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178 ⡰ Patriarchal Magistrates, Associated Improvers, and Monitoring Militias Visions of Self-Government in the Early American Republic, 1760–1840 j o h n l . b r o o k e H ow did Americans understand the concept of self-government, and the relationship between state and citizen, during the age of revolutions and the early Republic? I would like to explore these understandings of public authority in something of a social anthropology of power, arcing from early modern England to the antebellum American states. I agree with Steve Hindle, who, in respect to Tudor-Stuart England, speaks of being more interested in the “circuits of authority” than the “corridors of power,” more interested in “what was happening” than “what happened.”¹ Such a mapping needs to take into consideration the claims of the state to an “autonomous” existence outside of society, and the counterclaims of subjects and citizens to a responsive government “of the people.” It also requires that we keep in focus the evolving forms and practices of governance and civil life that mediated directly between state and citizen. Over the past several decades a powerful literature has begun a new exploration of these practices of governance. Christopher Tomlins launched this work with his account of the eighteenth-century origins of the concept of “internal police”—the broad power of a government to regulate internal order for the benefit of its inhabitants—and its transition into a system of labor law in the early Republic. William Novak subsequently presented a similarly influential account of this power to regulate, the salus populi, in which the “people’s welfare” required and assumed a web of municipal law and regulation that confounds any mythology about an era of laissez-faire minimalism in nineteenthcentury America.² Tomlins’s and Novak’s descriptions of the practices of the rule of law in states and localities reinforce an understanding that—before the Civil War, through to the turn of the twentieth century and the Progressive era, and even until the New Deal—the American national state was simply a superThompson & Onuf final pages.indd 178 Thompson & Onuf final pages.indd 178 1/3/13 1:39 PM 1/3/13 1:39 PM Magistrates, Improvers, and Militias 179 intending power, framing the contexts and terms under which governance was practiced in lesser jurisdictions.³ Unfortunately these accounts of nineteenth-century law and regulation are virtually free of political context. An enormous and long-standing literature explores the policy, cultural, and even psychological differences between Whigs and Democrats in “Jacksonian America,” and the resonances of these political identities back to the Revolution and forward to the post–Civil War Gilded Age. Tomlins and Novak, however, give priority to legal rather than political history and avoid any explorations of the dynamics between partisan identity and popular governance.⁴ This essay presents the outlines of such an exploration. It begins with the assumption that Tomlins and Novak are essentially right and that partisans along the antebellum political spectrum all subscribed to the general premises of the “internal police,” the salus populi. But if they shared these general premises , their interpretations of their meanings for routine governance diverged fundamentally. This commonality, I argue, was grounded in the common traditions of governance that Americans inherited from a colonial past. Refracted by revolution and carried down different paths into the nineteenth century, diverging interpretations of early modern conceptions of patriarchy, magistracy , and the state moved toward both a Whig ideal of the associated improver and a Jacksonian ideal of the monitoring militia. Let us begin this mapping by imagining an elderly man sitting at his desk somewhere in the state of New York in the spring of 1832, thinking back across his life in public over the course of many decades. Before him lies a stack of almanacs and registers, the constant companion of the man of affairs, each item displaying a snapshot view of the public life of province and state. In endless lists of men entrusted with public authority, these little books provided the ordinary citizen with a guide to the specific officers whose performance literally mediated between state and citizen, or state and subject. The oldest in this man’s collection dated from the end of the old colonial world and was printed and sold by the printer Hugh Gaine in Hanover Square in New York City. As the Revolutionary crisis had crested in 1774 and 1775, Gaine had been on the fence but eventually spent the...

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