ABSTRACT
The evening of September 26, 1858, was cloudy, dark. John Howard stood on the main campground in Bibb County, Georgia. A camp meeting of local Blacks and Whites was in full swing. The deadly confrontation between Jacob and Thomas Bagby was the outcome of a system of policing structured by the imperatives of human bondage. In pre-modern England, policing was based on the mutual pledge system, which dated back to the tenth century. The men of a community banded together as needed to protect themselves from outlaws or to come to each other's aid in other times of distress. The American colonists continued this system of community-based policing. Eventually every colony hired constables and marshals and established militias and night watches made up of all free adult men. America underwent a profound transformation from the turn of the nineteenth century to the Civil War. The Louisiana Purchase and lands acquired after the Mexican War greatly enlarged the country.
