The Local Roots of Public Education

Providing public education is one of the most important and expensive responsibilities of state governments. By the Civil War, many northern states had committed significant tax support for schools, and many southern states were moving in the same direction. In other words, by the Civil War, state governments had developed the capacity to provide a new public good through public institutions. But where did this capacity come from? Scholars recognize now that the expansion of public education emerged from local contexts and depended on citizens’ support. This new consensus challenges arguments dating back to the 1970s, and still dominant among some education historians, that the expansion of public education was largely an elite response to social and economic change.^{Footnote 23}

The expansion of mass schooling was a transatlantic phenomenon, but certain states were more effective than others in raising taxes and increasing enrollment. For much of the nineteenth century, the German states and the United States were in the lead. These countries also had the smallest enrollment gap between boys and girls. Challenging top-down theories, economist Peter Lindert discovered that enrollment and spending were correlated with “whether school finance and curriculum were decided locally or by the central government.” A secondary factor was whether citizens at the local level had a meaningful voice in political affairs.^{Footnote 24} Decentralization was also posited as one of the primary “virtues of the past,” which economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz credit for expanding access to public education in the nineteenth century. America was a leader in education by 1900 because of “small fiscally independent districts, public funding, secular control, gender neutrality, open access and a forgiving system, and an academic [not vocational or technical] curriculum.”^{Footnote 25}

Historians have also recognized a connection between localism and school enrollment. David Tyack, in a now-classic 1972 essay, argued that decentralization was one reason why antistatist Americans embraced public schools. Education reformers may have desired greater central control, but many citizens appreciated that “the country school belonged to the community in more than a legal sense.” Indeed, the schoolhouse was “frequently the focus of their lives outside of the home.” Because schools were run by neighbors known to each other, the line between the state and the sociability of the community was not experienced starkly. To Tyack, “school and community were organically related in a tightly knit group in which people met face-to-face and all knew each others’ affairs.”^{Footnote 26} Modifying Tyack’s framework, Jürgen Herbst described early public schools as “between community and state.” Despite reformers’ efforts, “a widely scattered population in small towns, villages, and the countryside accounts for [Americans’] resistance to centralized direction or supervision.” The resulting schools, however, were neither creatures of the state nor the community but, to Herbst, in a middle space as localists and reformers engaged in a “see-saw battle” to control them.^{Footnote 27}

Economists thus have found a correlation between localism and increased enrollment and taxation. Historians Tyack and Herbst, in analyzing these correlations, have suggested that the public sector expanded because schools blurred the conceptual line between the state and the community. That school districts were public entities cannot be denied; indeed, recent work has demonstrated that education history is central to understanding the development of the American state.^{Footnote 28} Nonetheless, Tyack and Herbst have good reasons for their conclusions. Local control mattered not just as a matter of principle but because it encouraged the expansion of the state’s capacity to offer schooling as a public good.

Local Social Capital and Public Education

In a 2010 article examining New York state, Nancy Beadie argues that “by the time the state [government] intervened, the social aim of education and the social institution of schooling already mobilized financial resources and participation from ordinary households on a voluntary basis at a level far beyond that which either the state or the local government could command.” This is a striking statement. If correct, it means that the expansion of public schooling depended on the prior capacity of citizens to work together in their communities. Looking at ten districts, Beadie writes that enrollment was “virtually universal from the very first year such data was collected.” This, to Beadie, was not because of top-down legislation or bureaucratic capacity but because governments “incorporated pre-existing networks of social and financial capital into the political economy of the state.” In Beadie’s rendering, the schools were not between community and state (as Herbst had argued) but the state “incorporated” what citizens could do themselves.^{Footnote 29}

