4 The tradition still exists. A vigilante killing occurred in the small town of Maryville, Missouri, as recently as the 1980s, when Kenneth McElroy, a typical backcountry bully who “for most of his years … terrorized many of the town’s 440 citizens,” shot a grocer in town. When he continued to threaten his neighbors, he was surrounded by a crowd of sixty townspeople and shot to death “by person or persons unknown.” NY Times, 26 Sept. 1986.
5 Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 28.
6 The leading survey has found evidence of 326 American vigilante movements, of which 211 occurred in the southern highlands and the southern rim. Most of the remainder were on the fringes of that region, in the lower middle west and the mountain states. Not a single case was recorded in New England, New York, or the Yankee part of the old northwest. There were none in the Delaware Valley, and only two cases in tidewater Virginia and the Carolina low country. Other cases can be found in all of these regions, but they were very rare compared with the southern highlands and the southwestern rim. See Richard M. Brown, “The American Vigilante Tradition,” in The History of Violence in America, 154-226.
7 This is Brown’s judgment in ibid., 158-59.