Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America

Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America
Author(s): Douglas Greenberg

Source: The American Journal of Legal History , Oct., 1982, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1982),
pp. 293-325
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/844939
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Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social
Control In Colonial America
by DOUGLAS GREENBERG*
It is one of the more curious ironies of contemporary historic

writing that scholars have shown so little interest in the history
American crime, law enforcement, and criminal justice. America
historiography has ordinarily been nothing if not responsive to t
past dimensions of current problems. Yet at a time when crim
remains among the most pressing issues of contemporary public
concern, the field of American criminal justice history is only begin-
ning to develop. American historians have also been eager to borr
from scholars in other disciplines as well as from historians of oth
cultures. But at a time when the "new social history" has pr
foundly redefined both the subjects and the objects of our work, w
Americanists have only infrequently applied the new methodolo
to the history of crime. In short, the history of criminal justice in th
United States ought to be booming, much as other fields of socia
history are. Instead, however, it is moving ahead rather fitfully, a
one wonders why this should be so. Why is it that such subjects
black history, women's history, labor history, and a variety of oth
sub-fields have made great strides in recent years and have produc
a considerable body of distinguished scholarship while the history
crime in this country is still in its infancy?
Answers to such questions are invariably speculative, but we
may adduce several tentative explanations for the retarded state o
American criminal justice history. One is that such research requir
a familiarity with legal records and the language of the law, a fam
iarity most social historians lack. Trained in graduate program
rather than law schools, American historians have had a tendency
be intimidated by the arcana of the common law, and they natural
revert to subjects that depend upon sources that are not only mor
familiar and accessible, but more reliable as well. Then, too, legal
historians in the law schools have not exactly gone out of their w
to open the field to "lay" historians; nor have they made muc
* Assistant Dean of the Faculty, Princeton University.

Many of the citations in these notes are to work that is still unpublished. I wish
thank all my 'informants" for sharing their work with me. This essay would ha
been impossible without their assistance.
293

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294 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL HISTORY Vol. XXVI
effort themselves to undertake the social history of the criminal

for many of them share the conviction of one leading legal sc
who wrote forty years ago that "social historians function in a
ant anarchic world of their own."1 This situation is now cha
and several major law schools have established or are establis
programs that will permit a freer interchange of methods an
among social historians and legal scholars, but the results of
cross-fertilization have only begun to bear fruit.
In addition to lacking the technical knowledge that resear
legal materials often requires, moreover, those historians who
ventured into the field have too frequently shared the biases
lawyers and, as a result, they have concentrated upon matte
form, precedent, and procedure without paying much attent
the social context in which courts and the law functioned. To be
sure, some previous scholars did try to avoid the pitfalls of exces
sively formalistic legal history, but the result was often a catalogu
of bizarre crimes and horrid punishments whose relevance to large
historical issues was difficult to identify.2
A second reason why histories of American crime and criminal
justice are so few is that the subject itself touches questions of soci
division and class conflict that, until very recently, American lega
historians preferred to sidestep. Of course, this is also true of oth
fields of social history; however, unlike black history, women's hi
tory, labor history, and the other new or revived sub-disciplines
criminal justice history has no natural constituency. It is unlikely t
uncover heroes and villains whose experience will help to rescue
unremembered champions or unrecognized cultures from the
obscurity to which a racist, sexist, or elitist historiography has con
demned them. Students of the American past, in other words, hav
suspected that the history of crime and criminal justice was either
rather dismal story, which could only reveal embarrassing division
and conflicts, or that it was likely to tell us little that would illum
nate the contributions of inarticulate groups to American history and
culture.
Whatever the reasons (and there are surely others), it remains
true that the history of American criminal justice is only beginning to
escape from its previously moribund state. The first general history
1. Julius N. Goebel and T. Raymond Naughton, Law Enforcement in Colonial

New York: A Study in Criminal Procedure, 1664-1776 (New York, 1944), xxxv.
2. See, for example, Edwin Powers, Crime and Punishment in Early Mas-
sachusetts, 1620-1692 (Boston, 1966); Raphael Semmes, Crime and Punishment in
Early Maryland (Baltimore, 1938; reprinted. Montclair, N.J., 1970); Harry and Grace
Weiss, An Introduction to Crime and Punishment in Colonial New Jersey (Trenton,
1960); and Hugh F. Rankin, Criminal Trial Proceedings in the General Court of
Colonial Virginia (Williamsburg, 1965).

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1982 CRIME, LAW ENFORCEMENT, AND SOCIAL CONTROL 295
of the subject has just appeared;3 at least three book-length studies

of crime and justice in particular places and periods are now in
print;4 and a number of other studies await publication. In fact, there
are signs that the history of crime is about to become the growth
field that some of us have been hoping it would become for some
time. As historians have learned more about the law, as lawyers
have learned more about history, and as American social history has
begun at least to approach the sophistication of its European coun-
terpart, the history of crime and law enforcement in the United
States has begun to absorb the attention of a larger and larger
number of scholars.
Still, it must be acknowledged that we Americans are probably
ten to fifteen years behind our English and continental colleagues
and that much of our work remains unpublished and, therefore,
inaccessible.5 Moreover, the colonial period of American history
seems a particularly critical and neglected area of inquiry. Studies of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century crime invariably make compari-
sons to that earlier era, and they frequently suggest that a dramatic
transformation took place in crime and criminal justice as a conse-
quence of industrialization, modernization, urbanization or some
other broad social process. Yet it is difficult to know either the
nature or the direction of change in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries without first knowing something of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to
assess the conclusions of recent scholarship (much of it still unpub-
lished) and to suggest a framework of analysis within which the
history of early American crime and law enforcement may be under-
stood both as a discrete specialty and as part of a more broadly
gauged attempt to comprehend social and legal change in Britain's
North American colonies.
3. Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (New

York, 1980).
4. For example, Douglas Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony o
New York, 1691-1776 (Ithaca, 1976); Eric Monkonen, The Dangerous Class: Crim
and Poverty in Columbus, Ohio, 1860-1885 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); and Michael S
Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts an
South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980).
5. To demonstrate this point one only has to compare the available literature fo
colonial America to that available for England in the same period. At least thre
books of essays on crime in England have appeared in the last several years, and th
journal literature is equally rich. See Douglas Hay, et. al., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crim
and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975); James Cockburn, ed
Crime in England, 1550-1800 (London, 1977); and John Brewer and John Styles, eds
An Ungovernable People? The English and their law in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980).

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Any discussion of crime and criminal justice in early American

society must begin by recognizing the distinctions among the various
colonies. There were substantial differences in their social arrange-
ments, populations, ideologies, institutional developments, and
economic organization. Moreover, sometimes such variations could
be as profound within a single colony as they were among all of
them. Indeed, it is probably inaccurate to speak of colonial society
at all; we would do better to understand the experience of seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century Americans as having taken place in a
congeries of societies that shared the umbrella of the British Empire
and little else. Any generalization at all about these societies-to say
nothing of a generalization about so delicately influenced and locally
colored a question as crime and law enforcement-is almost inevit-
ably subject to challenge and exceptions. The following paragraphs,
therefore, constitute a sort of guided tour of colonial North America
in which I have attempted to distinguish among those colonies for
which relevant information and data are now available. The journey
begins at the north in New England and ends at the south in the
Carolinas. It is, in addition, a two-part tour: the first section concen-
trates upon conditions in the seventeenth century while the second
focuses upon the eighteenth century. Yet the nature of the data
presently available does not permit conclusions that are ideally
comparable on either a geographic or chronological basis. Such con-
clusions must await further investigation, and readers should be
particularly forewarned that the chronology of crime and law en-
forcement is presented here in gross rather than specific terms.
That said, there are several specific issues I wish to emphasize
and which inform this discussion. The first is the amount (insofar as
it can be measured) and kind of crime that the courts of the various
colonies prosecuted. It may be worth observing in this connection
that we are here talking only about offenses cognizable before the
courts and not about the total amount of crime actually committed.
Indeed, it is precisely because the "dark figure" of unreported crime
has permanently escaped our grasp that we must treat materials and
statistics drawn from court cases as cultural artifacts rather than
objective reflections of social behavior. Within that constraint, ho
ever, it is possible to test systems of criminal justice against them
selves; that is, we can discover how effectively they satisfied the
own articulated purposes of social control as well as the mechanis
they used to achieve that end. And this raises the second questio
upon which I wish to focus: the effectiveness of law enforcement
colonial North America and the factors that influenced such en-
forcement. If the argument is cast in terms of these two fact

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the amount and kind of crime prosecuted and the effectiveness of the
courts in handling it-it is possible to make useful, though unavoid-
ably imprecise, geographic and chronological comparisons. With
that task completed, I will try to suggest a broader framework
for future research and interpretation.
II
The colonies of New England play a central role in all courses in

early American history and they are, as well, the subjects of a consid-
erable mythology in American culture. The popular image of dou
Puritan magistrates and ministers humiliating transgressors and im
posing essentially religious definitions of crime and a retributive
system of justice upon a cowed and intimidated population has been
reinforced for 150 years by Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. The
terror of the Salem witch trials has equally influenced our concep-
tion of crime and justice in New England. Such images are not easily
dispelled; nor, necessarily, should they be. Indeed, seventeenth
century New Englanders did understand crime as sin and did regar
their courts as guardians of unbreachable Biblical precepts. They
occasionally paid obeisance to the common law, but their underlyin
conception of the law as a mechanism to secure a utopian religiou
community from sin and corruption remained a powerful influenc
upon the operation of their criminal justice systems.6
Despite this common trait, however, there were some signifi-
cant differences among the New England colonies. In Mas-
sachusetts, the best known of these provinces, the most commonly
prosecuted crimes were morals offenses (usually drunkenness o
sexual misconduct) and thefts. Massachusetts courts seem to have
undertaken prosecutions of crimes against the person only in
frequently. Perhaps this was because for much of the seventeenth
century the small-scale communities of the Bay Colony had effectiv
informal means available to them to prevent physical conflict amon
their members. Another related feature of this system was that of
fenders were often placed in double jeopardy: they suffered crimin
penalties in civil courts as well as "spiritual sanctions" in thei
individual churches. In any case, the system was generally effective
6. In addition to the works cited below, other studies of crime and justice i
colonial New England include Powers, Crime and Punishment; Kai T. Erikson,
Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1966); an
Emil Oberholzer, Delinquent Saints: Disciplinary Action in the Early Congre
gational Churches of Massachusetts, 1620-1692 (New York, 1956).