Perhaps it was because citizens were able and willing to pool their own resources and labor that public schools took off. This is what David Mathews found for Alabama. In 1823, a new Alabama law divided the state’s townships into school districts in which voters would elect school overseers. By tapping into localism, the state government unleashed “an army of public support for public education.” In 1839, the state government offered state funding in return for local action. By the 1850 census, about a third of Alabama’s white children were enrolled. It was at this point that Alabama followed other states to establish a state and county superintendents for oversight. Between 1850 and 1860, enrollment increased 117 percent. By 1860, around nineteen hundred of the state’s twenty-one hundred schools were public and expenditures had increased by about a third, much of which came from local taxes.^{Footnote 30}

Neither Beadie nor Mathews ignores government’s role, but both point to the importance of local citizens working together. I build on their insights in my recent book, Democracy’s Schools. I argue that localism was as much a purposeful approach to state building as it was a principle of democratic politics. Because state governments lacked the capacity to tax sufficiently and to build and run schools, they had to develop that capacity from below. Thus, the expansion of public education was a combination of legislators’ policy choices (the state) and what citizens could accomplish (social capital). State governments nudged and then pushed citizens to act, but the success of their efforts depended on collective action in localities around America.^{Footnote 31}

My argument helps us understand how states’ abstract police power to provide for the public welfare became the capacity to provide education as a public good at scale. If, as Beadie and Mathews conclude, the first public schools relied on the capacity of citizens to mobilize at the local level, once in existence the schools themselves became “agents of change,” as Richard R. John has characterized government in this era.^{Footnote 32} Citizens mobilized themselves locally to form school districts, elect school officers, raise taxes, build schoolhouses, and hire teachers. But once these institutions and practices were in place, they had a momentum of their own. Americans learned how to run schools and raise taxes for them. Elected school officers became boosters, often demanding more resources from their town, county, or state governments. As more children enrolled, more parents sought the same for their children, creating a need to provide equitable access, once again increasing the need to raise taxes. Each decision generated more capacity and more momentum, creating a path-dependent set of forces encouraging greater investment and, over time, greater state capacity.^{Footnote 33}

In New York, for example, the state legislature in 1795 authorized £20,000 for education but required localities to raise taxes to qualify for state funds. New York depended on citizens to build state capacity. Towns elected three to seven commissioners, but the heart of the system was at the local level. New York legislators purposefully and knowingly relied on citizens’ bodies. The law urged citizens to “associate together” to hire teachers and build schoolhouses. We see a slippage between the language of the state and voluntarism as schools were built in the middle ground between the two. Ohio followed a similar path. Ohio lawmakers in 1821 permitted townships to divide into smaller districts where citizens would elect school committees and vote on school taxation. In 1825, this nudge became a mandate and counties were required to collect one-twentieth of a percent of their overall taxes to distribute to school districts. Towns were required to break up into districts, and districts were required to form schools. While the legislature pushed, citizens did the work, and by 1829 there was sufficient capacity for the state to mandate a minimum three-month term. By 1837, Ohio’s first state superintendent counted 7,748 school districts, about seven per township, enrolling about a third of school-aged children.

The state mattered greatly. Even if some schools were organized before state laws required citizens to do so, legislators provided the incentives and mandates to expand schooling’s scope and scale. Yet states did not do the work of schooling; for this, they relied on citizens’ capacity to work together. By the time that reformers like Horace Mann sought greater central oversight and bureaucratic autonomy, states had already increased substantially their capacity to provide education.

