Through her investigations, Wells discovered that the rise in lynching in the South wasn’t about rape at all. The supposed mass phenomenon of black men violating white women was, she famously wrote, a “threadbare lie.” Lynching was just a new means of controlling blacks at a time when they were becoming more economically competitive with whites. The fragility of white women, it turns out, was the weapons of mass destruction of its day.
But that isn’t the only time in American history that whites have wielded female virtue and victimhood to justify aggression against nonwhites. The practice is neither exclusive to the history of lynching of black Americans nor to the American South. Indeed, it is integral to the way white supremacy has always been enforced in America.
The first woman in American history to have a statue erected in her honor was a symbol of virtuous violence against nonwhites.
In March of 1697, a Massachusetts-born Puritan named Hannah Duston was taken captive by Native Americans a week after giving birth to her twelfth child. Marched north for two weeks, during which time her newborn was killed by her captors, Duston and two other captives were left with an Indian family on an island located in what is now New Hampshire. With help from her fellow captives, Duston then killed and scalped ten Indians–six of whom were children—while they slept, then escaped, scalps in hand, in a canoe down the Merrimack River.
Back home, the Massachusetts General Assembly gave the escaped women 50 pounds as a reward for the scalps. Cotton Mather, the most celebrated of Puritan ministers, wrote about Duston’s harrowing story no fewer than three times, making her the most famous woman of her day. Mather’s stories made clear that Duston’s murder of Indian children was justified by virtue of her having lost her own child as well as by the fact that she was beyond the boundaries—and laws—of her community. He compared Duston to Jael, an Old Testament heroine who saved the Israelites by driving a spike through the head of a sleeping enemy commander. The comparison further demonstrated that Duston’s violent acts were committed not just in her own defense, but on behalf of her people. The story, now a legend, thus allowed seventeenth-century Puritans to see their own violence against Native Americans as not only legitimate but virtuous.