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Most of the accused appeared for trial; many pleaded guilty (k

ing that a "not guilty" plea followed by a conviction would b
harsher penalty); and among those who did hazard "not guilt
pleas, the rate of conviction was very high and ranged in most
dictions between approximately 70% and 80% for most of the
teenth century.' Not surprisingly, both accusation and convi
were more frequent among those of lower status and wealth
among the upper classes.8 The result was a system which, wit
own moral universe, worked rather well and in which convicted
offenders were rather easily reabsorbed into the community.9 There
were, to be sure, notorious cases of deviance from the society's
dominant values which called for the permanent exclusion of the
offenders from the community, either through banishment or execu-
tion. The Antinomian prosecutions of the 1630's, the Quaker pros-
ecutions of the 1650's, and the witch-craft trials of the 1690's are
examples. 10 But these were exceptions. Their complaints of declen-
sion notwithstanding, the leaders of Massachusetts created a system
of criminal justice that reflected their most dearly held values, suf-
fered relatively low levels of criminal behavior, and functioned ef-
fectively and efficiently.
The settlers in the radical Puritan colony of New Haven were
even more successful than their Massachusetts neighbors in creating
an effective, albeit severe system of criminal justice and social con-
trol. The New Haven magistrates paid little attention to the niceties
of common law procedure or abstract notions of "liberty." Instead,
their law book was the Bible and their procedural model was in-
quisitorial. Such an approach bred what was probably the harshest
system of criminal justice in Anglo-American history. It was also
one of the most effective: the New Haven colony did not prosecute a
single murder in its entire history, and neither property crimes nor
assaults loomed very large on its court dockets. Instead, New
Haven justice concentrated on morals crimes-particularly fornica-
tion, adultery, sodomy, buggery, and, for good measure, public mas-
turbation. The system was so draconian that most defendants (the
majority of whom seem to have been young men) could be terrorized
into confessing. One man was executed for masturbating in public.
Another, one John Knight, although only convicted of having at-
7. John M. Murrin, "Settlers, Sinners, and Magistrates: The Curious History of

Trial By Jury in Colonial America" (unpublished paper), 55, 69.
8. Eli Faber, "Puritan Criminals: The Economic, Social, and Intellectial
Background to Crime in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts," Perspectives in
American History, XI (1977-1978), 81-144.
9. Ibid.
10. See Erikson, Wayward Puritans.

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tempted sodomy, was executed because he was "a leud, prophane,

filthy, corrupting, incorrigible person, a notorious lyar, beside that
sodomitical attempt so proved, and the other filthy defiling wayes."11
New Haven magistrates seem also to have been especially con-
cerned about sexual relationships between men and animals. They
executed at least three men for such offenses, one of whom, accused
of having sexual contact with a pig, had the unlikely name of Thomas
Hogg.12
What were the results of such a system? First, prosecutions
were very speedy and very little overt resistance to the authority of
the courts appears in the court records. Of 201 defendants between
1638 and 1658, only four failed to appear. Another result of the
system was a very high conviction rate of 93%. Only one person was
acquitted in the twenty year period. 13 Moreover, none of this was
mitigated by a tendency to be merciful or to grant clemency, as
seems to have been the case in Massachusetts. A sinner was a sinner
in New Haven, and it was not for men to abrogate the law of God.
The level of serious crime in the colony was thus unusually low. Its
conviction rate was unquestionably the highest of any British colony
in North America. Indeed, it seems likely that the rate was higher in
New Haven than in any English-speaking society anywhere at any-
time, but perhaps a more whiggish historian than I would argue that
this was because its system of justice, which found no place for
juries, was so "un-English" in the first place.
Conditions in a third New England colony, Plymouth, were
similar to those in Massachusetts and New Haven, although the
actual operation of the legal system seems to have been somewhat
less severe. As in New Haven, the Plymouth magistrates spent little
time prosecuting property offenses. Crimes against morality ab-
sorbed much of their attention.14 The major differences were a
greater faithfulness to the jury system than in New Haven and a
lower conviction rate than in either Massachusetts or New Haven. 15
Another trait of the Plymouth records--although impressionistically
derived-seems to be that the magistrates prosecuted assaults and
other acts of violence more frequently than their neighbors. Why
11. Gail Sussman Marcus, "Puritanism and Criminal Punishment. New Haven and
Connecticut Colonies, 1636-1680" (unpublished paper), 11. See also Murrin,
"Settlers, Sinners, and Magistrates," 6-13.
12. Murrin, "Settlers, Sinners, and Magistrates," 10.
13. Marcus, "Puritanism and Criminal Punishment."
14. See Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in
New England, Vols. 1-6 (Boston, 1855-1861) and David Thomas Konig, ed., Plymouth
Court Records, 1686-1859 (Wilmington, Del., 1978), I.

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this should be so is difficult to say. Any definitive answer w

quire more systematic research than I (or anyone else, to my
edge) have yet conducted.'16
Despite their differences, therefore, the New England co
posessed the most effective criminal justice systems in
seventeenth-century America. Living in small, deferential, agrarian
societies characterized by unusual ethnic and religious homogeneity
as well as a stable family structure and powerful ideological con-
straints, New England colonists occupied a social world that toler-
ated little serious crime and harshly punished such crime as it did
discover.
A rather different sort of society emerged along New England's
southern border. There the Dutch struggled to rule the small and
mostly unsuccessful colony of New Netherland. The most polyglot
society in North America during the seventeenth century, New
Netherland struggled to survive with a heterogeneous population
that included not only Dutch fur traders, but a smattering of most
other European nationalities as well as African slaves. The Dutch
legal system was, of course, quite different from the English, al-
though the Calvinist religious principles of the colony's magistrates
made them almost as sensitive to sexual misconduct as their Puritan
counterparts to the north. In general, though, the legal institutions of
the colony (such as they were) lacked authority. Five English towns
on Long Island, settled by Puritans from Connecticut, went their
own way in legal matters as they did in most other things. They
continued to do so even after their Anglican countrymen conquered
the colony in 1664.
The English conquest of New Netherland had important conse-
quences for crime and law enforcement. The invaders and the Dutch
residents both regarded the law as an instrument of conquest. Ethnic
antagonism, which had been present to some degree in the Dutch
period, only intensified under English rule. The result was a legal
system whose legitimacy many New Yorkers either suspected or
denied entirely. For the rest of the colonial period English judges
and law enforcement officials complained that the Dutch would not
cooperate with the system while, for their part, the Dutch made it
clear that English legal institutions lacked sufficient authority to do
their job. When one Dutchman said that he "Valued no English Law
no more than a Turd," he bespoke an ongoing dilemma. Even
worse, he was himself a Justice of the Peace charged with enforcing
English law. 17 I will have more to say about New York when we turn
16. Shurtleff, ed., Records and Konig, Plymouth Court Records.

17. Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement, 66.

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to the eighteenth century. For now, though, we may note that the
criminal justice system of the colony seems almost never to have
done its job effectively. Conviction rates were low (usually less than
45%), more than one-third of all defendants failed to appear for trial
and escaped the reach of the law altogether, and law enforcement
officers of all kinds were notoriously inattentive to their duties.
Perhaps this is why New York courts never paid much attention to
the morals crimes that so absorbed New England tribunals. They
had too many other problems without also having to worry about
punishing adulterers, fornicators, and men with an unseemly affec-
tion for pigs. In short, if institutions of criminal justice in New Eng-
land succeeded in accomplishing the task set for them by society's
leaders, those in New York failed utterly to achieve the ends for
which the Dutch and then the English designed them.
The Quaker colonies of West Jersey and Pennsylvania provide
instructive contrasts to both New England and New York. On the
one hand, they shared the powerful ideological basis of New Eng-
land, although Quakerism certainly emphasized different aspects of
human nature than Puritanism did. On the other hand, however,
they shared the ethnic diversity and lack of institutional coherence
that characterized New York. The result was a system of law en-
forcement whose operation was frequently haphazard and some-
times contradictory. Punishments in these colonies, for example,
were as lenient as those in New England were harsh. Pennsylvania
had but two capital felonies in its earliest years: treason and murder.
Moreover, in the beginning neither Pennsylvania nor West Jersey
seems to have paid unusual attention to morals crimes--although, of
course, we have no reason to believe that Quakers were any less
promiscuous than Puritans, and many such offenses may have been
handled outside the formal legal system in the Quaker meetings.
In any case, although neither West Jersey nor Pennsylvania
seems to have been quite so chaotic as New York, patterns of crime
and law enforcement assumed a similar character. Conviction rates
were low, law enforcement officials often failed to perform their
duties faithfully, and citizens were frequently contemptuous of the
law. Using a familiar epithet, one Jerseyman summed up the attitude
of many of his fellows when he said to an intrepid officer: "Thou
sherriff, thou turd."'s Attitudes like these hardly supported com-
pliance with the law, and many West Jersey and Pennsylvania crim-
inal trials, like those in New York, were never completed for want
of the defendant's presence. Even after West Jersey merged with
East Jersey in 1702, the situation did not improve. The New Jersey
Supreme Court managed but one conviction between 1704 and

