Uniforms are placed upon them from the start to help obscure this fact. In the end, the winners' mobs are always anything but mobs, especially to their partisans.
Like John Bicknell, here, in "The Philadelphia Bible Riots":
In Philadelphia, after some stops and starts, the civil authority in the form of local militias defended order. ... In Illinois, the civil authorities sided with the mob. Philadelphia’s Catholics survived. Nauvoo’s Mormons, having seen their government abandon them to the mob, fled.
Six years earlier in Springfield, a mere 130 miles from Nauvoo, a young Whig lawyer had warned
that “if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if their
rights to be secure in their persons and property, are held by no better
tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections
from the government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or
later, it must come.” As would so often be the case, Abraham Lincoln was
prophetic. ...
But the useful lesson from the Philadelphia riots of 1844, the mob assassination of Joseph Smith, and countless other examples across the centuries, is that those with power will always act to defend that power and are not too particular about how they do it. It makes little difference if that power is derived from positions of authority in government, business, religion, the media, academia, or any other institution. If mobs, in the street or online, will help them achieve their ends, they’re willing to exploit them, ignoring Lincoln’s admonition that “there is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” The question—in 1844 as it remains today—is whether the authority of the state will be employed to quell the mob or to augment it. The former is the foundation of ordered liberty. The latter is something else entirely.
I'm sure that the British crown thought that sending 24,000 Redcoats to Long Island in August 1776 was meant to maintain ordered liberty, too, against the Presbyterian Rebellion, just as Lincoln came to think both disunion and slavery were grievances which had become quite fit indeed for redress by force of arms. Eventually the chartered rights of Englishmen in New York prevailed over the forces of a foreign king, only to suffer loss 89 years later from the Bluebellies of a domestic tyrant.
As Bicknell otherwise rightly says,
Human affairs are morally complex and attempts to simplify them—even for
supposedly well-intentioned purposes—are almost always bound to come up
short.
