Here are some enlightening comments from different historians:
There is a speech attributed to William Lynch which has been circulated on the internet and elsewhere, and which even Louis Farrakhan referred to at the Million Man March of October 16, 1995. By quoting extensively from the "Willie Lynch" speech, Mr. Farrakhan inspired the birth of a new term, Willie Lynch Syndrome, based on Lynch's supposed speech.
this speech is a ridiculous fake, written in the 1990s (there's no record of it being circulated before 1993).
First, the writer of this speech has made hardly any attempt to use the writing/speech style of the early 18th century.
Second, the author was not at all successful at steering clear of very specific anachronisms. We'll name only the most glaring word-choice errors: fool-proof, used in the speech, actually dates from only 1902. The noun program is not used in the sense found in this speech until the 1830s. Self-refueling is an utter anachronism, as the term refueling did not arise until the early 20th century. Use of installed when referring to something other than a person did not first occur until the mid-19th century. Moreover, attitude did not refer to anything other than a physical position until the mid-19th century.
Third, a speaker would hardly need to so carefully identify the date and place of his speech, nor would he be likely to refer to King James as "our illustrious King, whose version of the Bible we cherish", unless he were a person of the 1990s making a clumsy attempt at writing a fake speech from the early 18th century. We cannot imagine why the writer introduces the theme of "James... our illustrious king" unless it is merely to emphasize that this took place in colonial times. Only someone creating a fake would need to try to establish a date for the speech within the fake itself. And, by the way, James was long-dead by 1712, the monarch of that era being Queen Anne. Finally, there is no evidence that a William Lynch from a "modest plantation" in the West Indies ever existed. There is, however, plenty of evidence for the existence of Captain William Lynch of Pittsylvania, Virginia, whom we have identified as the probable source of the verb lynch, and who was born fifty years after the date given in the speech above.
There are other obvious characteristics of the speech which render it a 20th-century creation. Some of these are discussed at a web site devoted to the subject and created by Anne Taylor, collection development librarian at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. By the way, Ms. Taylor seems to be one of the first to have posted the speech on the internet. She obtained it from the publisher of a free publication in St. Louis, The St. Louis Black Pages, dated 1994 but published in 1993. This is the earliest reference we've been able to find to the Willie Lynch speech in print. We think it's time to send Willie Lynch's speech to the urban legends department.
I suspect that the narrator's name--Mr. Will Lynch--is a humorous put-on. Moreover, when Mr. Lynch thinks about
dividing the slaves, he forgets the division that was most obvious to a West-Indian planter: nationality--both African
ethnic divisions--Akan, Ibo, Mandingo and American divisions between so-called new Negroes [native Africans]
and those born in the New World. His old vs young and dark vs light divisions would be most peculiar among early
eighteenth-century African Americans (in both the West Indies and Virginia) who did not have such color gradations
as in our own time and who still maintained the near absolute African respect for age.
First, I think it is rather odd for a speaker, even in 1712, to go to such lengths to locate the speech in time and space. The hearers of a speech would have no need for such a preamble: they are there and then, and it is not so clear that this was being spoken for a later printing. It is, however, useful to encourage a later reader to place the speech in a time and place, and the florid style fits a contemporary, though usually false, expectation for florid speech by speakers of the time.
Next, "the bank of the James River," is too generic. If the speaker was making the reference as a matter of courtesy, it is unusual -- indeed it would have been rude -- not to thank the specific hosts: why on the banks of the River, and no reference to a planter at whose landing or house such a speech must have been given? This omission gives rise to another problem: why a speech on such a topic, and given by someone ostensibly imported by ship for the purpose of giving it, would be given to an open riverside assembly, and not in a house or meeting room. It is unlikely that a planter or planters would underwrite the passage of a speaker from the Indies and not have arranged a suitable place for invitees to hear such a speech without fear of being overheard by the lower classes.
Next (and I promise this is my last point about the geography) there is utterly no reason for anyone arriving in Virginia to have thought of a single thing, "As our boat sailed south on the James River". The James River flows north, not south, from Hampton Roads. The only way he would travel south on it is after having given the speech and not before. While such a reference would have been impossible for someone on the banks of the river, it does reinforce, to the modern reader challenged by geography that the speaker is in the South.
As for other reference to time, the speech refers the river as "named for our illustrious King, whose version of the Bible we cherish." While this is a bit afield of my own areas of specialty, I think this is a rather anachronistic manner of referring to the English Bible: such an overt reference to a "version" makes clear that there are other versions, something to me that sounds a tad odd in the mouth of such a declared Anglican. James's 1611 English Bible had pretty so much fully replaced the Geneva Bible as the Bible of the English-speaking world by 1660, that in 1712, this sounds out of place. A reference to James as "patron of our Bible" would have been much more likely.
There are other textual problems that are better left to others (why is the speech so short when the speaker was imported and is speaking in an age of rhetoric as public entertainment? why "West Indies" and not an island name? why "color" and not "colour"? why bank and not "banks"?), but I wonder most about the reference to controlling slaves for 300 years.
Why would a person be invited from the West Indies to Virginia just to deliver an 8-paragraph speech? Back then, such a voyage would have been too strenuous and expensive for this, especially from an unknown person, especially when letter-writing was still the main form of long-distance communication? Of course, Lynch could have been in Virginia on business just before being spontaneously invited to speak. Still, if there had been a William Lynch whose word was so valued that he should deliver such a short speech in person rather than in writing, then certainly his speech would have been reprinted and commented upon in the local newspapers.