The same story may be true for the South. For a long time, scholars presumed that white southerners did not seek to expand public schooling; poor farmers did not want it, and rich planters did not want to pay for it. The South thus lagged behind the North in increasing access to public schools. Yet the story is complicated by the fact that many state legislators sought to expand access to schooling for white Southerners, and after the Revolution, at least on paper, southern states expressed support for public schools. Why, then, the lag? Some of it is because of the challenges of raising taxes in a slave economy.^{Footnote 34} But, I contend, some of it has to do with legislators’ strategies.^{Footnote 35} The South lagged behind not just because of a lack of will, but because they initially failed to tap into local social capital. Middle-class white Southerners were, like their northern counterparts, joiners. They formed associations for all kinds of purposes, suggesting that there was significant social capital in the South.^{Footnote 36} But because Southern states tended to be governed at the county level, and because many public offices were appointed rather than elected, the state did not effectively mobilize ordinary citizens.^{Footnote 37} Early efforts to organize schools in the South followed this model: legislators attempted to build schools from the top down, but state and county governments lacked the capacity to accomplish their goals. Things started to change around the 1830s as southern states expanded suffrage and made more offices elective.^{Footnote 38} Southern states then followed their northern counterparts in mobilizing citizens’ bodies. Mathews considered localism to be the key to success in Alabama, but the story holds true for other southern states as well. When authority was given to local districts with elected officials, citizens tended to organize more schools and increase enrollment and taxation at higher rates. In the South, as in the North, states’ capacity to provide education increased when legislators tapped into local communities.

As states in both regions developed school systems, they often relied on bonding forms of social capital when it came to race. To Putnam, bridging social capital links people across divisions, whereas bonding social capital reinforces those divisions. In the South, the schools were explicitly for white Americans, reinforcing the racial barrier. Indeed, in southern states, the decision to democratize control to local communities and expand schooling may well have reflected elites’ sectional anxieties.^{Footnote 39} (After the Civil War, African Americans sought to expand access to schooling, as did many northern philanthropists. As in white schools, northern foundations relied on African American communities’ stock of social capital. African Americans raised money and pooled labor to build and run schools, just as had white Americans.)^{Footnote 40} In the North, racial barriers to citizenship increased in the antebellum decades, and while there was no single pattern, many states in the North and Old Northwest explicitly or implicitly authorized racial segregation, reinforcing the bonds between white Americans rather than, as many African Americans had hoped, using the common schools to bring all Americans together.^{Footnote 41}

One consequence of the way in which state governments expanded public education was that the line between the state and the community was blurred. A local system required thousands of citizens to volunteer their labor to organize and serve on local school boards. For these citizens, there was little reason to distinguish between themselves and the state. Instead, they saw themselves as community members, even as they were tasked with carrying out the objectives of state legislators and relied on the sovereign capacity to tax and make necessary regulations. And it took a lot of civic labor. Henry Barnard estimated that it required six to eight thousand citizens to run Connecticut’s schools. In Pennsylvania in 1841, there were 917 districts, which meant 5,502 directors and 19,410 school committee members.^{Footnote 42} The public’s work was being done locally by the people themselves. As a result, when state capacity had reached a threshold and reformers sought to centralize control, establish salaried officers, and increase oversight, many other Americans objected. They responded (not necessarily accurately) as if the state that they had created with their own labor was taking on an independent life.

Courts

The very premise of law is that there exists a sovereign capable of making and enforcing it. The law therefore is a creature of the state. The existence of legitimate courts, judges on those courts, officers in those courts, and individuals empowered to enforce the law, including apprehending suspected criminals, all depend on the state’s exercise of sovereign authority.

Yet when we turn to how the law worked and who enforced it, we once again find ourselves in a space that blurred the line between the state and the community. Unlike in the case of public education, there was greater continuity between the colonial and postrevolutionary eras. Yet, as in the case of public education, when it came to undertaking public work, courts and law-enforcement officials relied on the civic labor of ordinary citizens. Once again we find that state governments developed the capacity to adjudicate and enforce the law by tapping into local social capital.

In 1950, James Willard Hurst noted that the central judicial role local justices of the peace played “meant that one kind of court was set up almost on a neighborhood basis.”^{Footnote 43} In the colonial era, justices of the peace prided themselves on mediating between the King’s law and local context. They distinguished themselves from lawyers precisely because they relied on local knowledge over abstract reasoning.^{Footnote 44} Much of what passed as law continued to be grounded locally after the Revolution. While scholars have noted the abstract “police power” held by states to enforce order, in practice most of the daily work of the law took place in local contexts, a space and place very different from when historians examine legal doctrine or the decisions of higher courts.^{Footnote 45} It was in these local contexts that the state developed the capacity to adjudicate and enforce law, and so we must turn to them first.

