Vigilance and the Law: The Moral Authority of Popular Justice in the Far West

Abstract

1 historical importance of legal institutions in nineteenth-century America is a recurrent theme in the work of J. Willard Hurst. See, in particular, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century United States (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1956). I have also been influenced by Morton Horowitz's controversial study, Transformation of Law, 1789-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), esp. chs. 1, 5; and Perry Miller, Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1956); 99-116. For a recent review of the legal history literature, see Harry Scheiber, Public Economic Policy and the Legal System: Historical Perspectives, Wisconsin Law Review (1980), 1159-89; and Scheiber, American Constitutional History and the New Legal History: Complementary Themes in Two Modes, Journal of History, 68 (1981), 337-50. literature on control in the nineteenth century is large. most noted studies are David Rothman, Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the Early Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Michael Katz, Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968); Anthony Platt, Child Savers: Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969). I am aware of the controversy about the very term control as applied in these works, and I use it with the caution Richard Fox suggests in Beyond Social Control: Institutions and Disorder in Bourgeois Society, History of Education Quarterly, 16 (1976), 203-207, and Insanity in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1979), ch. 1. My understanding of post-Revolutionary efforts at institutional social reform stems from Fox's work and Christopher Lasch, The Origins of the Asylum, in World of Nations (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973), 3-17, 313-16. For a thoughtful dissent, see Gerald Grob, Rediscovering Asylums: Unhistorical History of the Mental Hospital, in Morris J. Vogel and Charles E. Rosenberg, eds., Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of Medicine (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 135-57. On the police, see Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston, 1833-1865 (New York: Atheneum, 1967); James Richardson, New York Police, Colonial Times to 1900 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970).