‘Doing their Mock Justice there’: The Whiteboys, the British Legal System and a Transatlantic Language of Violence

Throughout the mid-eighteenth century, as the Seven Years War and other imperial conflicts generated intense violence and economic distress throughout the British Atlantic World, those living on the fringes of empire, such as Irish Catholics, dissenting Ulster Scots, and those living along the mid-Atlantic frontier, responded in kind with violence of their own. Although violent extralegal groups such as the Whiteboys in Ireland (and their contemporaries the Paxton Boys, the Black Boys, and the Augusta Boys in North America) responded to tensions within their own specific colonial contexts, these groups drew from a well-established tradition of violence in the legal system, such as public whippings and executions, as well as from community traditions of revelry. In borrowing from these already acceptable forms of violence throughout the British Atlantic World, the Whiteboys adapted those structures of pageantry to fit their needs and grievances within a framework of authority and legitimacy. Understanding the ways the Whiteboys engaged with these pre-existing, legitimate structures of legal violence and street culture allow historians to view the Whiteboys within a broader, transatlantic context. However, despite their claims to legitimacy, the state’s response to the Whiteboys’ violence was unsurprisingly clear as British officials on both sides of the Atlantic prosecuted them with the full force of the law and ultimately resorted to legal violence. The violence enacted by both sides was melodramatic and full of meticulously choreographed pageantry, but it was a common vocabulary that allowed these extralegal groups and the state to converse with each other in pointed ways.