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The last name of Charles Lynch became a verb. Lynching is a terrifying execution, often by hanging, at the hands of a mob. The sentences he imposed on Loyalists in the tense summer of 1780 were indeed severe — but does he deserve everlasting infamy? A new biography has some answers.
Contrary to some sources, Charles Lynch wasn’t born in what’s now Lynchburg, but on his father’s plantation in Goochland (later Albemarle) County. The site later became Charlottesville’s Pen Park, according to Wyatt Golden, author of “A Zealous and Active Patriot,” which will be published July 11.
The career of Judge Lynch’s father, Charles Lynch the Elder, illustrates the incredible fortunes that could be made in Colonial Virginia by white males with hard work, a willingness to take risks, and luck. The elder Lynch arrived in Virginia around 1725 as stowaway from Ireland. The penniless teen had no options except indentured servitude, and had the good fortune to find himself in the hands of a kindly Quaker master. Lynch left his indenture not only with the skills to navigate 18th-century Virginia, but with the master’s 15-year-old daughter, Sarah. By the late 1740s the former indentured servant was a member of the House of Burgesses. He moved from Albemarle to what’s now Lynchburg, and his holdings in 1752 included 4,000 acres and 22 enslaved people.
Charles Sr. and Sarah had four sons, including Charles Jr., the judge (born 1736) and John (founder of Lynchburg). In 1755, Charles Jr. married Anne Terrell, a Quaker, and moved to a property he inherited on the Staunton (Roanoke) River in Bedford County (later Campbell County). The site of Lynch’s plantation, Green Level, is in what’s now Altavista.
No portraits survive of Charles Lynch. We know nothing of his appearance except that the Lynch men were tall. Like his father, he was resourceful, ambitious, energetic and willing to take risks.
The man whose surname became a byword for violence, especially against Black people, was a Quaker. Some Quakers still owned slaves in the mid-1700s, and Charles owned and used enslaved people to build and run his estate. He inherited five enslaved people, Lety, Will, Samson, Philis and Sarah, from his father. By 1776, Quakers were prohibited from owning slaves. Charles’s siblings Sarah and John, devout Quakers, became advocates for manumission.
Charles was a prominent Quaker, but dropped out by 1764 — probably in support of his brother, Christopher, who was charged with transgressions and forced out of the faith, according to Golden.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Charles was elected to the House of Burgesses in 1769. In Williamsburg he widened his acquaintance with the men who would take Virginia out of the British Empire.
With war looming, gunpowder became critical. Almost all of the Colonies’ supply was imported from Britain. As tensions heated up, the British cut off supplies and instructed governors like Lord Dunmore to seize local stores. In 1775 the Colonies had only one powder mill, in Pennsylvania.
Into the breach stepped Charles Lynch. With a neighbor, Benjamin Clement, he went into the un-Quakerish business of manufacturing gunpowder.
The ingredients for gunpowder are saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur and charcoal. At the Third Virginia Convention, Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, Robert Carter Nicholas, Archibald Cary, Edmund Pendleton and Lynch authored an ordinance for making “saltpetre, gunpowder, lead, and refining sulfur, and providing arms for the use of the colony.”
Lynch’s inclusion among some of the foremost Virginians of the day indicates their recognition of his expertise and energy. The Lynch/Clement powder mill was in Hurt, across the Staunton River from Green Level.
Virginia’s primitive military-industrial complex included the mill, an arsenal at New London, and the lead mines (see our story) in Montgomery (now Wythe) County. By 1778, Lynch was in charge of the lead mines. The ex-Quaker was a linchpin of the military supply chain. Patriot soldiers fired bullets made from Lynch’s lead, propelled by Lynch’s gunpowder.
Lynch was also a justice of the peace and a militia colonel, responsible for recruiting Bedford County’s militia. He traveled back and forth to the mines, but probably spent most of his time in Bedford County, Golden said.
In 1780 a Patriot spy named John Wyatt uncovered a Loyalist conspiracy to seize the mines and the arsenal. Patriots feared a full-fledged insurrection. Loyalist sentiment simmered in the back country, while Gen. Cornwallis threatened Virginia from the south. (For more on Wyatt and how he uncovered what Col. William Preston told Gov. Thomas Jefferson was “a horrid conspiracy,” see our previous story.)
In 1776, Continental Congress recommended that each state enact a law against treason. The General Assembly defined treason as making war against the commonwealth, or giving aid and comfort to the commonwealth’s enemies. Convicted traitors were to be executed without benefit of clergy, forfeiting their land and possessions. Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, adopted in 1776, grants the accused in capital or criminal prosecutions the right to confront accusers and witnesses, and the right to receive a speedy trial by an impartial jury.
In the first week of August 1780, Charles Lynch tried some of the accused Loyalist plotters at Green Level, rather than sending them to Richmond. He may have feared escape attempts or rescue by other Loyalists. He was also in a hurry to secure the lead mines.
Records, if any were made, no longer exist, but Golden believes Lynch chose to act in his role as a militia colonel, rather than as a justice of the peace, and in a court-martial, rather than in a criminal trial. The convicted Loyalists, tied to a tree, were lashed 39 times or until they cried “Liberty forever!” Broken under the whip, they were sent to the ranks of the Continental Army.
There is no evidence that Lynch ever executed anyone, by hanging or otherwise, Golden said. Nor were Black people singled out. Nor was Lynch the only back-country Patriot to deal harshly with Loyalists.
Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781. With liberty secured, judges became more careful in observing legalities. On June 15, 1782, the Virginia General Court sentenced John Caton, Joshua Hopkins and James Lamb to death for treason. That same year, the General Assembly granted retroactive legal cover to Lynch, William Preston, Robert Adams and James Callaway, describing their summary trials of Loyalists as not “strictly warranted by law, although justifiable from the imminence of the danger.”
after his death; he was buried without one, in keeping with the Quaker values of simplicity and equality.
He withdrew from membership in the 1760s but may have remained in the “Quaker orbit,” according to
Golden. Randy Walker photo.
Lynch himself used the term “Lynch’s Law.” Perhaps the alliteration made it more memorable than “Preston’s Law.” Perhaps the “ch” sound chokes off the syllable like a rope-drop. In any case, by the mid-19th century, the term had assumed its terrible modern meaning.
No longer an official member of the Society of Friends, Lynch may have still considered himself a Quaker at heart. When he died in 1796, the judge was buried without a headstone, in keeping with the Quaker values of simplicity and equality. Quakers have no set dogma on judgment in the afterlife. But in attaching his name to lynching, posterity has rendered a kind of verdict on Charles Lynch, whether justified or not.
For information on purchasing “An Active and Zealous Patriot,” see the Avoca Museum website, avocamuseum.org.
Sources:
“An Active and Zealous Patriot,” by Wyatt Golden, 2026.
The Real Judge Lynch by Thomas Walker Page, 1901
1782 letter mentioning “Lynch’s Law”
“An Act Declaring What Shall Be Treason,” 1776
Virginia General Court sentences three men to death for treason, 1782
General Assembly’s indemnification of Lynch:
William Hening, “The Statutes at Large,” vol. 11, p. 134.
