That basic tension between formal law and popular justice continued beyond the middle of the century, though its location shifted somewhat. The efforts of state governments to wrest control of criminal justice from local hands were more successful in those years, as they increased their control over law enforcement. Their efforts to centralize and standardize the criminal law continued to be checked by jurors’ willingness to substitute their own views of justice for the commands of law. In other respects extralegal forces remained powerful and were increasingly used in competition with, or as a replacement for, the formal institutions of law. At the same time, people resorted to popular justice to challenge decisions of the formal legal system that conflicted with their sense of what justice required.

extralegal justice

The 1830s are called the decade of the mob, but the years that followed were not much different. The flash points that had led to mobbing in the 1830s – economic injury, moral condemnation, and threats to the social order and the status quo – continued to prompt extralegal violence from 1840 through the end of the Civil War. In the 1840s, weavers in Philadelphia, threatened by efforts to shift the economies of their trade, boycotted certain employers and beat those weavers who broke ranks; striking tailors took similar action in New York in the 1850s.