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1710.19 By the early eighteenth century, William Penn believe

the situation in Pennsylvania had become intolerable. Penn, t
proprietor of the colony, whose liberal attitudes had so inform
early leniency of the system, promulgated a harsher criminal
1700. Then, in 1718, Pennsylvania adopted the criminal law of
land outright, complete with its 300 capital felonies. In other w
Quaker idealism, which had been responsible for the seeming
eration of the colony's criminal justice system, soon gave wa
more severe attitudes. The result was a system designed to cor
perceived rise in crime and disobedience to law.20
Variations in patterns of criminal justice among the nort
colonies were considerable, and the Chesapeake settlements ex-
hibited yet another configuration of human and institutional rela-
tionships. With their tobacco-centered plantation economies and
their heavy reliance upon bonded labor (first white servants and then
black slaves), Maryland and Virginia had to cope with different so-
cial forces than those which impinged upon legal institutions in the
provinces to the north. These were arguably among the most violent
societies in the American colonies. With a disproportionate ratio of
men to women throughout the seventeenth century, high death
rates, low birth rates, and intense competition for the control of
productive land, the Chesapeake colonies weathered a terrifying
degree of conflict that was reflected not only in personal assaults and
frequent thefts, but in substantial political violence as well.21 One of
the consequences of this almost anarchic situation was that the sys-
tem of law enforcement in the region showed relatively little interest
in prosecuting morals offenses. In fact, as John Murrin has recently
observed, Maryland undertook only one prosecution for fornication
in the entire seventeenth century despite the fact that, as other re-
search has shown, about one-third of all immigrant brides were
pregnant at the time of their marriages.22 Virginia courts may have
19. Thomas P. Slaughter, "The Supreme Court of Colonial New Jersey, 1695-
1715" (unpublished paper).
20. Herbert W. K. Fitzroy, "The Punishment of Crime in Provincial Pennsyl-
vania," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 60 (1936), 242-69 and
Lawrence Henry Gipson, "Crime and Its Punishment in Provincial Pennsylvania,"
Pennsylvania History, 2 (1935), 3-16.
21. The literature on the colonial Chesapeake is extensive and familiar to colonial
historians. Those unacquainted with Virginia's and Maryland's seventeenth century
should consult Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The
Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), Thed W. Tate and David L. Ammer-
man, The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Soci-
ety and Politics (New York and Chapel Hill, 1979), and John Barth, The Sot-Weed
Factor (New York, 1967). The Tate and Ammerman volume contains an excellent
historiographic and bibliographic essay written by Tate.
22. Murrin, "Settlers, Sinners, and Magistrates," 27-28.

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shown somewhat more interest in undertaking such prosecutions,

but in both colonies death rates were so high and birth rates were so
low that any birth, whether legitimized by a marriage or not, was
cause for celebration rather than criminal prosecution. As in New
York, the courts of Virginia and Maryland had other, more threaten-
ing problems to worry about.
Another result of the rather dismal demographic situation in the
region has to do with punishment. In Maryland, persons convicted
of grand theft, a felony in England, were required to make triple or
quadruple restitution rather than suffer the death penalty. One man,
convicted of stealing a hog, was ordered not only to make restitution
for the slaughtered animal, but also to see that the county bridge was
repaired before the next meeting of the court.23 A labor shortage,
which was one of the most salient characteristics of Chesapeake
society, thus modified the operation of the criminal justice system,
and the Chesapeake colonies were also disinclined to execute people
for any but the most heinous crimes.
Wherever the heaviest burden of prosecution fell, the criminal
justice systems of the Chesapeake colonies failed to cope with it
very effectively. Despite unusually severe punishments, law en-
forcement in the area was almost disastrously weak. First, although
other sources suggest a very high level of violence in the region, the
number of cases actually reaching the courts seems to have been
relatively low. Second, defendants were less than obedient to sum-
monses to appear. In one Maryland county, 36% of all the writs
issued in 1674 were returned Non Est Inventus.24 Third, convictions
were difficult to obtain even when defendants did bother to appear.
Fourth, neither J.P.'s nor juries seem to have been any more upright
than those whose cases they were to adjudicate. The J.P.'s seem, on
the whole, to have been an ignorant and frequently drunken group,
and Murrin calculates that almost a quarter of all jurors in Prince
George's County appeared themselves for some criminal offense. In
all, law enforcement in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake was
less effective than in any other region in the colonies. From a mod-
ern and somewhat ahistorical perspective, therefore, to choose be-
tween living in New Haven or Maryland in the seventeenth century
would have been to choose between tyranny and chaos.
Before leaving the Chesapeake, we should also note that by the
end of the century, as demographic conditions began to improve,
the pattern of crime and law enforcement also began to change. As the
sex ratio equalized and the number of unattached men declined, the
volume of violent crime almost certainly declined as well. As longev-
23. Semmes, Crime and Punishment, 96.


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ity increased, the rate of turnover among law enforcemen

also probably went down, and the effectiveness of law enf
may have increased concomitantly. In general, moreov
changes in the physical circumstances of life permitted the
ment of stable planter elites in both colonies, elites that
reigns of government for their own purposes, one of whi
establish a more stable and smoothly functioning legal sys
Unfortunately, very little information is available for
sion of crime and law enforcement in the Carolinas during the
teenth century. We do know that demographic conditions t
similar to, if not worse than those in the Chesapeake. Evide
sources other than court records and legal materials indic
the Carolinas were chronically disordered societies where t
ity of political authority ranged from tenuous to non-exis
Quaker influence in North Carolina seems to have led t
consistent application of the jury system than existed elsew
beyond these rather sketchy and tentative sorts of conclu
can say little about patterns of crime and criminal justice
southernmost of the seventeenth century continental colo
III
If we turn now from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century,

we will discover that throughout the colonies there were changes in
the pattern of criminal prosecution as well as in the pattern of law
enforcement. In some colonies, these shifts were subtle and in-
volved the reinforcement of patterns that first appeared in the
1600's; in others, such alterations were quite dramatic and suggest
that a fundamental reversal of earlier trends occurred. Wherever we
direct our attention, however, it is possible to identify significant
differences between the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century expe-
riences. With that task accomplished, we will be able to turn to
some of the larger theoretical issues which the evidence raises.
By the eighteenth century, the old colony of New Haven had
been absorbed into Connecticut. Connecticut court records suggest
that prosecutions for morals offenses declined precipitously
throughout the eighteenth century while the number of cases involv-
ing property crimes or personal violence increased. By the time of
the American Revolution, 50% of all prosecutions were for theft and
the proportion rose even higher after that. In addition, the overall
volume of business in Connecticut criminal courts followed
economic cycles, falling in good times and rising in bad. Not surp
25. Ibid., 58-59, 65.

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ingly, defendants tended to be young men who possessed little status

or wealth. But the general picture seems to have been one in which
there was relatively little prosecution of serious crime. Only about
fifteen such cases reached the Superior Court every year-although
the volume of less serious offenses in the inferior courts of the
colony was undoubtedly much higher.
Generally speaking, Connecticut's system of criminal justice
was quite effective. It was characterized by low turnover and faith-
ful performance by law enforcement officials as well as by high rates
of conviction and a very small percentage of unresolved cases. (It
should be noted in passing that neither Connecticut nor any other
colony ever came close to the record established by New Haven in
the seventeenth century.) The one interesting anomaly in the Con-
necticut records is that between 1750 and 1775 morals offenses ac-
counted for 25% of the business of the New Haven County court.
During the same period, such offenses comprised fully 60% of the
business of the Middlesex County Court in Massachusetts. Thus,
New Haven's sensitivity to morals offenses, which was greater than
that of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, declined faster
than that of Massachusetts in the eighteenth century. Why this
should have been the case is very difficult to say, though future
research may provide the answer by placing these data in a more
detailed social context.26
In Massachusetts, the stable and orderly system of justice that
had emerged in the seventeenth century continued to function in the
eighteenth century. Massachusetts remained more sensitive to mo-
rals crimes than other colonies, but the preponderance of such cases
in the court records did decline in the eighteenth century. Property
crimes, in contrast, increased considerably, perhaps doubling their
seventeenth-century percentage of the total case load. The effec-
tiveness of the system remained very high, however. Judges, const-
ables, and sheriffs, who were paid promptly and well, performed
their tasks faithfully and with dispatch. Turnover in office was rela-
tively low, and juries seem to have been attentive to their tasks.
Furthermore, most cases were resolved, few defendants escaped
prosecution entirely, and recidivism was uncommon. Still, in most
jurisdictions, the conviction rate did decline to about 50% while
acquittals about doubled.27 David Flaherty concludes from the rec-
ords of Massachusetts Superior Court that the colony was relatively
26. This discussion of the situation in Connecticut draws upon Mary Kilbourne
Matossian, "The Wayward Yankees: Deviant Behavior in Colonial Connecticut"
(unpublished paper) and Richard Gaskins, "The Criminal Law in Colonial Connec-
ticut in the Late Eighteenth Century" (unpublished paper).
27. Murrin, "Settlers, Sinners, and Magistrates," 69 and David H. Flaherty,
"Crime and Social Control in Provincial Massachusetts" (unpublished paper).

