kangaroo court / mustang court / mustang
It is often the case with slang terms that the metaphor underlying the term has been lost. Slang often circulates for decades before being recorded, and in that time why the term came to be can be forgotten. Such is the case with kangaroo court. We have no firm idea why it is associated with the Australian marsupial. A kangaroo court is an unofficial and sham tribunal or an ad hoc group of people who pass judgment on someone who is perceived as having committed some transgression. It carries the connotation of prejudgment and of relying on poor or trumped-up evidence.
What we do know of the term is that is an Americanism, originating in the antebellum South. Its appearance is slightly preceded by the synonymous mustang court. In the case of mustang court, the underlying metaphor is clear, a mustang being a wild or unbroken horse. Mustang is from a blend of two Spanish words meaning stray, mestengo (now mesteño) and mostrenco. English use of mustang is recorded in 1808.
The first recorded use of mustang court, however, is in a debate in the legislature of the Republic of Texas on 20 December 1839:
The Report of the Judiciary Committee, recommending the passage of a bill to repeal certain acts therein named, was read 2nd time, and adopted; and when the act had received its 2nd reading,
[…]
Mr. Jones, of Brazoria, replied, that the committee on the Judiciary had referred to the statute books; and if gentlemen would do so, they would find as not authorizing the President to receive 40,000 volunteers; an act creating the celebrated Auditorial Court—or ‘Mustang Court’, as it had been very properly called; and enough of other resolutions, acts and laws, equally as useless and odious; to convince them of the errors into which they had fallen.
The earliest record of kangaroo court that I can locate is in the New Orleans Times-Picayune of 24 August 1841:
DON’T COMPREHEND.—The Concordia Intelligencers says “several loafers were lynched in Natchez last week upon various charges instituted by the Kangaroo court. The times grow warm; we can see another storm coming, not unlike that which prevailed in the days of the Murrel excitement. In Natchez, as in New Orleans, they are driving away all of the free negroes.” What is a Kangaroo court, neighbor?
The question at the end demonstrates that the term was not yet widely understood and that the slang term was unfamiliar to a general, Louisiana audience in 1841. While this specific use is to an unlawful tribunal that lynches Blacks, the term did not seem to, and today does not, carry a racist connotation. The issue of the Concordia Intelligencer, another Louisiana newspaper, that is referenced is not digitized, so there is at least one somewhat earlier usage to be found in a paper copy in a library somewhere.
In 1850, the writer Samuel A. Hammett, using the pseudonym Philip Paxton, penned the following description of such a tribunal, using both mustang court and kangaroo court. The tribunal that Hammett describes is a mock trial, convened by lawyers as a joke, but general usage of the term was for real, albeit unofficial and unlawful, courts:
One of the principal amusements of the bar during these sessions of the court, is to assemble in some sufficiently capacious room, and after indulging in all the boyish games that occur to them, to institute mock proceedings against some one of their number, for some ridiculous, imaginary offence.
One of these “circuit evenings” is very green in my memory—and I do not ever remember to have laughed so long or so heartily before or since, as I did then, at seeing the wisest and most intelligent men in the country entering with perfectly childish enjoyment and abandon, into childish jokes and childish games.
The scene was a log hut, containing one room and some dozen beds, upon which, lying, sitting, or in an intermediate posture, were at least thirty members of the courts.
After playing “Simon,” “What is my Thought Like?” and a dozen similar games, one of the company arose and announced in a most funereal tone that a member of the bar had—he deeply and sincerely regretted to state—been guilty of a most aggravated offence against decency, and the dignity of his profession, and he therefore moved that a Judge be appointed and the case regularly inquired into.
By an unanimous vote, Judge G.—the fattest and funniest of the assembly—was elected to the bench, and the “Mestang” or “Kangaroo Court” regularly organized.
Mustang court fell out of use toward the end of the nineteenth century, but use of kangaroo court remains strong.
While the origin of kangaroo court must be labeled as “unknown,” researcher Barry Popik has discovered an intriguing possibility, that while by no means definite, might define the locus of how the term originated. Vicksburg, Mississippi in the 1820s–30s had a notorious red-light district known as the Kangaroo, so named after the district's most famous brothel. (Why the brothel was named Kangaroo I don’t know, but perhaps it is because it was, in that era, an exotic animal or more crudely an association of brothels with bouncing.). In 1835, following a disturbance in the Kangaroo during Fourth of July celebrations, an ad hoc group of citizens attempted to dislodge the gamblers and sex workers from the district, resulting one of the citizens dead and the hanging of five gamblers for his murder. The incident was widely reported on in newspapers throughout the United States. While there is no evidence of anyone calling the posse that raided the district a kangaroo court, the district’s name, its location, and the date of the incident correspond to a potential origin for the term.
And as is often the case with slang terms whose origin is obscure, various speculations about the origin of kangaroo court have been promoted as fact. Some claim that the term was brought to the United States by Australians working the California gold fields in 1849–55, but as can be seen from the evidence the term existed before the discovery of gold there and the early uses are not from California. Another speculation is that a kangaroo court bounces the defendant from courtroom to jail, much like a kangaroo hops. This is an amusing idea but is almost certainly a post-hoc rationalization.
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Sources:
Buchanan, Thomas C. Black Life on the Mississippi. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: U of North Carolina Press, 2004, 36. HeinOnline: Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law. Partial view available at Google Books.
“Don’t Comprehend.” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 24 August 1841, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Fourth Congress····First Session” (20 December 1839). Austin City Gazette (Texas), 25 March 1840, 1/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Lynch Law—Five Gamblers Hung Without Trial” (27 July 1835). Albany Journal (New York), 28 July 1835, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2024, s.v. kangaroo court, n., mustang court, n.
Paxton, Philip [Samuel A Hammett]. “Term-Time in the Backwoods, and a Mestang Court.” Spirit of the Times, 27 July 1850, 269/2. ProQuest Magazine. Later published as a chapter in A Stray Yankee in Texas. New York: Redfield, 1853, 205. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Popik, Barry. “Kangaroo Court.” The Big Apple (blog), 4 August 2006.
Tréguer, Pascal. “’Kangaroo Court’ and Synonyms: Meanings and Early Occurrences.” Wordhistories.net, 3 July 2023.
Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 20 July 1944. Wikimedia Commons. Bundesarchive Bild 151-11-29. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.
