The People's Welfare, Police Powers, and the Rights of Free People of African Descent

Abstract

In addition to offering hilariously long lists of local regulations, The People’s Welfare addresses some of the largest and most interesting questions in the field of U.S. history, for instance what Novak calls the “fundamental tension in the coexistence of a heightened American rhetoric of individual liberty with a constant and historic readiness to employ the coercive state powers of regulation and police.”1 In the legal history context, Novak challenged those who believed the purpose of state and local lawmaking in the nineteenth century was to destroy barriers to commerce and to unleash the nascent energy of the new nation. Rather, Novak plumbed the myriad ways policymakers regulated and restricted not only in the name of economic development but also with the goal of promoting community well-being, that is, to create a “well-regulated society.” Outside the mainstream of legal history, the book also opened the door to new ways of thinking about how public entities wielded power in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, The People’s Welfare offered a way to get outside a liberal framework in which individual rights and equality always seem a self-evident goal, with obstacles conceived as Other, un-American, and illegitimate. And on the other, it offered an escape from the dominant “social control” arguments of earlier scholarly studies; that is, the idea that governing was never liberatory but, rather, always about the monitoring and repression of the poor and disfranchised and the imposition of bourgeois values. Novak kept slavery and race at the margins of his study. Yet, when considered together with other recent work in legal history, Novak’s exploration of local-level governance in general – and police powers in particular – can help us better understand the history of free black people and civil rights organizing in the nineteenth century.