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free of serious crimes-although he acknowledges that one-th

all prosecutions were for crimes of violence, a shift from the
seventeenth-century pattern.28 In short, the system was one which
achieved its avowed purpose of limiting disruptive behavior and its
attendant social disorder. It did perform this task less well in the
eighteenth century than it had in the seventeenth. Massachusetts
was, after all, a more complex and less stable society than it had
been in an earlier era. By the same token, however, when compared
to Britain's other eighteenth-century colonies, the Bay Colony re-
mained one of the most homogeneous and stable. As a result, it
handled the crime it did suffer as effectively as any province in
British North America, and more effectively than most.
By the eighteenth century, Plymouth was no longer a separate
colony; it was now merely another Massachusetts county. But it
remained a rather isolated locale, and its pattern of crime and law
enforcement continued to be distinctive. Its Court of General Ses-
sions prosecuted more crimes of violence and cases of theft than it
had in the seventeenth century and it continued to undertake pros-
ecutions of morals offenses. For example, Elijah Leach was brought
before the justices in October 1765 charged with "unbuttoning his
breeches and exposing his private members to the open view of
divers of his majesties good subjects, both men and women. .. ."
Furthermore, he repeated an epithet that had appeared in the rec-
ords of other colonies in the seventeenth century when he declared
that he "did not care a turd for God in Heaven or on Earth."29
The Plymouth Court prosecuted a greater volume of criminal
activity in the eighteenth century than it had earlier; it also seems to
have been less effective than it had previously been. The jail of the
county was in almost constant disrepair, the constables and jurors
upon whom the system depended often refused to serve, contempt
prosecutions were frequent, and a larger percentage of cases was left
unresolved.30 A reader of the Plymouth County records for the
eighteenth century cannot help but be struck by a sense that the legal
system was struggling to keep up and failing to function very well.
As we have already noted, the effectiveness of Plymouth's system of
criminal justice had always lagged behind other areas of New Eng-
land, and that gap seems only to have widened in the eighteenth
century.
28. Flaherty, "Crime and Social Control."

29. Konig, ed., Plymouth Court Records, III, 219.
30. Evidence of such difficulty appears in almost every session of the court. See,
for example, the session of September 1730, when the justices fined three constables
and two jurors for refusing to serve, and also appropriated funds to repair the county
jail. Ibid., II, 109-11.

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Because I have elsewhere treated the subject of crime and law

enforcement in eighteenth-century New York at length, I will con
fine my remarks here to just a few points that are especially relevant
to the issues I have been trying to raise in this essay. First, morals
offenses were never very important in New York. During the
eighteenth century, the importance of property crimes increased
steadily in the colony while crimes of personal violence declined in
relative significance. Second, contempt proceedings and prosecu-
tions for malefeasance in office were more common in New York
than anywhere else in the colonies. There is abundant evidence t
indicate that the effectiveness of law enforcement in the colony w
very low. Neither jurors nor constables nor sheriffs nor J.P.'s n
jails nor jailkeepers nor even hangmen were doing their jobs. Mo
prosecutions took a very long time to complete, and more than
one-third were never resolved at all. The conviction rate was slight
lower in New York than elsewhere and the acquittal rate was slight
higher. Recidivism was also more common in New York than in
either Massachusetts or Virginia. In addition, the conviction rate
was highest for black slaves, who were a significant component
the "social mix" of the colony as they were not in provinces to th
north. Third, most defendants-whether male or female-were
young and unmarried. A fourth and, I think, telling point is that the
only exception to this general pattern may be found in Suffolk
County on Long Island, which had been settled by New Englanders
early in the seventeenth century and continued to go its own way
under the English just as it had under the Dutch. Conviction rates
were high there, and the effectiveness of law enforcement was, by
virtually every indicator, much like that in Massachusetts, suggest-
ing once again a close connection between the ideology and social
organization of Puritanism-even the diluted Puritanism of the
eighteenth century-and effective law enforcement.3'
We know very little about the pattern of criminal justice in
eighteenth-century New Jersey, but it may be surmised that its so-
cial characteristics and its political and economic organization made
it quite similar to the rural areas of New York during the same
period. At least one piece of evidence suggests that the legal ignor-
ance of J.P.'s-which plagued New York in this era-was also a
problem in New Jersey. New Jersey had a law which imposed a five
pound fine on any person caught with a gun on another person's
land. The court was required to share the fine with the informer, and
no stipulation was made for a defendant without the means to pay
the fine. But when one man was caught in such circumstances the
court was in a quandary about what to do. "At last [the J.P.] deter-
31. Greenberg, Crime and Law Enjorcement, passim.

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mined him a whipping of thirty lashes, and as the Informer w

entitled to one Half the Fine, very judicially ordered him to rece
Half the Lashes."32 This is an amusing anecdote, but it also tells
something about the vagueness of criminal law in New Jersey a
about the quality of criminal justice there.
Pennsylvania differed both from the neighboring Middle C
onies of New York and New Jersey and from the provinces of N
England. The business of Pennsylvania's criminal courts underw
a noticeable shift in the eighteenth century. In Chester County, mor
als offenses declined noticeably as a proportion of the court's bu
ness while assaults, riots, and thefts increased to nearly thr
quarters of all cases.33 In addition, the total volume of crim
business seems to have been greater than in the New England co
onies and slightly less than in New York, although Chester Cou
prosecuted a larger total number of cases in the mid-eighteenth c
tury than any county in New York except New York City.34
Insofar as the effectiveness of enforcement is concerned, con
tempts were frequent in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and
use of the peace bond, a legally binding promise of good behavi
seems to have had only minimal impact. We have no acquittal, co
viction, or resolution statistics for Pennsylvania, and we know lit
of the staffing of the criminal justice system. We do know, however
that the size of the constabulary as well as the number of justi
increased significantly in the eighteenth century in response to w
was at least perceived as a rising level of personal and prope
crime.35 It is, therefore, difficult to say much with assurance ab
the effectiveness of law enforcement in eighteenth-century Penn
vania. The shift away from morals offenses, and toward crimes
violence does suggest, however, that socially dangerous acts-
those with specific victims-were increasing sufficiently fast to d
suade officials from their earlier interest in morals offenses, althoug
it must be observed that such interest was never as enthusiastic as
that of New England courts. On the other hand, the near-anarchy of
32. Weiss, An Introduction, 75-76. Additional evidence of the low regard of

Jerseyites for their legal system may be found in Michael R. Lazerwitz, "The New
Jersey Provincial Supreme Court: Common Law Adjudication During the 1770's."
(Senior Thesis, Princeton University, 1980), esp. 110, 123.
33. Jack D. Marietta, "Law and the Enforcement of Morals in Early Pennsyl-
vania" (unpublished paper).
34. Alan Tully, William Penn's Legacy: Politics and Social Structure in Provincial
Pennsylvania, 1726-1755 (Baltimore, 1975), 190-91; Marietta, "Law and the Enforce-
ment of Morals;" and Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement.
35. Marietta, "Law and the Enforcement of Morals;" Gipson, "Crime and Its
Punishment;" Fitzroy, "The Punishment of Crime;" and Paul Lermack, "Peace
Bonds and Criminal Justice in Colonial Pennsylvania," Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography, 100 (1976), 173-90.

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Pennsylvania's criminal justice system in its earliest years almost

certainly gave way to a more regularized and legitimate set of institu-
tions which, however beleaguered by violence and theft, managed to
operate without verging into the state of virtual collapse that charac-
terized New York's legal system at mid-century.
The Chesapeake colonies probably experienced the most radi-
cal shift in patterns of crime and law enforcement during the
eighteenth century. As we have already seen, things were beginning
to change by the closing decades of the seventeenth century, and
many patterns that first appeared in those years intensified during
the eighteenth century. The 1700's were, of course, the age of
planter hegemony in the Chesapeake. The great families of the re-
gion maintained considerable intergenerational stability and, relative
to the earlier period, were far more successful in exercising ready
control over society and politics. This fact, combined with the rise of
black slavery and the transportation of large numbers of English
convicts to the region, critically influenced the pattern of crime and
justice in the tobacco colonies along Chesapeake Bay.36
The entrenched position of the planters in the socio-economic
and political structure gave them an influence over courts of criminal
justice that few other American elite groups could match. Court day
in Virginia was an occasion for symbolic reassertions of the author-
ity structure of the county, and the local grandees used the occasion
to reinforce popular perceptions of authority and the consequences
of defying it.37 Two measures of the legitimacy that local authorities
enjoyed were the infrequency with which defendants requested jury
trials and the effective use of recognizances for good behavior.38
Although the available data is far from complete, the evidence
suggests that Virginia and Maryland managed to reverse the near-
disastrous pattern of the seventeenth century and that their criminal
justice systems operated quickly and effectively for most of the
eighteenth century. In Richmond County, Virginia, for example,
70.4% of all defendants were convicted between 1711 and 1754. This
is the highest conviction rate I have discovered for any eighteenth-
century American jurisdiction. In addition, recidivism in the county
was negligible in comparison to New York and lower than in Mas-
36. See Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom and Abbot E. Smith, Col-
onists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776
(Durham, N.C., 1947).
37. See A. G. Roeber, "Authority, Law, and Custom: The Rituals of Court Day in
Tidewater Virginia, 1720-1750," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 37 (1980),
29-52. On Maryland, see Ashley Ellefson, "The Functions of Punishments in
Eighteenth-Century Maryland" (unpublished paper).
38. Peter C. Hoffer and William B. Scott, "The Richmond County Virginia Crimi-
nal Trials Record, 1711-1754" (unpublished paper), 11-19.

