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By Root 1841 0

in effect, for life or as long as they want. But in the states, in the nineteenth century, a strong and successful movement switched the state courts to elective systems. In most states, then, voters elect the judges who sit in criminal courts. Democratic principles seemed to demand this. But the result is more of a political than a professional ethos. The logic seems clear. After all, judges were part of the apparatus of government; they were policy-makers and (far too often) had been extensions of the executive. This, at least, is the way many voters read the book of American and British experience. An elected judge, on the other hand, would be responsible to the voters. In the first half of the nineteenth century, election of judges became the norm (Massachusetts was one of the few holdouts). The principle applied not only to judges. Under the Arkansas constitution of 1836, for example, every township was to elect a constable for a two-year term, and every county elected a coroner and a sheriff as well (Article VI, sections 16, 17).

THE POLICE

One of the major social inventions of the first half of the nineteenth century was the creation of police forces: full-time, night-and-day agencies whose job was to prevent crime, to keep the peace, and to capture criminals. The creation of police forces was another landmark on the road to professionalization, certainly a landmark in the long, slow retreat of lay justice.

Of course, society was not totally unpoliced before police forces were organized. In the cities, as we have seen, watchmen made their rounds at night, looking out for fires and disturbances. Constables were the day-time shift in the law-enforcement business. They guarded the city, arrested drunks and vagrants, hauled offenders before the grand jury, enforced local ordinances, and supervised the watch. In addition, able-bodied men could be called on to play a part. A New York law of 1787 laid out these duties. Whenever a serious crime was committed (murder, robbery, burglary, “burning of houses,” theft, “or other felony”), “cries thereof shall be solemnly made immediately in all the towns, markets and places of public resort” near where the crime took place, “so that no man, by ignorance, may excuse himself.” This makeshift force of “horsemen and footmen” would pursue the criminals “from town to town, and from county to county.” All men were supposed to be “ready, and armed and accoutred” in order to carry out this duty. 18

A system of this kind, assuming it worked at all, had obvious problems. It was loose and haphazard; it could hardly be expected to do the job right in a city like New York or Boston. There was a constant chorus of complaints about the constables and watchmen. In Boston, several burglaries were committed in August 1789, evoking a remark that it was “high time the watchmen were overhauled; they have been asleep since New Year’s.” The captains, it was said with a sneer, were “men in their prime, aged from ninety to one hundred years, and the crew only average about fourscore, and so we have the advantage of their age and experience, at least the robbers do.”19After 1800, complaints from the respectable citizens in the cities became more strident. The old system, it was said, simply could not cope.

The London Metropolitan Police, set up in 1829, preceded and helped inspire American experiments with a standing army of professional law-enforcers. In both England and the United States, one stimulus was fear: fear of the “dangerous classes,” fear of riots and urban disorders. A metropolis was a place of danger; its twisted, narrow, darkened streets, its waterfront areas and slums were realms of vice and evil. In its impenetrable shadows lurked a tough, dangerous underworld, a sub-society of thieves, prostitutes, lowlifes, pickpockets, malcontents. It was, or could be, a “place of isolation and a breeding ground for the breakdown of moral sanctions.”20

The cities were also violent places. A wave of riots swept the cities in the 1830s and 1840s—in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, Cincinnati, and