Laura Edwards’s The People and Their Peace offers the best picture we have of these local contexts and how they worked. Examining North and South Carolina, Edwards urges scholars to distinguish between doctrine and practice, and between high-profile cases and the daily work of legal institutions. Like Tyack and Herbst in their examination of schools, Edwards found in her study of courts that historians must put “ordinary people, rather than legal professionals and political leaders, at the center of law and governance in this period.”^{Footnote 46} After independence, postrevolutionary North and South Carolina responded to citizens’ desires for greater access to courts by decentralizing the system. Advocates of legal centralization, as in the case of education, made little headway until around the 1830s.^{Footnote 47} Courts’ capacity to adjudicate law depended on the people’s own understanding of law. As a result, the law’s legitimacy depended on local consent and action. Local courts, Edwards writes, were always “blurring the demarcation between ‘local administration’ and ‘state government.’” State governments remained “relatively weak” and thus “largely depended on local jurisdiction.” The legal system depended on “flesh-and-blood individuals.” Thus, many Americans experienced “the legal system as something directly connected to them.”^{Footnote 48}

At the local level, crimes were not prosecuted by publicly paid prosecutors. Instead, “everyone participated in the identification of offenses, the resolution of conflicts, and the definition of law.” Rather than a formal body of doctrines, local citizens’ “situated knowledge” mattered most. Legal localism had dual implications. On the one hand, women, poor people, and even enslaved people could gain access to the law. As lawyers exerted greater control around the 1830s, and as courts gained autonomy from their communities, such people had a harder time accessing legal institutions, which came to favor enfranchised white men.^{Footnote 49} On the other hand, legal localism did not mean a greater commitment to equality. The “local community networks” Edwards identifies allowed greater access but also reinforced “hierarchical family and community relationships.”^{Footnote 50}

A way to make these claims tangible is to examine the places where the law was adjudicated. In education, we have images of the early nineteenth-century one-room schoolhouse. We may look back and see them as shabby, but they were important community centers.^{Footnote 51} Courthouses, like schoolhouses, were not widespread before the Revolution. Martha McNamara argues in From Taverns to Courthouses that it was not until the late eighteenth century that courts were “held in purpose-built structures devoted exclusively to judicial proceedings.” By the mid-nineteenth-century, Americans had constructed a new “landscape of justice.”^{Footnote 52} As with schoolhouses, early courthouses served, Edwards writes, as “multipurpose public buildings used for other meetings and events when court was not in session,” reinforcing the law’s close links to the local community.^{Footnote 53} And it was on this community, not the law, that justices of the peace relied to get the law’s work done.

Sheriffs and magistrates were legal officials created by the state and elected or appointed by state laws. They embodied the people’s sovereign authority, but they had little capacity to enforce law. Instead, to enforce legal dictates they “deputized willing bystanders to perform specific duties temporarily.” In other words, they tapped into social capital. Trials did not necessarily take place in formal settings governed by formal legal rules. Before courthouses, trials might be held “in convenient spots that would accommodate a crowd: taverns, country stores, front porches, a room in the magistrate’s house, or under a canopy of trees.” Legal spaces were at first not demarcated from the broader community’s life. Instead, courts, like schools, were constituted by the people coming together in their shared space and bringing them into being. And, once a judicial determination was made, enforcement depended on “community policing,” as neighbors, friends, and others carried out justice.^{Footnote 54} Courts were more formal institutions at higher levels, but even in these contexts, Edwards concludes, court days in court towns were as much social and economic events as legal ones. Given this overlap, Edwards argues for “the impossibility of distinguishing between private and public.”^{Footnote 55}