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sachusetts. In short, if Richmond County is a reliable guide to co

tions in the Chesapeake colonies, those provinces had one of
most powerful and effective criminal justice systems of all the
onies in the eighteenth century, and one that was certainly m
effective than that of the seventeenth-century tobacco colonies
Not only did the effectiveness of law enforcement increas
the Chesapeake, the types of crimes appearing before the cour
also changed. The same study of Richmond County demonstrat
that, in contrast to other colonies, sex offenses actually increa
until the 1720's when they slackened again. Between 1711 and 17
however, morals crimes were far more important in Richm
County than in most other locales; they accounted for 44.4% o
prosecutions. Perhaps, having achieved hegemony, planters wer
able to turn to morals offenses that their predecessors had neit
the time nor the power to suppress. This does not mean, of cour
that property or violent crimes disappeared from court dockets.
lent crimes accounted for more than a third of the total case load and
property crimes for about one-fifth. In any case, regardless of the
type of crime, the Richmond County court evinced special concern
for offenses committed by those at the very bottom of the social
ladder: servants, transported convicts, and slaves. Crimes commit-
ted by slaves became particularly pressing issues of concern and
increased in Richmond County even faster than slave population
did.40
Generally speaking, the available evidence indicates that the
legal system of Richmond County, and probably those of other
Chesapeake counties as well, became a powerful weapon in the
hands of the emergent planter elite. It expressed their conception of
the social order and functioned effectively to establish that order. It
did so by controlling those beneath the planters with rapid punish-
ment for criminal behavior and a plethora of more informal mecha-
39. This conclusion is powerfully reinforced by several additional facts. Rates of

indictment in New York City and Richmond County, Virginia were very similar. In
New York, the rate of indictment per 10,000 adult males in 1723 was 52.9. The
comparable rate in Richmond County was 54.1. Even if we grant the considerable
differences between the two locales, therefore, several conclusions seem inescap-
able: the Virginia court undertook a slightly higher rate of prosecution than that in
New York, but it handled crime more effectively. The percentage of cases leading to
conviction in Richmond County was higher than in New York and the percentage of
cases left unresolved was lower. In other words, the planters of Richmond County
not only ferreted out more crime than their New York counterparts, they were also
more successful in dealing with it. See Hoffer and Scott, "Richmond County." The
New York City data have been recalculated in order to make them comparable to the
Richmond County computations. See note 53 below.
40. Hoffer and Scott, "Richmond County," 77.

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nisms that helped to insure the status and position of the elite in th
hierarchy of the region.
To the south of the Chesapeake lay the relatively isolated col-
ony of North Carolina, whose population grew quite rapidly in th
eighteenth century. German and Scots-Irish settlers flocked to the
colony, and they did so at a rate that placed great strains on institu
tions of law enforcement that had first developed in a far differen
social environment. Between 1720 and 1740, the pattern of crime
and justice in North Carolina resembled that of no colony so muc
as it did New York's. North Carolina courts were somewhat more
sensitive to moral offenses, but the most common crimes were as-
saults, thefts, and contempts. As in New York, contempt of author-
ity constituted more than 10% of the total case load. One constable
who tried to make an arrest faced a suspect, one Robert Atkins, who
warned him that if he came any closer "by God I will blow your
Brains out."41
Attitudes like that expressed by Atkins were as common in
North Carolina as they were in New York. They hardly made for
effective law enforcement, and the records of the colony reflect the
low regard in which the courts and the law were held by eighteenth-
century North Carolinians. For example, the rate of turnover among
justices in the colony was very high; 71% of them served less than
two years in office. In addition, constables, juries, and sheriffs fre-
quently failed to appear at court sessions or refused to serve al-
together. North Carolina jails were in almost constant disrepair, and
not a few jailkeepers were themselves prosecuted for allowing es-
capes. Most important of all, 57% of all cases appearing before the
courts were not resolved because the defendant did not appear or
could not be apprehended. Finally, the conviction rate in North
Carolina was only 25%, the lowest such rate I have discovered for
any colony before the Revolution. It should be noted however, that
there was an inverse relationship in North Carolina between the
social status of the defendant and the conviction rate; as the one
declined, the other increased. In sum, North Carolina law enforce-
ment was probably less effective than anywhere else in colonial
North America. When the so-called Regulator movement of the late
1760's complained about the lack of courts and law in the Carolina
back-country, it was not raising a bogus issue. Rather, the Reg-
ulators, whatever else they may have been, were seeking a solution
to a genuine social problem.42
41. Donna Spindel, "The Administration of Criminal Justice in North Carolina,

1720-1740" (unpublished paper), 11.
42. Ibid.

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Before concluding this chronological and geographic tour of

colonial North America, we should turn briefly to South Carolin
and Georgia, two colonies about which we know relatively little
Both should prove valuable in future comparative studies, howeve
for each possessed unique social characteristics that did not appe
elsewhere. Proportionally, South Carolina had the largest slav
population of any colony; it also possessed a major port in Charl
ton; and, like its northern neighbor, was the location of a Regula
movement in the late 1760s. Furthermore, its ruling elite of
planter-merchants was one of the most firmly entrenched in all
colonies, and its population was religiously and ethnically
heterogeneous. In other words, South Carolina combined the social
characteristics of the Middle Colonies with those of the Chesapeake;
the pattern of criminal justice there thus deserves closer attention
than it has heretofore received.43
Although we lack systematic data for South Carolina courts,
some clues to the nature of law enforcement in that colony may be
gleaned from the records of the Commons House of Assembly.
These clues suggest that the system of criminal justice in
eighteenth-century South Carolina labored with many of the same
difficulties that plagued North Carolina and New York. For exam-
ple, one persistent problem was the colony's lack of an adequate jail.
Although both proprietary and royal instructions to the governors
had since 1716 required the building of a prison for offenders await-
ing trial or sentencing, a grand jury could still complain in 1742 about
the legislature's failure to appropriate the funds necessary for the
construction of a "sufficient and commodious public gaol."44 Gov-
ernor James Glen repeated the complaint three years later when he
noted in an address to the Commons House that criminals and
debtors were "daily escaping from Justice for Want of a sufficie
Prison." The colony had been renting private homes in Charlest
for the purpose of detaining suspects, but such an arrangement w
clearly unworkable: during the previous summer every prisoner c
fined in those houses had escaped!45
Despite the rather dismal situation that Glen bemoaned in 174
he was still attempting to cajole the Assembly into action in 174
when he asked that body to consider "the Welfare of the go
43. Michael Hindus' Prison and Plantation illuminates some of these issues-
although the author is primarily concerned with developments in post-Revoluti
South Carolina.
44. A. S. Sally, ed., Concessions and Instructions from the Lords Proprietors
Carolina to Public Officials in South Carolina, 1685-1715 (Columbia, 1916), 270 an
J. H. Easterby, ed., The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly [volum
for 1742-1744] (Columbia, 1954), 72.
45. Easterby, ed., Journal [volume for 1745-1746] (Columbia, 1956), 64.

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People you represent" and follow the example of both England an

the other colonies "by erecting at the public Charge Gaols for th
Reception of such unfortunate Persons as may at any time be com
mitted to them." In fact, the house in Charleston leased for that
purpose had been burnt to the ground, and Glen confessed that he
found it "really astonishing" that the Assembly had still failed to
act.46 Glen's astonishment was to continue, however. In 1750 and
again in 1751, he appeared before the Assembly to beseech them to
build a jail, and he was very explicit about why he was unwilling to
abandon the project. He explained that "it is in the interest of every
Good Subject that the Laws of his country should be executed with
regularity, as well as with resolution and steadiness .. ." Legis-
lators, moreover, had a special responsibility since, by example,
they had the power to "create a reverence for the Laws, and keep up
the authority of them. .. ." Yet the courts of South Carolina were
"kept in Taverns, and the Prisons in private Houses." The conse-
quences of such a situation for law enforcement, Glen argued, were
disastrous.47
But the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly was an
unaccountably stubborn body, and it had no interest in building jails.
In March of 1752, Glen made yet another appeal for the aid of the
legislature. This time he reported that the jail-keeper had 22 prison-
ers in custody, some of whom had already been convicted of capital
crimes. Furthermore, owing to the inadequacy of the rented building
then in use as a jail, the jailkeeper was "very apprehensive . . . that
they will break Prison & make their escape, notwithstanding the
greatest Care and utmost Vigilance of himself." The members of the
House informed Glen that they would take up the matter "in due
time," but there is no indication in the published volumes of the
Commons House records that they ever did.48 South Carolina thus
seems to have failed to keep pace with its need for effective criminal
justice. The reasons for the Assembly's recalcitrance on the subject
are difficult to discern, although we may infer that political consid-
erations not directly related to law enforcement played a role. In any
case, the issue of the jail was but part of a larger set of problems that
included the failure of jury members to attend to duty, the neglect of
sheriffs and constables of their assigned tasks, and the general disre-
gard of South Carolinians for the authority of the law.49 This pattern
46. Easterby, ed., Journal [volume for 1748] (Columbia, 1961), 46-47.
47. R. Nicholas Olsberg, ed., Journal [volume for 1750-1751] (Columbia, 1974),
188, 326.
48. Terry W. Lipscomb and R. Nicholas Olsberg, eds., Journal [volume for 1751-
1752] (Columbia, 1977), 160-61.
49. Evidence of these difficulties appears in the Journal thorughout the 1740's and
1750's.

