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Howard Smead, Donald G. Mathews. At the Altar of Lynching: Burning Sam Hose in the American South; Nicholas Villanueva Jr. The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1668–1670, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy316
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Over recent decades, research has produced a growing number of detailed analyses of lynching and mob violence that have forced a reconsideration of the centrality of mob violence to the maintenance of white supremacy. The two works under review here offer an important contribution to this process and merit serious attention. Donald G. Mathews’s At the Altar of Lynching: Burning Sam Hose in the American South and Nicholas Villanueva Jr.’s The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands add new insight to the encompassing nature of lynch law and mob violence. Mathews’s account examines the role of religion in justifying and legitimizing extralegal, ritualistic execution that often involved mutilation and torture. Villanueva details the role that lynching played in Anglo-Hispanic relations in the Southwest.
The 1899 lynching of Sam Hose (né Tom Wilkes) in Newnan, Georgia, was so horrific as to defy belief. And yet a broad swath of southern leadership defended the mob on the grounds that Hose’s crimes justified extreme action. Hose was accused of murdering his boss, raping his boss’s wife, and abusing their daughter. He did kill his boss, probably in self-defense, but the other charges were born of racist hysteria. After Hose was chained to a tree, “those with knives then fell on their victim; they cut away his humanity . . . they broke him into bits, sliced him into portions, grasped parts of him as souvenirs, or sold him off at ten to twenty-five cents apiece” (166). He was then doused with kerosene and burned to death.