A good example of how this worked can be found in Elizabeth Dale’s discussion of an 1805 South Carolina trial. On October 24 of that year, Elizabeth Cannon awoke to find her husband John dead beside her. She screamed; her stepson alerted neighbors and family. When John’s adult nephew arrived, he noticed finger marks on John’s neck and a bump on his head. He called for the magistrate, who represented the state’s sovereign authority. The magistrate in turn called for, in Dale’s words, “the white men of the community.” These community members were quickly sworn as a jury and concluded that criminality had taken place. Everyone knew—relying on what Edwards calls “situated knowledge”—that the culprit was likely Elizabeth’s lover, Joshua Nettles. The judge ordered him apprehended, but he had absconded, and brought Elizabeth into custody. The entire process, from identifying the crime to forming the jury to apprehending Elizabeth and searching for Nettles, took place by citizens acting in common.^{Footnote 56}

Similar stories can be told for the North. In his study of Philadelphia, Allen Steinberg argues that before the Civil War “the law was ‘brought to bear’ upon citizens not by policemen or state officials but by each other.” Citizens prosecuted each other rather than rely on the mediating role of police or court officers. As a result, Steinberg writes, reaching a conclusion similar to Edwards, there existed “a process of prosecution that was . . . popular, particularistic, and extremely locally based,” as well as “flexible, subject to exploitation, and often, relative to the formal law, quite corrupt.” Over time, as in education, reformers wrangled control away from citizens, replacing private prosecutions with a criminal justice system “anchored by the police and the public prosecutor.” But in doing so, reformers relied on institutions that had gained their capacity by tapping into the local community—the courts “originated,” Steinberg concludes, “within the world of private prosecution.”^{Footnote 57}

Thus, much of what would be called “law” in the postrevolutionary decades was locally produced and was carried out not by formal public officials alone but by ordinary citizens deputized or sworn into juries. These early courts, like early schools, tapped into local social capital and generated state capacity. Legal reformers who sought, after the 1830s, to make the legal system more autonomous and governed by experts relied, as did school reformers, on the existence of this institutional capacity. By the Civil War, American courts began to look more familiar: lawyers were more widely used; there were formal rules governing who could practice law; and court officials had greater bureaucratic autonomy and resources, including being able to rely on salaried police forces (see below).

Law Enforcement

The people’s role extended from adjudicating to enforcing justice. Again the line between state and community was blurry. Before paid police forces, law enforcement depended on magistrates’ ability to recruit citizens to carry out the law’s mandates. Law enforcement may have been more dependent on local social capital than the courts. The state’s coercive power—its monopoly on legitimate violence—could not be asserted a priori, but, as in education, emerged by building state capacity from the local level upward.

Law enforcement had to be able to serve the courts before the courts could serve the law. The history of law enforcement thus parallels that of schools and courts. At first, citizens directly carried out the law. In Baltimore, Adam Malka finds that “ordinary individuals performed seemingly ‘public’ roles all the time, and this proved especially to be the case when it came to policing” and enforcing the racial order.^{Footnote 58} In Philadelphia, for most of the first half of the nineteenth century, the police force was, according to Steinberg, “a handful of men who guarded the city at night and who could initiate a criminal proceeding through an arrest.”^{Footnote 59} That started to change in 1833, when a gift from Stephen Girard enabled the city to divide into four sections, each with day policemen, thirty night watchmen, one watch captain and lieutenant, and three inspectors. In 1835, Philadelphia’s police force consisted of 176 officers, even as the city expanded and violence increased. Pressure to expand the Philadelphia police force’s authority and autonomy emerged after the city’s 1838 riots, when the major and watchmen proved incapable of stopping rioters from burning down the newly completed Pennsylvania Hall and citizens refused to respond to officials’ requests to keep the peace. After years of effort and modest reforms in response to nativist and other violence, in 1850 two reforms were instituted: the formation of a “marshal’s force” composed of a marshal elected to a three-year term who was authorized to select officers from a pool of nominees chosen by district councils or district commissioners; and the public prosecutor’s title was changed to district attorney and the officeholder was now required to “sign all bills of indictment and conduct in court all criminal or other prosecutions in the name of the commonwealth.”^{Footnote 60}