Also, he claims to want to give an "outline of action," yet no such plan is clearly given. It seems that a person who travels from the West Indies to Virginia for a speech would have elaborated more.
Thirdly, in paragraph 6, the author writes that "distrust is stronger than trust," yet only 5 sentences later, contradicts himself, saying, "it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us." Such a big contradiction would be expected from someone whose audience is listening intently for detailed information about specific steps in maintaining its livelihood through better control of his property. Why the switch in subjects from 3rd to 2nd person? Why not mention at least 2 or 3 methods of using dark-skinned slaves against light-skinned ones, and vice versa? Contradiction and lack of detail make me leery of any claims that this "speech" is not a hoax.
Furthermore, the obvious stab at the sore points in African-American psyche, such as gender and facial feature issues, makes me believe it was written for a contemporary audience, since "female vs. ... male and ... male vs. ... female." would not have been so major a societal issue amongst slaves in 1712 in the United States.
As a historian, I am generally skeptical of smoking guns. Historical work, like forensic science, is more about the painstaking aggregation of facts that lead researchers to the most likely explanation, but rarely the only one. Slavery was an incredibly complex set of social, economic and legal relations that literally boiled down to black and white. But given the variation in size of farms, number of enslaved workers, region, crops grown, law, gender-ratios, religion and local economy, it is unlikely that a single letter could explain slave policy for at least 151 years of the institution and its ramifications down to the present day.
Considering the limited number of extant sources from 18th century, if this speech had been "discovered" it would've been the subject of incessant historical panels, scholarly articles and debates. It would literally be a career-making find. But the letter was never "discovered," but rather it "appeared" - bypassing the official historical circuits and making its way via internet directly into the canon of American racial conspiratoria.
On a more practical level, the speech is filled with references that are questionable if not completely inaccurate. Lynch makes reference to an invitation reaching him on his "modest plantation in the West Indies." While this is theoretically possible - the plantation system was well-established in the Caribbean by 1712 - most plantation owners were absentees who chose to remain in the colonizing country while the day-to-day affairs of their holdings were run by hired managers and overseers. But assuming that Mr. Lynch was an exception to this practice, much of the text of his "speech" is anachronistic. Lynch makes consistent reference to "slaves" - which again is possible, though it is far more likely people during this era would refer to persons in bondage simply as "Negroes." In the first paragraph, he promises that "Ancient Rome would envy us if my program is implemented," but the word "program" did not enter the English language with this connotation until 1837 - at the time of this speech it was used to reference a written notice for theater events.
Two paragraphs later he says that he will "give an outline of action," for slave-holders; the word "out-line" had appeared only 50 years earlier and was an artistic term meaning a sketch - it didn't convey it's present meaning until 1759. Even more damning is his use of the terms "indoctrination" and "self-refueling" in the next sentence. The first word didn't carry it current connotation until 1832; the second didn't even enter the language until 1811 -- a century after the purported date of Lynch's speech. More obviously, Lynch uses the word "Black," with an upper-case "B" to describe African Americans more than two centuries before the word came to be applied as a common ethnic identifier.
In popular citations, Lynch has also been - inexplicably - credited with the term "lynching" which would be odd since the speech promises to provide slave-holders with non-violent techniques that will save them the expense of killing valuable, if unruly, property. This inaccuracy points to a more basic problem in understanding American history.
The violence directed at black people in America was exceptional in the regard that it was racialized and used to reinforce political and social subordination, but it was not unique. Early America was incredibly violent in general - stemming in part from the endemic violence in British society and partly from the violence that tends to be associated with frontier societies. For most of its history, lynching was a non-racial phenomenon- actually it was racial in that it most often directed at white people. "Lynch law" was derived from the mob violence directed at Tories, or British loyalists, just after the American Revolution. While there is disagreement about the precise origins of the term - some associate it with Charles Lynch, a Revolution-era Justice-of-the-Peace who imprisoned Tories, others see it as the legacy of an armed militia founded near the Lynche River or the militia captain named Lynch who created judicial tribunals in Virginia in 1776 - there is no reference to the term earlier than 1768, more than half a century after the date given for the speech.
Given the sparse judicial resources (judges were forced to travel from town-to-town hearing cases, which is where we get the term "judicial circuit") and the frequency of property crimes in the early republic, lynching was often seen as a form of community justice. Not until the 1880s, after the end of Reconstruction, did "lynching" become associated with African Americans; gradually the number of blacks lynched each year surpassed the number of whites until it became almost exclusively directed at black people late in the century.
On another level, the Willie Lynch speech would seem to give a quick-and-easy explanation of the roots of our much-lamented "black disunity." You could make similar arguments about the lingering effects of a real historical document like the 1845 tract "Religious Instruction of Negroes" - written by a proslavery Presbyterian minister -- or the British practice of mixing different African ethnicities on slave ships in order to make communication - and therefore rebellion - more difficult. But this too is questionable - it presumes that whites, or any other diverse group, do not face divisive gender issues, generation gaps and class distinctions. Willie Lynch offers no explanation for the white pro-lifer who guns down a white abortion-provider or white-on-white domestic violence. He does not explain political conflicts among different Latino groups or crime in Asian communities. Unity is not the same as unanimity and in the end, black people are no more disunited than any other group of people - and a lot more united than we give ourselves credit for.
