 Group violence in the British Atlantic was usually nonlethal in intention and result.In the seventeenth century, in the context of political turmoil in England and unsettled social and political conditions in the American colonies, there arose rebellions and riots that took multiple lives.In the United States, during the decades before the Civil War (sometimes called the Antebellum era), free Blacks, Mexicans in the South West, and runaways were the objects of racial lynching.