Looking at Local Officials in Early America

The Summer 2024 issue of the Journal of the Early Republic includes a forum of several scholars discussing local governance.

As the introduction to that forum says, “Local governments shaped the lives of early republic Americans more profoundly than national or state-level government did. And yet, we historians of the early republic talk about local government the least.”

But that journal is behind a paywall. So the Society for the History of the Early American Republic’s Panorama blog shared some teaser essays by contributors to that forum. Here are samples.

Sung Yup Kim, “The Jack-of-all-trades Magistrate: Grappling with the Expansive Governing Role of Justices of the Peace in Early America”:

What would have happened in the early United States if one day, every justice of the peace was suddenly removed from office? Without anyone to assess rates and enforce their collection with due authority and local knowledge, maintaining the poor and building and repairing roads would become all but impossible. State and municipal governments would have a tough time getting local communities to comply with any peacetime or wartime statutory orders.

Shorn of local magistrates handling the preliminary examination of evidence and issuing of warrants on a daily basis, county courts would be overburdened, and criminal justice would grind to a standstill. And with no one entrusted to mediate and adjudicate upon petty civil disputes among local inhabitants, everyday socioeconomic interactions would be seriously hampered.

Gabriel J. Loiacono, “Let’s Give Hog Reeves Their Due!”:

Few towns [in the early republic] still elected [hog reeves] by that name, but might elect field drivers or haywards, whose remit would include regulating hogs and other animals, as well as the fences used to confine them all. Those that did specify hog reeves, according to a 1793 Boston newspaper editor, chose newly married men by custom. This seems to have been a mild form of hazing. Election to the post was often intended as a snub, as this 1790s vignette makes clear:

A certain Priest, being informed that he had been nominated in a public meeting to the office of a Hog-Reeve–replied, “I have hitherto supposed myself to be a shepherd among my flock; but some of my people, it seems, perceiving themselves to be hogs, wish me to be in a more proper relation to them, than the one I now sustain.”

That the joke was reprinted in largely Congregationalist New England, and describes a “priest,” suggests that readers appreciated both the insult of a hog reeve nomination aimed at a Church of England clergyman, as well as the witty comeback that he flung at members of his own congregation.

Nicole Breault, “When Did the Police Become a ‘Machine’?”:

Boston’s watch was not a professional police force, nor would the men who served in the watch have seen the modern police officer as a kindred official. They did not practice preventive policing; in other words, they did not patrol in an effort to prevent crimes before they happened, nor did they seek out individuals and populations suspected of criminal behavior. . . .

The role of local policing entities as agents of state has changed so dramatically over time, from a patchwork of actions performed by non-professional watches to a highly visible form of regulation by armed, uniformed law enforcement. As I suggest in the forum, Boston’s watch, officers of the “police of the town” were the most common ways in which ordinary people interacted with the state, and arguably, this remains true to the present. And, of course, one that must be held accountable for its potential for “abuses and evils.”