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of institutional weakness was remarkably similar to that in Ne

York, and the frustrations that Glen experienced were quite sim
to those voiced by several governors and attorneys-general in
York. If the views of such men are to be credited, moreover, So
Carolina was no more successful than New York in coping with
serious problems of law enforcement that such frustrations
evidenced.50
Similarly, Georgia should have an interesting story to tell since
it was founded with the explicit expectation of reforming English
criminal offenders, and many of its earliest settlers were transported
English convicts as a result. Further, slavery soon became a critical
component of Georgia society and its impact upon criminal justice
also needs to be gauged.
IV
Because both the geographic and chronological compass of the

preceding survey of crime and law enforcement in the Amercian
colonies is so broad and because the character of currently available
research varies so widely, we have necessarily bypassed a number
of important issues. For example, I have said very little about the
relationship of colonial women to the criminal justice system. Some
data are available in my own work and that of Donna Spindel,
and N.E.H. Hull has written a dissertation on the subject, but at
the moment, little can be said about women and the criminal law in
the colonies.51 Similarly, the treatment of slaves and free blacks in
colonial criminal courts is an extraordinarily important problem that
is only beginning to receive the attention it deserves.52 And Indians,
too, not only appeared as defendants but were also the victims of
crime in the colonies. Precise distinctions among ethnic, religious,
and racial groups remain only an undercurrent in the literature, al-
though there is reason to suspect that such issues will have a signifi-
cant place in future scholarship. In addition, almost nothing has
been said here about crime rates. In part, this is because the data are
not yet available and, in part it is also the result of an unfortunate
lack of coordination among those of us who have attempted such
calculations.53 Finally, the bifurcated chronological approach of this
50. On New York, see Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement, chs. 6-7.
51. See Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement and Spindel, "The Administra-
tion of Justice." Hull's dissertation was completed at Columbia University in 1981.
52. See, among other unpublished work, Phillip J. Schwarz, "Slave Criminality
and the Slave Community: Patterns of Slave Assertiveness in Eighteenth-Century
Virginia" (unpublished paper).
53. The details of these differences need not concern us here. However, three
examples may at least serve as cautions for future researchers. In my work on New

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essay inevitably covers the subtle and significant shifts in crime and
justice that occurred in various jurisdictions over periods of less
than a century as well as those among geographic regions within a
given colony.
With these caveats entered and unspecified others apologized
for, however, the data presented here do require additional discus-
sion. In these concluding pages, I should like to address three issues.
After a brief attempt to draw together the disparate conclusions of
the extant literature, I would like to suggest what I take to be the
most critical questions that future research should address. Second,
something more needs to be said about the influence of external
social, economic, and political factors upon criminal justice systems
in the colonies. And third, the broader significance of law and courts
for social historians is also a question that deserves further
attention.
One sure generalization to be garnered from our review of re-
cent scholarship would seem to be that crimes against morality lost
importance in the eighteenth century in areas where they had been
significant in the seventeenth. David Flaherty suggested as much in
an important essay published in 1971, and the accumulated data
generally support his conclusions.54 Recent work also provides
geographic and chronological refinements to Flaherty's work, for it
suggests that such prosecutions were a luxury in which law en-
forcement officials indulged only when there was a relative paucity
of other, more threatening crimes of violence or against property.
The New England colonies demonstrated this point in the eighteenth
century as crimes against morality lost significance, while the
seventeenth-century histories of the other colonies prove the same
point since they rarely prosecuted morals offenses in that earlier era.
In addition, Maryland and Virginia provide additional evidence to
support this view because the preliminary data indicate that they be-
gan to prosecute morals offenses more frequently after about 1700.
If we were to draw patterns in still more general terms, we
would have to say that in eighteenth-century New England there
was some erosion of the extraordinary stability of the earlier period.
York, I calculated rates of both indictment and conviction on the basis of all criminal
prosecutions in a given area per 100,000 of total population per year. In David Flaher-
ty's work on Massachusetts, he has calculated indictment and conviction rates on the
basis of "serious" crime (that appearing before the Superior Court) only. Hoffer and
Scott, on the other hand, in their research on Richmond County, Virginia, have
computed indictment rates only (using only trials in the county court) against the
standard of 10,000 adult males per year. In order to compare these rates, therefore,
further computations must be undertaken (as in note 39 above, where I have con-
verted my New York data to Hoffer's and Scott's standard).
54. See David H. Flaherty, "Law and the Enforcement of Morals in Early
America," Perspectives in American History, 5 (1971), 209-53.

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The abandonment of crimes against morality for property and per

sonal crimes in eighteenth-century New England is telling, for ev
if the level of violence and theft was low by comparison to New
York or North Carolina, it was very high when compared to New
England itself in the seventeenth century. In the Chesapeake, an
opposite pattern probably prevailed. For much of the seventeenth
century, the tobacco colonies were close to being anarchic, but in
the last quarter of the century and into the 1700's the emergence of a
securely positioned planter class, which emphasized rigid soci
control over slaves and poor whites, resulted in a more effective
system of law enforcement that was also more and not less sensitiv
to morals offenses. A correlation thus existed between the effective-
ness of law enforcement institutions and the willingness of thos
institutions to undertake morals prosecutions since only a smoothl
functioning system of criminal justice could afford the time and
energy necessary to regulate private morality.
As for the Middle Colonies and North Carolina, none of them
ever seems to have placed much emphasis on morals offenses (al-
though Pennsylvania paid less attention to such crimes in the
eighteenth century than it had earlier), and all of them did a rela-
tively poor job of enforcing the criminal law efficiently and effec-
tively. Yet none of them were ever as chaotic as the seventeenth-
century Chesapeake provinces (probably for demographic reasons)
or as stable as seventeenth-century New England (for demographic
as well as other reasons). In comparison to the other colonies, they
changed relatively little over time and, with the treatment of slaves
excepted, never indulged in the excesses of tyranny or chaos that
appeared in New England and the Chesapeake. There may be a
lesson there-particularly since these were the most heterogeneous
of all the colonies.
As this quick summary shows, a number of obvious difficulties
inhere in any attempt to write a general history of crime and law
enforcement in early America. Two should be immediately appar-
ent. The first is that the number of societies and criminal justice
systems in Britain's North American colonies was so great that the
variations among them defy easy categorization. But this is a prob-
lem that all colonial historians face in their teaching as well as in
their scholarship. The second problem is that relatively few histo-
rians have thus far undertaken systematic study of crime in the
colonies, and fewer still have published the results of their research.
Finally, I have alluded to a third problem, which is that those few of
us who have been working in the field not only differ about what the
right answers are, we do not even agree about which are the right
questions. I have no illusions that this essay will succeed in estab-
lishing a consensus, but I would like to suggest some basic factual,
rather than interpretive questions that future research ought to at-

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tempt to answer. However scholars may disagree about the meaning

of their data, it does seem to me that we ought at least try to come to
terms with the following fundamental issues:
1. Rates of Resolution. What percentage of its total case load

did a given court or legal system actually resolve through
conviction or acquittal? How did rates of resolution vary
over time and among various jurisdictions? These are rela-
tively easy research tasks, and it should be possible to estab-
lish resolution statistics for every court and colony whose
records are extant.
2. Conviction and Acquittal Rates. What percentage of cases
resulted in conviction? What percentage resulted in acquit-
tal? Again, such statistics should not be difficult to compile.
They should be calculated with a similar sensitivity to
chronological and geographic variation.
3. Social Background of Defendants. At the very least, we need
precise information about the age, marital status, and race of
defendants. Where it is possible to do so, we also ought to
collect information about their socio-economic status, relig-
ion, ethnic background, and occupations, but such data will
be very difficult to come by in many parts of the colonies.
4. Quality and Character of Criminal Justice Personnel. For
most jurisdictions, it should be possible to gauge the per-
formance of judges, juries, constables, sheriffs, jailkeepers,
and the like since colonial court records frequently contain
notations of the failure of officials to perform their jobs satis-
factorily. In addition, in some colonies it will be possible to
discover something of the social, occupational, and educa-
tional background of officers of the law as well as to deter-
mine rates of turnover in office.
5. Recidivism. Recidivism is a notoriously difficult phenome-
non to measure accurately, and there is disagreement about
the proper methodology to employ. Nonetheless, some ef-
fort should be made to acquire such data.
6. Ratio of Property to Personal to Morals Offenses. This is a
critical piece of information that appears only sporadically in
the current literature. Again, however, such data should not
be difficult to gather, and they would provide a reliable and
useful standard of inter-jurisdictional comparison. One cau-
tion: I suspect that previous writers have sometimes used
different definitions of these three categories. Perhaps the
best definitions to use are Blackstone's.
7. Crime Rates. The calculation of "crime" rates is a peculiarly
tricky business. Not the least of problems are the vagaries of
incomplete court records and population statistics. Of

