ABSTRACT
In their recent efforts to study the problem of law and order in mid-nineteenth century America, scholars have entered a field where only amateurs and popularizers once dared to tread. The result has been a more conceptually sophisticated look not only at frontier communities with their gunslingers, vigilantes, and lynchings, but also at the established cities, where crime and disorder peaked around mid-century, and the idea of professional policing began to take hold. One thing historians have found is that Americans were torn between two, often conflicting emotions. Legalistic and order-minded, they were also intensely individualistic to the point where violence could be justified as a democratic right. Interestingly, this same ambivalence informed the way Americans reacted to crime and disorder. On the one hand, there was the urge to maintain the law and the public peace. In the cities, this often meant reorganizing systems of policing inherited from colonial times, and thereby acquiescing in the idea of a more powerful municipal government. On the other hand, Americans were sensitive about the influence and the cost of local government. 1 The reorganization of urban policing, therefore, had to be reconciled with democratic and republican principles, as well as with the concerns of penny-pinching property-holders. This desire to maintain order without jeopardizing democratic individualism was epitomized in die frontier vigilante, who enshrined every man’s right to be the law untd himself, at no cost to the taxpayer.