Across the nation after the 1830s the line between officer and citizen became clearer.^{Footnote 61} At the heart of this change was a tension between two modes of law enforcement: citizens who responded to the “hue and cry” of local officials as needed, and a permanent salaried force that was part of an identifiable state. During the postrevolutionary decades, law enforcement required civic labor. Jurist James Wilson describes the posse comitatus as the primary way that sheriffs enforced the law. Posse comitatus was, Wilson argued, the sheriff’s “high power of ordering to assistance the whole strength of the country over which he presides” to “suppress . . . unlawful force and resistance.” Edward Livingston celebrated the posse for having “the same ties of property, of family, of love of country and of liberty” necessary to be “effective instruments for the suppression of disorder” without “usurpation.” Because posse comitatus required the sheriff’s call, one might see it as a “compulsory institution,” as does Gautham Rao. From another perspective, it was evidence of the practical reality that local law enforcement required the labor of local bodies.^{Footnote 62}

Southern slave patrols offer another example of how the state tapped into local social capital to carry out its work. Slave patrols, like school district committees, were created by and empowered by the state’s sovereign authority. Yet, for many, they were experienced as extensions of the community. Local citizens, voluntarily or for a stipend, upheld slave laws and protected white southerners from real or perceived violence. According to former South Carolina governor James Hammond in 1845, “With us, every citizen is concerned in the maintenance of order . . . and our habitual vigilance renders standing armies, whether of soldiers or policemen, entirely unnecessary.” Maintaining slavery, which depended on coercion, required both laws and the white community’s willingness to enforce them. As Sally Hadden argues in Slave Patrols, we too often imagine slavery as taking place on individual plantations subject to the whims and desires of specific masters and mistresses or their hired overseers. In reality, it took a village.^{Footnote 63}

Hadden’s meticulous reconstruction of slave patrols’ organization and activities in Virginia and the Carolinas reinforces the story told here. Law enforcement relied on local civic labor. The line between state and community was therefore blurry because the same bodies moved back and forth across it. The same person could be, at one point, a citizen and, at another point, an officer. Patrollers were often recruited during militia musters or assigned by lot. In North Carolina, the county court appointed citizens to slave patrols. In the 1830s, the legislature created local patrol committees, turning to localism to develop patrolling capacity, much as they would do in education. Appointed patrollers took an oath, signed papers, and their bodies were transformed from ordinary citizens to bearer of the state’s coercive authority. They now acted, in Hadden’s words, “on the community’s behalf.”^{Footnote 64} The existence of slave patrols also illuminates another role that enslaved Americans played in state-building. As enslaved people moved between plantations for their own purposes, their actions created the security and enforcement needs to which patrols responded.^{Footnote 65}

Americans’ experiences in posses, as night watch, and on slave patrols may be why they resisted the formation of paid police forces. Paralleling opposition to the professionalization of schools and courts, many Americans considered efforts to professionalize law enforcement as alienation and sources of potential tyranny. London, in 1829, was the first city to establish what scholars call a preventive police force—designed to prevent rather than respond to criminal activity. New York’s Common Council rejected a similar mayoral proposal in 1836 because “the nature of our institutions are [sic] such that more reliance may be placed upon the people for aid, in case of emergency, than in despotic governments.” In 1844, in response to a bloody murder and public fears, the state legislature established a police force. Yet the police force was tied to popular, partisan politics to avoid tyranny; each city ward would nominate officers to be selected by the mayor. Localism continued to rule even as cities moved toward greater bureaucratic capacity.^{Footnote 66}

Both citizens and police officers themselves worried about the extraction of policing from its embeddedness in the community. For example, advocates of uniformed police officers argued that uniforms would serve as a crime deterrent and aid citizens needing police help. Others, including police officers, considered uniforms a sign that police officers were not free citizens. David Johnson writes that “a uniform smacked of subordination and tyranny”; uniforms were “un-American liveries.” Yet between 1853 and 1862, most major cities adopted some kind of uniform. A more critical issue was violence. As gun crime increased, some officers started carrying their own weapons, but many citizens protested when police departments armed officers because the new paid police forces were not seen as extensions of the community so much as agents of the law, and sometimes violent, corrupt, and racist agents at that.^{Footnote 67} As both courts and police gained autonomy, many Americans recognized a shift from relying on civic labor to paid intermediaries to carry out public goods.

