William Lynch speech facts for kids
The William Lynch speech, also called the Willie Lynch letter, is a document that many people thought was a real speech from 1712. It claimed to be given by a man named William Lynch in Virginia Colony. The speech was supposedly about how to control enslaved people in the colony. However, historians have now shown that this document is a hoax, meaning it is not real.
The letter pretends to be a word-for-word account of a short speech. In it, a slave owner supposedly tells other slave masters that he found a "secret" way to control Black enslaved people. This "secret" was to make them fight against each other, using a method called divide and rule. The document has been printed since at least 1970. It became very well known in the 1990s when it appeared on the Internet. Many people believed it was a true story from the 1700s. But its mistakes and words that didn't exist back then have proven it is a fake.
What the Speech Says
The person who supposedly wrote the speech, William Lynch, says he owns a "modest plantation" in the British West Indies. He claims he was asked to come to the Virginia Colony by local slave owners. They wanted his advice because they were having trouble managing their enslaved people.
He briefly mentions that their current harsh ways of controlling enslaved people were not working well. Instead, he suggests his own method. This method involves using differences like age and skin color to turn enslaved people against each other. He promises his hosts that this method would "control the slaves for at least three hundred years." Some versions of the text online even add fake introductions. For example, one claims to be from Frederick Douglass. Others wrongly say Lynch's name is where the word "lynching" comes from.
The text of the speech has been published since at least 1970. It is often called "The Making of a Slave." It first appeared on the Internet around 1993. A librarian at the University of Missouri–St. Louis put the document on the library's Gopher server. The librarian later said she got the document from a local business directory.
Even though the librarian later realized the document was fake, she decided to leave it online. She believed that "even as an inauthentic document, it says something about the former and current state of African America." But she did add a warning that it was not real.
Why It's a Hoax
The text has many mistakes that show it is not from the 1700s. It uses words and phrases like "refueling" and "fool proof." These words were not used until the early 1900s. Historian Roy Rosenzweig also pointed out that the ways the text tries to divide people – by skin color, age, and gender – are more like ideas from the 1900s. They don't make much sense in the 1700s. Because of these reasons, historians like Rosenzweig and William Jelani Cobb agree that the William Lynch speech is a hoax.
About William Lynch
Some introductions to the speech online say that the narrator's name is the source of the terms ""lynching" and "Lynch law." This is despite the narrator actually saying he was against lynching. A man named William Lynch did claim to have started the term during the American Revolutionary War. However, he was born in 1742. This is thirty years after the speech was supposedly given. A document published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1836 suggested William Lynch as the creator of "lynch law." But this document might have been a hoax made by Edgar Allan Poe. A better known early use of the term "Lynch law" comes from Charles Lynch. He was a judge and military officer in Virginia during the American Revolution.