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course, calculations made from court records are not,

strictly speaking, crime rates at all; they are instead compu-
tations of rates of prosecution, indictment, or conviction per
unit of population per unit of time. As I have already noted,
historians of colonial crime have used several different
methods to calculate such rates, and additional calculations
are frequently necessary in order to compare data gather
by different researchers. Of course, there is some questi
about just what such rates tell us in any case. Do they gaug
actual levels of criminality, do they measure contempora
perceptions of the amount of crime, or something in be-
tween? And how would we know the difference? Nonethe-
less, such computations, if used cautiously, have a certain
value for comparative analysis and should, therefore, be un
dertaken when it is possible. My own view is that they
should be labelled as rates of prosecution and that they ought
to be determined per 10,000 of total population per year.
Further, careful distinctions must be made about the juris-
dictions involved and additional calculations ought to be per-
formed to ascertain rates of conviction on the same basis.
The value of each of the above measures depends to a consider
able degree upon their being applied to a broad range of jurisdictio
in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century America. That is, there
very little value in knowing that the rate of recidivism in New Yo
was about 16% throughout the eighteenth century unless we hav
some standard of comparison which indicates whether such a rate
high or low. And, of course, the greater the number of jurisdictio
for which we acquire data, the more reliable our generalizations w
be. Until very recently, those of us working on colonial crime an
law enforcement have frequently been forced to speculate about t
significance of our findings because we have lacked a broad basis f
comparison. Future scholarship, I hope, will not be hampered by
such a disability.
Beyond establishing measures for understanding the relative

characteristics of systems of criminal justice in the colonies, we also
need to be aware of and account for the social context in which
courts and the law functioned. Indeed, a variety of factors ext
to the institutions of law enforcement impinged upon the natu
their business and their efficacy in handling it.55 In the colonies, o
55. 1 am obligated to David Flaherty's paper, "Crime and Social Control in P

vincial Massachusetts" for suggesting several points made in this section, altho
is in no way responsible for the particular configuration of variables I descri

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of the most important of these factors was ethnicity. In societies

with a high degree of ethnic and/or religious homogeneity, like those
in New England, serious crime seems to have posed fewer problems
than in societies like those in the Middle Colonies and the South,
where diversity of race, religion, and ethnic background were pres
ent. In other words, places like Massachusetts, Connecticut,
Plymouth, and Suffolk County, New York prosecuted less crime
and handled it more effectively partly because they had a less com-
plex set of social groups and relationships with which to deal.
Another critical factor-perhaps the critical factor-in shaping
colonial crime and law enforcement was demography. In particular,
the sex ratio and age distribution had profound consequences for
criminal justice in all the colonies. A more equal sex ratio meant a
lower level of violent crime and provided a more stable family struc-
ture that almost certainly had an informal role in suppressing deviant
behavior. Moreover, it should not surprise us to discover that our
available knowledge suggests that the "dangerous class"
everywhere was low in wealth and status, young, unmarried, and,
usually, male. A social or legal system that could control its poor
young men, therefore, was a system that had made significant
strides toward using its courts as effective mechanisms of social
control.
An additional demographic factor of some importance was
probably population density. High density eased the problems of law
enforcement in most places by putting violators and enforcers in
close physical proximity to each other. Of course, at a certain point
high population density may also have reached a "critical mass" of
sorts that created explosive problems of its own, problems of crime
associated with rapid urbanization. In turn, the smooth functioning
of the court system may well have been interrupted. The data for
New York City, on the one hand, and for New England towns, on
the other, certainly suggest that such a situation may have prevailed
in colonial America.
The nature of a community's ideology was also significant. In
colonies that began with a strong predisposition toward strict social
control and a clear intention to establish a powerful magistracy, law
enforcement was usually effective and the volume of criminal busi-
ness coming to the courts was low. It must be acknowledged,
though, that ideology probably did not count for much if the demo-
graphic factors were not right (as was the case in the Carolinas,
whose Fundamental Constitutions were profoundly utopian and
oriented toward social control) or if the content of the ideology was
"too" libertarian in nature (as in West Jersey and Pennsylvania).
A factor related to ideology, of course, has to do with patterns
of leadership and institutional organization. In the New England
colonies, whose long-term cadre of leaders was among the most

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stable of all the colonies, institutions of criminal justice function

much the way that they were intended to. This pattern of s
declined somewhat during the eighteenth century in New En
but gained unprecedented power and cogency in the Ches
which may explain why conditions in that region seem to ha
proved over what they had been in the seventeenth century.
as I can tell, a stable pattern of leadership that was comparable
either to that in seventeenth-century New England or to that in
eighteenth-century Virginia and Maryland never emerged in the
legal systems of the Middle Colonies or in North Carolina. Another,
perhaps more appropriate way to put this is to say that a unified elite
was never able to seize control of the reins of power in New York,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. As a result, the
institutions of law enforcement in those colonies were themselves
subject to considerable political wrangling which undercut th
legitimacy and day-to-day effectiveness. In New England during t
seventeenth century and the Chesapeake colonies in the eighteen
century, on the other hand, a unified class possessing considerab
wealth, acknowledged status, and fundamentally unchallenged pol
ical power was able to use the legal system in a single-minded at
tempt to secure its own goals.
One consequence of this sort of elite control was coherently
organized institutions of law enforcement that were closely sup
vised at both the provincial and local levels and which were able a
willing to secure well-paid, capable personnel. Such institutio
both inhibited crime and dealt more effectively with such crime
they did discover. A related point is that draconian punishment
while present everywhere-were insufficient by themselves to det
serious crime. In order to operate as deterrents to crime, such
punishments had to be accompanied by other institutional and
human resources under the firm control of the elite. Thus, high rates
of resolution and conviction and low rates of acquittal were closely
correlated to the character of elite rule and its impact upon the
quality of law enforcement officials.
Finally, then, we are led to consider the relationship between
class structure and criminal justice in early America, for questions
about the effectiveness of law enforcement are ultimately questions
about how successfully elite groups manipulated social and legal
institutions for purposes of social control. But it is not enough to
ascribe effective law enforcement to securely held economic or
political power and a Weberian monopoly on the legitimate use of
violence. We must also inquire how economic and political power
became secure and how the law managed in a given society to ac-
quire a monopoly on legitimate violence. To pursue such an inquiry
we must turn our attention from law enforcers and law violators to
those who may be called, for want of a better term, "law obeyers."

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That is, the most critical influence upon institutions of law may be
the attitude of various social classes to the law itself. As Eugene
Genovese has observed in another context, the capacity of a legal
system to preserve "the wider social order and system of class rule"
depends not merely upon its control of the means of violence, but also
upon its "ability to present itself as the guardian of the interests and
sentiments of those being ruled."56 In other words, another way to
say that law enforcement is effective is to say that the law and its
institutions function, to use Genovese's Gramscian language,
"hegemonically." They survive not through terror, but through
their capacity to persuade large segments of society that their con-
tinued security and safety depend upon a given system of legal rules
and institutional mechanisms.
In an essay on "Property, Authority, and Criminal Law,"
Douglas Hay has applied a perspective similar to that outlined
above, and he has concluded that several aspects of English criminal
law in the eighteenth century helped to encourage respect for estab-
lished authority and deepened the power of the English ruling
class."' In particular, Hay highlights three aspects of the criminal
law as an ideological system: majesty, justice, and mercy. Briefly,
"majesty" refers to the rituals of the law, "justice" to its technical
and rule-bound nature, and "mercy" to the tendency of the legal
system to temper its harsh punishments with liberal pardons. All
three factors, Hay contends, helped to preserve values of deference
among the people of England. They were, in a phrase, the means of
"hegemony."
At present, it is impossible to apply a schema like Hay's sys-
tematically to all the American colonies. Fragmentary evidence does
suggest, however, that "majesty," "justice," and "mercy" all
made their appearance in early American criminal law and that they
were frequently associated with attempts to establish secure elite
control over political and social institutions. Of course, not all such
attempts were successful since ideology by itself is usually insuffi-
cient to establish social and political hegemony, and historians must
account for the other factors we have noted as having influenced the
operation of criminal law in the colonies. Nonetheless, the following
examples suggest that Hay's conclusions about England may have
significant parallels in the American colonies:
"Majesty"
Item: Court sessions in seventeenth-century New England
and in eighteenth-century Virginia were very elaborate affairs
56. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New
York, 1974), 25.
57. Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law" in Hay, et al.,
Albion's Fatal Tree, 17-63.

