Nineteenth-century chroniclers mythologized vigilantes as folk democracy and heroic surgeons of the body politic

Evidence

To men like Dimsdale, this was genuine folk justice; it was an Anglo-​Saxon inheritance as old as Teutonic folkmoots, transplanted to the new lands of the West. H. H. Bancroft, chronicler of the old West, advanced this view with great passion in his work on “Popular Tribunals,” published in 1887. Vigilance, he wrote, is an “expression of power on the part of the people in the absence or impotence of law.” It is “the exercise informally of their rightful power by a people wholly in sympathy with existing forms of law.” It is “the keen knife in the hands of a skillful surgeon, removing the putrefaction with the least possible injury to the body politic.” The San Francisco Committee of 1856, for example, was just such a surgeon: “Never before in the history of human progress have we seen, under a popular form of government, a city-​full rise as one man, summoned by almighty conscience, attend at the bedside of sick law … and perform a speedy and almost bloodless cure.” — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2158

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the mythology-school approach (Turner, Bancroft) that Friedman then dismantles with hardheaded modern scholarship—useful contrast case in course readings. — connects to: A vigilante past was no career obstacle in nineteenth-century western politics — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2159

Broader Connections

• A vigilante past was no career obstacle in nineteenth-century western politics #expands (0.85) — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2159