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Introduction On August 26, 1765, a crowd holding him responsible for the Stamp Act attackedtheBostonhomeofMassachusettslieutenantgovernorandchiefjustice Thomas Hutchinson. The attackers spent the entire night sacking Hutchinson’s mansion, carrying off his valuables, and using axes to dismantle the wooden portions of the building. Hutchinson and his family fled and survived without bodily harm, but his home was largely destroyed. As the rioters worked throughout the night dismantling Hutchinson’s house and looting his possessions , no forces of order arrived to eject them or to protect the property of this powerful and wealthy man. Hutchinson and his family fled to protect their lives, but not to summon police or militia to save their home.1 This incident from the early stage of the American Revolution might seem a strange opening for a history of the Chicago Police Department, which was not formed until almost ninety years later, but it illustrates a basic fact of colonial and early American life: the police simply did not exist. Armies, courts, sheriffs, and armed militias were common enough, but neither the northern colonies nor the early republic built police departments. In the major disturbances of the revolutionary and early republican period, crowds instead confronted other types of armed forces. A Boston mob confronted the British army during the Boston Massacre. Daniel Shays’s compatriots took over courthouses and fought the state militia. Whiskey rebels in the 1790s also stopped court proceedings and confronted federal marshals, state militia, and army units, but no police. By the 1830s and 1840s, various forms of disorder had become the norm in U.S. cities.2 Throughout the 1830s, Whigs and Democrats rioted regularly during election seasons.3 Working people took over the streets of Philadelphia at Christmas and reveled in the violent inversion of social norms with no force to stop them.4 Abolitionists and free black workers faced riotous mobs throughout the north, let alone the south, 2 introduction and workingmen’s strikes and political demonstrations often became riotous by later standards.5 Part of the reason that disorder became so prevalent in the 1830s and 1840s was that no U.S. city possessed an institution that modern observers would recognize as a police force. Even as late as 1849, the Astor Place rioters of New York easily overwhelmed the nascent city police and were only put down by the state militia.6 In fact, the development of police forces marked something entirely new in human history. Since the first civilizations, the maintenance of order was embedded within the economic and social organizations of society. The modern idea that economics, politics, and family life can be separated did not apply to any society before the development of capitalism. As Moses Finley points out, between Xenophon’s Oikonomikos in fourth-century bce Athens and Francis Hutcheson’s 1742 work, Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, Western thinkers considered production, trade, the maintenance of order, and family relations as inextricably bound responsibilities of local elites. In ancient Greece and Rome, the head of the household had power and responsibility over all the objects and people in that household, including children and slaves.7 Big slave rebellions like the Spartacus revolt in the 70s bce faced Roman legions, not local police. Similarly, a feudal lord was not just a rent collector. He was also the local representative of state power. In England this evolved into the system of justices of the peace. King Richard I commissioned knights to maintain order in restive areas in 1195, and by 1361 King Edward III instructed that “good and lawful men” be appointed in each county to keep order. These men were not organized into a bureaucracy commanded by the king. Rather, they were local elites given the authority to keep order as part of their overall position in society. Until the nineteenth century, the justices of the peace had a variety of responsibilities, including fixing wages, building roads and bridges, and administering poor relief. They were not paid because “for centuries most JPs were well-to-do landowners who would not bother about ‘expense accounts.’”8 The American colonies inherited this system and continued to adapt it until the 1840s. When necessary, locally elected part-time constables raised posses or called on volunteer militias, but these groups did not regularly patrol the streets. These constables were part of a broader paternalistic system of social control inherited from the colonial era. They did not resemble the police departments of a later era, and cities did not distinguish...

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