Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [113]
To begin with, it is not self-evident that the western frontier was violent. Scholars of the West are split on this issue. The West, in any event, was not a monolith. As Richard White has pointed out, no one contends that “Norwegian farmers in North Dakota habitually squared off with Colt .45s to settle the ownership of an ox ... or that German Mennonites in Kansas regulated their farm boundaries by slicing each other with bowie knives.”7 The wild part of the West meant the mining and cattle towns.
Roger McGrath studied two such towns: Aurora, Nevada, and Bodie, California, both in the Sierras. These frontier towns, he feels, were “unmistakably violent and lawless, but only in special ways.”8 There were plenty of shoot-outs, but not much robbery or rape. The violence was “men fighting men,” that is, fistfights and gunfights. The towns were crowded with “young, healthy, adventurous, single males who adhered to a code of conduct that required a man to stand and fight.”9 For the rest of the population, there was relative safety; women, unless they were prostitutes, were treated with respect; property was generally safe from depredations. (We shall return to this point.)
The frontier did attract some kinds of violence. The rootless killer was often a frontier killer, if only because the frontier, like the darkest slums of the cities, was full of places to lurk, to hide, and to flee. American mass murderers made good use of the country’s frontiers. Starting about 1800, the Harpe brothers, “Big Harpe” (Micajah) and “Little Harpe” (Wiley), carved a trail of blood along the Wilderness Road, in Kentucky. They were robbers, but they also murdered, wantonly, sometimes almost without motive.10 It is the twentieth century, of course, that has become the golden age of the “serial killer,” but the Harpes can hold their own with most.
The point is that the frontier, as a place, is not to blame; neither is the frontier as a kind of settlement. The frontier did attract rootless, deracinated men; and these are the ones who carry the germ of violence. What is to blame are situations in which uprooted men (and sometimes women) lose or lack control. Their gyroscopes gone haywire, their personalities bent out of shape, they suffer from profound character disorders, and no social force is strong enough to control or reshape them. Such people are the detritus of mobility. Individual acts of violence that come out of such a background can be sporadic, unpredictable. It may be sudden and senseless violence against strangers, though this kind of crime became far more common in the twentieth century. It is, perhaps, the kind of crime that criminal justice can do the least about.
Ritualized Violence: The Duel
Violence can also be patterned and ritualized. This is the case with the blood feud or the duel. It is an open question whether ritualized violence bears any relation to other kinds of violence. Is ritualized violence an outlet and a substitute for spontaneous violence? Or does it, in fact, breed more of it?
Dueling was an ancient custom, based on codes of male honor. At some point in the eighteenth century it crossed the Atlantic and found its way into American codes of honor as well. The most famous American duel took place on July 11, 1804, when Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton on a field in Weehawken, New Jersey.
The official attitude, especially in the North, was one of horror and outrage: dueling was a crime. In 1784, Massachusetts enacted a strong statute against this “detestable and infamous practice.” Anyone who engaged in a duel “with rapier or small sword, back-sword, pistol