A vigilance committee was a group of private citizens to administer law and order or exercise power through violence in places where they considered governmental structures or actions inadequate. A form of vigilantism and often a more structured kind of lynch mob, the term is commonly associated with the frontier areas of the American West in the mid-19th century, where groups attacked cattle rustlers and people at gold mining claims, held kangaroo courts; and beat, killed, or exiled those they believed had violated their preferred norms (sometimes on a thin pretext of such, motivated by personal or mercenary gain). As non-state organizations, no functioning checks existed to protect against excessive force or safeguard "due process" from the committees. In the years before the Civil War, some committees worked to free enslaved people and transport them to freedom.