• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Even morality and propriety were improvised. The American heartland would eventually develop a reputation for suffocating primness—and while this was a real phenomenon, it was something that developed slowly, over many decades, and only in reaction to the prevailing moral anarchy of the early years of the frontier. Excessive propriety didn’t really become the dominant mode in the river valley until around the time of the Civil War. Before then, immorality (by the rest of America’s standards) was taken for granted. Prostitution was so common as practically to be the fundamental structural element of society. In fact, no clear line was drawn between it and marriage. In many of the logging and mining towns, the ratio of men to women was twenty to one; a woman who wanted to establish her respectability, and yet still retain her income, would arrange to marry several of her regular clients simultaneously. After the wedding ceremonies were over, she would spend nights with each of her husbands on a prearranged schedule, or else would live with them all communally. Prostitutes were considered in some army garrisons to be essential military personnel: they lived full-time in the barracks, and were listed on the payroll as seamstresses or laundresses, or sometimes were recorded as officers’ wives. The opulent brothels of St. Louis and New Orleans were famous tourist destinations; they advertised openly in newspapers, they held fundraisers with the most celebrated local politicians in attendance, and the local churches only objected to them when they scheduled fancy costume balls on the Sabbath.

The traditional forces of morality were in perpetual disarray. Waves of preachers and missionaries came spreading through the river valley; even the most dismal logging camp could afford to build at least one church. But these clergymen routinely wasted their righteousness on hairsplitting debates over doctrinal purity. Some churches were ready to go to war over the biblical validity of river baptisms. Earthly law was just as erratically enforced. By midcentury, only St. Louis and New Orleans had professional police departments, and they were notoriously feeble, incompetent, and corrupt. About the police in New Orleans before the Civil War, the writer Henry Castellanos observed that “a more worthless and contemptible body of men never assumed the functions of office in any other city.” But New Orleans was still better off than most communities. Villages and even large towns rarely had more than one full-time sheriff or marshal. He had the authority to deputize more men in an emergency, but ordinarily he had to enforce the law on his own, by any means necessary—which primarily meant through intimidation and violence. It wasn’t uncommon for sheriffs to be career criminals or highwaymen themselves. Their employers often felt they were the only men tough enough for the job.

The routine business of keeping the peace fell to civilians—to groups of volunteer citizens who formed associations known as committees of safety and committees of vigilance, and to quasi professionals called regulators (some regulators were volunteers; others were mercenaries who traveled from town to town). The committees and the regulators had wide latitude regarding their duties and responsibilities. All strangers could count on being questioned closely by members of the local committee about who they were, what their business was, and where and how long they were expecting to stay. In most towns, they would also be expected to turn over to the committee any firearms they were carrying—despite the cliché of the frontier-town shoot-out, communities did not as a rule permit armed strangers to wander their streets (though there were many exceptions, and local citizens were generally free to do as they pleased). The committees in the lower valley also watched over the slaves. On the plantations, slaves were kept in close confinement by their overseers, or at least were in theory, but in towns they were generally left unsupervised during the day, and they routinely