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The Hazards of the Flush Times: Gambling, Mob Violence, and the Anxieties of America's Market Revolution
Joshua D. Rothman
| William Mills knew the residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi, would be criticized for what happened in their city in the summer of 1835. An argument at a Fourth of July barbecue escalated into a paroxysm of extralegal violence, achieving a frenzied climax two days later as a mob led by the local militia hanged five men accused of being professional gamblers. The victims' bodies dangled from a gallows for twenty-four hours before they were cut down and buried in a ditch. Reflecting on such a gruesome display of popular fury, Mills, an attorney and the editor of the Vicksburg Register, understood his neighbors' actions would meet with "censure from those who had not an opportunity of knowing and feeling the dire necessity out of which it originated." But he made no apologies. On the contrary, Mills used his newspaper to justify the mob's behavior, arguing that gamblers so compromised virtue, honor, and the rule of law that only violence carried out by the "most respectable citizens" could bring public decency, moral integrity, and legal order to Vicksburg.1 |
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Mills was right that not every American would see the imperative to hang five men without trial, no matter what their supposed crimes, and other accounts of the riot called into question whether its perpetrators could claim to be acting on behalf of decency and order at all. Despite Mills's efforts at vindication, the Vicksburg rioters found few supporters outside the city. Instead, across the nation "Vicksburg" became a byword for unjustifiable violence and the excesses of mob rule that threatened to undermine the authority of the law, if not republican government itself. In just days the city had acquired a reputation for brutality that would take decades to live down. |
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Critics' skepticism about how Mills framed matters was reasonable, as his defense of the gambling riot masked as much as it revealed about the social realities of the place and time that produced the rampage. Although the rioters proclaimed themselves defenders of sound economic and cultural values, Vicksburg was a boomtown created by the easy credit of the Jacksonian "flush times" and the scramble for wealth coincidental to Indian removal and the opening of Mississippi's interior to cotton planting. The merchants, doctors, lawyers, and planters who constituted Vicksburg's budding elite may have believed professional gamblers threatened their moral integrity, but most people in Vicksburg were essentially speculators who had risked migration to the Southwest for the allure of fast profits almost unimaginable anywhere else in the country. In a very real sense, nearly everyone in Vicksburg was a gambler. |
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Moreover, as a city that had not existed less than twenty years before the riot, Vicksburg was nearly bereft of well-established institutions and communal networks that composed "society" as the term was conventionally defined. Indeed, the barbecue altercation that helped trigger the succeeding days' events was arguably little more than an alcohol-fueled scuffle among men who knew each other just enough to have cultivated mutual distaste and distrust. But some in Vicksburg, particularly those who considered themselves members of the "respectable" classes, saw crystallized in the fracas concerns larger than any personal animosities engendering it, and they seized upon it as an opportunity to imagine community and impose order where such things scarcely existed. Not everyone was pleased that matters turned deadly, but supporters of the hangings maintained they were an unfortunate yet necessary affirmation of widely shared standards and mores. William Mills's defense of his fellow townspeople, then, was no simple description of events. At a time when many observers suggested that settlers in the nation's southwestern hinterland revealed Americans' aggressive individualism and rapacious greed, it was his contribution to the enterprise of constructing Vicksburg as a wholesome and substantive place rather than a wild frontier. Contrary to all appearances, Mills and those whose behavior he justified insisted that Vicksburg was not populated by unscrupulous speculators and grasping adventurers but by worthy Americans living upstanding lives and extending civilization into the wilderness.2 |
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