Federal state builders faced particular challenges as they sought to enforce federal law. Unlike local posses or slave patrols, which relied on local social networks, federal state builders were seen as imposing authority from the top down. Rao argues that citizens refused to comply with federal warrants because “the federal government lacked the requisite political legitimacy to force individuals into service.” This was particularly true among northern citizens who refused to enforce fugitive slave laws, especially the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The call for a posse was in theory a compulsory order, but Rao demonstrates that citizens were much more likely to respond effectively if the call came from a local source rather than from a distant federal state.^{Footnote 68} In the case of fugitive slave laws, the federal government found itself incompetent when citizens were unwilling to provide their own civic labor.

Citizens were more willing to support law enforcement when they felt it was tied closely to their own local understandings. Dale writes, “so long as the people were the police and jurors, their ideas of what justice permitted continued to shape criminal law.” Legal reformers thus confronted the same challenges in their efforts to develop public bureaucracies accountable to expertise rather than to amateur citizens as did education reformers. One option was to limit who counted as a member of the public. Women, children, African Americans, and Native Americans were simply determined not to be able to carry out the law with their civic labor; they were placed outside the law-creating and law-enforcing public.^{Footnote 69}

But even with these exclusions, there remained a problem: how to make law and law enforcement something formal and managed by expert professionals. And the reasons to do so were clear. If, for many Americans, the line between the community and the state was blurry, this also meant that civic labor could be used for both legal and extralegal ends. Vigilante justice was rampant on the frontier, where state capacity was limited.^{Footnote 70} Mobs attacked antislavery activists; Joseph Smith was not the only person killed for threatening communal norms and values. Partisan and racial violence spilled onto city streets.^{Footnote 71} To limit vigilante justice—whether through legal or extralegal forms—cities turned to tax-supported uniformed police forces. In short, reformers by the Civil War purposefully drew a clearer boundary between the community and the state.^{Footnote 72}

Although vigilante justice may not be something to celebrate, it still offers evidence of the importance of a community’s capacity to draw on its own resources—and bodies—for collective action. In frontier communities, self-created associations enabled citizens to cooperate to protect their life, liberty, and property from criminality. True, self-created associations could be sites for criminality in gangs such as that headed by Jesse James. But, as Cindy Higgins argues in her essay about the Anti-Horse Thief Association in Kansas, before officials could enforce law, settlers “banded together to spontaneously halt wrongdoing.” The law was in the hands of the people themselves. Actual arrests were made by the victim of a crime or by a local official. Such popular forms of collective action could degenerate into the “lynch mob,” but often they were “moderate citizens orderly in their application of force.” Vigilantism may have “discouraged crime.”^{Footnote 73}

In the west, collective action built social capital as citizens cooperated to achieve shared goals. Voluntary militias, for example, were part of a broad network of associations through which citizens forged social order in new frontier societies that lacked the stable structures of older eastern communities.^{Footnote 74} These new forms of social capital brought people together and also created new divisions, or bridging and bonding social capital. Thus, Rachel St. John concludes that frontier collective action provided a mechanism to solidify white supremacy against Native Americans.^{Footnote 75} This is not to imply that frontier societies created order spontaneously. The state was a central actor. Both national and territorial governments supported settlement by organizing property sales and managing Indian affairs, including using armed force to clear Native American land. State formation took place from the top-down actions of federal and territorial governments and the collective action of ordinary settlers. As new western communities formed, “the distinctions between state actors and early ‘frontierspeople’ blur.”^{Footnote 76}

Another site for this blurring was the militia. The postrevolutionary militia was simultaneously a local institution and one that was organized by, gained its authority from, and was loosely directed by state and federal governments. The ideal of the militia—as Americans inherited it from England and colonial practice—was that the best defenders of a free state were armed and disciplined citizens. Standing armies represented the state or the king but not the body of the people. Militia service, therefore, was required by law of able-bodied men. Communal defense depended on mobilizing citizens’ bodies. The state, as it did in other realms, both relied on and encouraged the formation of local stocks of social capital.

