Crime, Confession, and Comeuppance: The Lynching Narrative’s Antecedent

Abstract

Abstract

E. E. Barclay’s 1851 publication, A Confession of the Awful and Bloody Transactions in the Life of Charles Wallace serves as a literary precursor to the lynching narrative, a melodramatic, voyeuristic accounting of a specific lynching that is written by a lynching participant, spectator, sympathizer, apologist, or victim. Wallace’s sensational criminal confession-asproffered to Rev Henry Tracey, a witness to his brutal comeuppance-wasa vernacular form of antebellum amusement that grappled with contemporary tensions concerning gender, domesticity, and urbanity among others. Barclay’s narrative suggests that modernity, industrialism, and expansionism gave rise to salacious monsters like Wallace (Snelling and Morere). Their nullification demanded lynch law’srough justice as the only viable means to protect hearth, home, and family from predation and corruption. This fictive narrative form gave rise to sensational published accounts of authentic lynching that will help to fuel the acceptance of mob rule as an inevitable outcome of social instability and change.