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filled with symbolic expressions of the social status and po

power of the magistrates.58
Item: In the mid-1760's, the New York Supreme Court,
ing what it took to be a rising tide of crime and social diso
required that in the future all judges and lawyers appear in ro
and bands at court sessions because such apparel would "d
tinguish the Different Orders of Men" and advance the "
nity, Authority, Solemnity, and Decorum of the Court.""5
Item: In all the colonies, as in England, executions were
tricately staged public ceremonies designed to "teach" the
spectators as much as to punish the convicted felon.60
"''Justice"
Item: After 1680, jury trials in criminal cases rapidly replaced
a tradition of summary justice in every colony north of Virginia.
The process through which this change was achieved varied
from colony to colony. In some (like Maryland and Virginia), it
was the result of changes instituted directly by the ruling class.
In others (like those in New England), it filtered up from below.
In all, however, it almost certainly aided in maintaining the
legitimacy of the legal system.61
Item: In New York, the criminal law "anglicized" increas-
ingly after the court system was reorganized in 1691. Through-
out the colonies, moreover, the law and lawyers, although con-
tinuing to be the object of popular suspicion, gained increasing
ascendancy during the eighteenth century. By the middle of the
century, several colonies had codified their laws. At the same
time, common law rules were applied with more consistency
than they had been previously.62
58. See Powers, Crime and Punishment and Roeber, "Authority, Law, and
Custom."
59. Cited in Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement, 223-24.

60. See Powers, Crime and Punishment, Ellefson, "The Function of Punishment,"
and Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement. Note, too, the frequent publication of
execution sermons and the "speeches of dying men" given on the gallows. For a
discussion of some typical examples, see Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement,
Ch. 4.
61. See Murrin, "Settlers, Sinners, and Magistrates," 74-76.

62. On New York, see Goebel and Naughton, Law Enforcement. On New Jersey,
see Lazerwitz, "The New Jersey Provincial Supreme Court." For the "angliciza-
tion" of law in Massachusetts, see John M. Murrin, "Anglicizing an American Col-
ony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts" (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univer-
sity, 1966). Gipson, "Crime and Its Punishment" and Fitzroy, "The Punishment of
Crime" also provide evidence of anglicization. On the codification of law, see Robert
G. Smith, "Toward A System of Law: Law Revision and Codification in Colonial
America" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1977).

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"Mercy"
Item: In seventeenth-century New Haven and Massa-
chusetts, the purpose of criminal tribunals was clearly not
punishment for its own sake. Rather, "mercy" was applied
generously when the court was assured that the accused had
made appropriate deference to the behavioral standards of the
community.63
Item: In eighteenth-century New York, Pennsylvania, and
Maryland, despite the formal institutionalization of the severe
penalties of English criminal law, pardons were liberally
granted much as they were in contemporary England.64
Examples are only examples, of course; and to demonstrate the
presence of "majesty," "justice," and "mercy" in early American
criminal law is not to demonstrate their function. Certainly, there
were variations from one jurisdiction to another, and it is equally
apparent that such practices did not always succeed in inculcating
deference or establishing social control. One New York official was
astounded to discover in 1756, for instance, that a man charged with
murdering the Sheriff of New York "had imbibed and strongly be-
lieved a common Error generally prevailing among the Lower Class
of Mankind in this part of the world that after warning the Officer to
desist and bidding him stand off at his Peril, it was lawful to oppose
him by any means to prevent the arrest."65 Thus, future studies will
have to come to terms not only with the "lessons" the criminal law
was designed to teach, but also with the extent to which those les-
sons were learned and applied in actual social behavior. As yet, we
know far too little about popular attitudes toward the law and legal
institutions, although such attitudes almost certainly had a critical
impact upon the hegemonic function of law in a given colony.
Perhaps we also need to think about law and courts in the col-
onies in even more general terms. Anyone who has looked even
briefly at a set of colonial court records knows that criminal cases
occupied only a very small portion of the court's time. In every
jurisdiction with which I am familiar, civil litigation was far more
common than criminal prosecution. Yet the study of litigiousness in
the colonies is even more retarded than the history of crime and law
enforcement. In a very important book, David Konig has recently
argued that the rise of litigation in seventeenth-century Essex
County, Massachusetts represented a sort of conquest of society by
63. See Faber, "Puritan Criminals" and Marcus, "Puritanism and Criminal
Punishment."
64. See Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement, 127-31; Fitzroy, "The Punish-
ment of Crime;" and Ashley Ellefson, "Pardons and Reprieves in Eighteenth-
Century Maryland" (unpublished paper).
65. Quoted in Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement, 160.

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the law.66 While other scholars have argued that litigiousness w

sign of increasing social conflict, Konig contends that high leve
litigation signified a society that had established appropriate inst
tional mechanisms for the resolution of such conflict. If Konig
very persuasive argument is correct, then historians of criminal
tice will have to examine the "civil side" of court records as well as
the "criminal side." Indeed, it may well be that a smoothly function
ing system of civil litigation is an aspect of "justice" as Hay uses th
term and that such a system is closely related to low levels of crim
and effective law enforcement. In other words, the law as whole-
not just the criminal law-needs to be understood in terms of its
capacity to protect authority and insure deference. In a sense, what
am suggesting is that the study of crime, law enforcement, and crim-
inal justice may be a dangerously narrow category of analysis for
social historians to adopt if it causes them to ignore the history and
social meaning of the law in more general terms. For many of us, this
sort of agenda will mean significant retooling since few "lay" histo
rians are yet equipped to read the records of the civil courts with full
comprehension. Yet if the records of such courts are as important t
our most fundamental concerns as I believe they may be, there ar
significant benefits to be gained from acquiring a more thorough
knowledge of the language and procedures of the common law.
In the final analysis, then, the history of crime and law en-
forcement raises issues of continuing significance. Even so cursor
an examination as the one I have undertaken here suggests that the
manner in which a past society dealt with crime and criminals is
sensitive barometer of the ways in which it resolved-or failed to
resolve-the apparent contradiction between human freedom an
social control. This seeming paradox between liberty and order
upon which the study of criminal justice must invariably touch, is
tension that has been peculiarly problematic for American histo-
rians because few societies have simultaneously valued liberty so
intensely and pursued order so passionately.
Almost no one in the American colonies before the Revolution
would have understood crime and law enforcement in terms of a
conflict between liberty and order, but the historical record conta
few examples of colonies that managed to create orderly systems
criminal justice without also enforcing a rigidly hierarchical syst
of values and a highly authoritarian social structure. The colonies
seventeenth-century New England and of the eighteenth-centur
Chesapeake, for example, were probably more successful than an
others in suppressing crime and social disorder. They were also t
66. David Thomas Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex
County, 1629-1692 (Chapel Hill, 1979).

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most successful in crushing dissent and staving off challenges to th

ruling elite. In contrast, eighteenth-century New York and North
Carolina failed to keep crime within manageable limits and barely
secured even minimal deference to the legal system. They were als
colonies in which ethnic and religious diversity flourished and in
which democratic political activity achieved substantial success.
Other colonies in other periods fell between these extremes. But th
sobering conclusion must be that where order thrived in colonial
America, so too did oppression; where liberty prospered, so too did
crime.
Until the ratification of the Federal Constitution few Americans
would have been disturbed to discover this relationship; most would
probably have explained rising crime as the unfortunate conse-
quence of an "excess of liberty." But the men who made the Ameri-
can Revolution and wrote the Constitution-the most influential of
whom were from Virginia and Massachusetts-changed all that by
exalting liberty even while they attempted to establish order. Eve
since, Americans have found it difficult simultaneously to
contemplate-no less to comprehend-the mutually reinforcing
character of their cultural attachment to liberty and their social im-
pulse for order. The history of early American crime, law enforce-
ment, and criminal justice thus offers scholars challenging opportu-
nity to delineate the origins of one of the most enduring dilemmas in
American culture, a dilemma which is as important to our under-
standing of the future as it is to our interpretation of the past.

143.106.202.206 on Wed, 29 Dec 2021 20:51:25 UTC

Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America

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Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America

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Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America

Author(s): Douglas Greenberg

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/844939

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It is one of the more curious ironies of contemporary historic

* Assistant Dean of the Faculty, Princeton University.

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effort themselves to undertake the social history of the criminal

1. Julius N. Goebel and T. Raymond Naughton, Law Enforcement in Colonial

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of the subject has just appeared;3 at least three book-length studies

3. Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (New

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Any discussion of crime and criminal justice in early American

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The colonies of New England play a central role in all courses in

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Most of the accused appeared for trial; many pleaded guilty (k

7. John M. Murrin, "Settlers, Sinners, and Magistrates: The Curious History of

10. See Erikson, Wayward Puritans.

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tempted sodomy, was executed because he was "a leud, prophane,

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this should be so is difficult to say. Any definitive answer w

16. Shurtleff, ed., Records and Konig, Plymouth Court Records.

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18. Murrin, "Settlers, Sinners, and Magistrates," 19.

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1710.19 By the early eighteenth century, William Penn believe

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shown somewhat more interest in undertaking such prosecutions,

23. Semmes, Crime and Punishment, 96.

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ity increased, the rate of turnover among law enforcemen

If we turn now from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century,

25. Ibid., 58-59, 65.

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ingly, defendants tended to be young men who possessed little status

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free of serious crimes-although he acknowledges that one-th

28. Flaherty, "Crime and Social Control."

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Because I have elsewhere treated the subject of crime and law

31. Greenberg, Crime and Law Enjorcement, passim.

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mined him a whipping of thirty lashes, and as the Informer w

32. Weiss, An Introduction, 75-76. Additional evidence of the low regard of

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Pennsylvania's criminal justice system in its earliest years almost

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sachusetts. In short, if Richmond County is a reliable guide to co

39. This conclusion is powerfully reinforced by several additional facts. Rates of

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41. Donna Spindel, "The Administration of Criminal Justice in North Carolina,

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Before concluding this chronological and geographic tour of

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People you represent" and follow the example of both England an

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of institutional weakness was remarkably similar to that in Ne

Because both the geographic and chronological compass of the

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