a survival of the lynching habit after the necessity for it passed away. In parts of the Southern states, where the whites are few and greatly outnumbered by the blacks, certain of the conditions of the West have prevailed, and since emancipation released the blacks from restraint many of the latter have been lawless and turbulent. The Reconstruction, by giving to the blacks temporary political supremacy, increased the friction between the races, and greatly
- ↑ The usual explanation is that the name was derived from Charles Lynch (1736–1796), a justice of the peace in Virginia after 1774, who in 1780, toward the close of the War of Independence, greatly exceeded his powers in the punishment of Tories or Loyalists detected in a conspiracy in the neighbourhood of his home in Bedford county, Va. Lynch was a man of influence in his community, was for many years a member of the Virginia legislature, was a member of the famous Virginia Convention of 1776 and was later (in 1781) an officer in the American army. See an article, “The Real Judge Lynch,” in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. lxxxviii. (Boston, 1901).