According to Harry S. Laver, militia musters promoted “a sense of community, and a bond of neighborliness.” By coming together in a militia, white male citizens developed connections that enabled them to act collectively, much as they did during meetings or court days. As in the case of segregated schools or courts, militia musters also drew lines between full and marginal members of a community; the militia’s “public display of unity covered a hierarchical substrate of class, gender, and race.” Yet, Laver continues, in early frontier Kentucky the militia enhanced the state’s capacity to enforce law: “Kentucky’s militia assisted local authorities by fulfilling some government duties,” including helping the national census, providing information to federal authorities, assisting sheriffs, and guarding jails. An 1835 meeting of Lexington citizens called on “the several Militia and Volunteer companies” to “give their aid . . . in arresting and bringing to justice all persons guilty” of gambling “contrary to law.”^{Footnote 77}

None of this is to idealize the militia’s effectiveness at its stated purpose: ensuring well-trained and willing citizen-soldiers. Instead, militias were often dysfunctional and lacked capacity. State-level officers rarely received from local companies the information that state laws mandated, and federal officials knew even less. As local institutions, in many states recruiting was carried out in a decentralized fashion, and militia officers were often elected by their local companies. Militia days may have forged bonding social capital among free white men who came together in musters, but militias were less effective at defending the homeland. Moreover, by the eve of the War of 1812, better-off Americans sought to pay fines rather than muster, thus undermining civic solidarity. Some northern states abandoned their militias. South Carolina, which considered the militia a necessary bulwark against federal power, struggled to organize it effectively. Some states moved to a voluntary model, which, given the administrative and bureaucratic limits of most states, may have proven more effective.^{Footnote 78}

Yet the militia remained central to American defense because, as Gerstle writes, the American military “was minuscule” compared to other major powers. Instead, “the place of professional soldiers was to be taken by citizen-soldiers whom the government would call on in times of need to defend the republic.” America’s fighting capacity depended on state and volunteer militia companies. But given the failure of many state governments to maintain effective militias, success depended on voluntarism. Leading citizens organized voluntary militias by “residence or ethnicity,” which would then receive “official recognition by the state governments.” Militia were useful in small skirmishes or for law enforcement. In times of war, the federal government turned to governors to recruit; in turn, governors would turn to “private citizens to raise the necessary troops.” “Thus,” Gerstle concludes, “America’s nineteenth-century military system was built on the willingness of ordinary citizens to respond to their government’s call,” as were schools and courts.^{Footnote 79}

One need not and should not romanticize this local voluntarism. In all cases—schools, courts, law enforcement, and militia—citizens relied on the state’s sovereign authority and responded to its incentives and mandates. The development of schools, courts, and law enforcement was not spontaneous. But the state, lacking capacity, relied on the civic labor, and thus the willingness, of ordinary people to act in its name, which in experience blurred the line between citizen and state. The actual institutions were imperfect and often flawed. Citizens, for example, resented and shirked militia service. Such education reformers as Horace Mann believed, reasonably, that state and local governments could provide a superior education than that offered in ramshackle buildings with poorly paid amateur teachers. And reformers understood that relying on amateurs to enforce the law led to arbitrariness and poor administration. There were, in short, good reasons why education and legal reformers sought to assert expert control and build bureaucratic capacity and autonomy. In doing so, however, they risked angering citizens who had experienced the state and popular sovereignty very differently.