[1] However, as it spread throughout the poorest areas of the rural South after the Civil War, white members operated from economically driven and anti-black biases.
[2] After it was institutionalized in formal law, its legal definition became more general than the specific movement itself: "Whitecapping is the crime of threatening a person with violence.
"[4][5] The Whitecapping movement started in Indiana around 1837,[6] as white males began forming secret societies in order to attempt to deliver what they considered justice on the American frontier, independent from the state.
Men who neglected or abused their family, people who showed excessive laziness, and women who had children out of wedlock all were likely targets.
[7] As whitecapping spread into the Southern states during the 1890s after Reconstruction, a period of increasing racial violence against blacks by whites, the targets changed.
In the South, White Cap societies were generally made up of poor-white farmers, frequently sharecroppers and small landowners, who operated to control black laborers and to prevent merchants from acquiring more land.
Whitecapping in the South is thought to have been related to the stresses of the reconstruction Era agricultural depression that occurred immediately after the Civil War.
Prosperous black men, or simply African Americans who acquired land in the South, frequently faced resentment that could be expressed violently.
While a segregationist, Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman assembled an executive task force in 1904 in order to gather information about membership.
In the late twentieth century, whitecapping continued to be an issue in the South: Mississippi passed an edentulous statute criminalizing its practice in 1972.
[9] Some members of the White Caps had elite connections to defense attorneys in their state, who aided them in avoiding harsher sentences in court.