Six Guns and state-formation: The co-evolution of public and private violence in American political development

This dissertation investigates the puzzle of how the American state was able to construct a powerful security bureaucracy while simultaneously preserving---and even expanding---the authorized capacity for private individuals and firms to protect themselves through violence in the late 19th Century. It argues that the amateur republican approach to organizing violence which infused antebellum American political institutions was transformed into a dual system of public and private violence experts (e.g. gunfighters, police, private detectives and vigilantes) who occasionally shared resources and membership. This transformation was due, in turn, to the effects of the "frontier" on how citizens related to their communities. In frontier settings---conditions of physical mobility and social ambiguity---the link between the practical forms of authority allowing a minimal state to practice coercion without a bureaucracy and the institutional rules proscribing its use was broken, a process called jurisdictional decoupling. Decoupling undermined the traditional relationship between private citizenship and communal protection and allowed market, social and state actors to adapt the older republican coercive institutions to their own ends. The upshot was that the creation of coercive bureaucracies controlled by the state in the mid and late-19th Century coincided with the expansion of institutional settings in which private actors could also continue to use force.;Because the frontier decoupled authority from formal rules across different types of jurisdictions, this dissertation presents an array of new data on violence organization in counties, municipalities, states, and territories. I first examine the use of force in the "classic" frontier zone of Northern Illinois in the 1840s, explores the role of enclosed control in counties, demonstrating how shifts in social network structure undermined the capacity for political authorities to manage ad hoc mobilization in posses and transformed participatory law enforcement into sporadic forms of vigilantism. I then, in turn, trace the emergence and co-evolution of the municipal police and private security industry in Chicago in the 1850s, demonstrating how the origins of both public police and the private security industry was the product of traditional special deputization being used in "internal" frontier settings of railroad depots and public streets, where the delegation of policing to local neighborhoods no longer worked as intended. Next, I focus on social frontiers in Louisiana in the 1870s, where the representative control of political and economic elites over the state militia was deeply compromised by the extension of political rights (including the right to serve as citizen soldiers) to African-Americans. As a result, on the one hand, the Reconstruction-Era state developed new and permanent capacities to police its citizens by professionalizing the older militia organization into a National Guard. On the other hand, many southern whites transformed the militia a systematic form of vigilantism emerged with the goal of "redeeming" the state. After the end of Reconstruction these public and private forms of force began to complement one another in propping up white elite rule, even as the state gained increasing power to define who could and could not own and use weapons. Finally, I argue that the imperial strategy based on military presence and political divide and rule which was used to incorporate the territorial frontier of the Southwestern United States in the 1870s through 1890s was undercut by market incorporation, which forged links and shared interests between territorial jurisdictions which were supposed to be distinct. Precisely because imperial incorporation relied on local delegation, however, "traditional" and limited local institutions of the sheriff and town constableship remained key nodes in the protection of property, while the military, whose activities were focused on native populations and border management, only had a limited role in direct service of the cattle, mining, and railroad industries. The result was that large-scale economic actors began to demand that gunfighting experts rather than amateurs occupy traditional law enforcement roles, transforming those roles into opportunities for entrepreneurship.