Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T18:01:04.604Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Fragmented Force: The Evolution of Federal Law Enforcement in the United States, 1870–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2017

Jonathan Obert
Jonathan Obert*
Affiliation:
Amherst College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 640 - 675
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank Adam Dean, Eleonora Mattiacci, Nicholas Rush Smith, Paul Frymer, and Jeffrey Friedman for their comments and insights on this project.

References

NOTES

1. Paving the way for this interpretation is Stephen Skowronek, who identified the ways in which attempts to professionalize the American military along European lines were stymied by traditional dominance of patronage politics, even as the military itself took on increasingly robust policing and expansionary functions in the late nineteenth century. See Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877—1920 (Cambridge, 1982), 87–120.Google Scholar

2. For important revisionist analyses of the non-Weberian nature of American state capacity, see Boundaries of the State in U.S. History, ed. Sparrow, James T., Novak, William J., and Sawyer, Stephen W. (Chicago, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nackenoff, Carol and Novkov, Julie, eds., Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal (Philadelphia, 2014);Google Scholar Gerstle, Gary, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, 2015);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Balogh, Brian, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 2015);Google Scholar Balogh, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, 2009);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Novak, William J., “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 752–72;Google Scholar Jensen, Laura S., Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (Cambridge, 2003);CrossRefGoogle Scholar King, Desmond and Lieberman, Robert C., “Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State,” World Politics 61, no. 3 (2009): 547–88;Google Scholar Moore, Colin D., “State Building Through Partnership: Delegation, Public-Private Partnerships, and the Political Development of American Imperialism, 1898–1916,” Studies in American Political Development 25, no. 1 (April 2011): 27–55;Google ScholarClemens, Elisabeth S., “Lineages of the Rube Goldberg State: Building and Blurring Public Programs, 1900–1940,” in Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of The State, ed. Shapiro, Ian, Skowronek, Stephen, and Galvin, Daniel (New York, 2006), 380–443Google Scholar.

3. For public-private ties in federal enforcement, see Unterman, Katherine, Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives across Borders (Cambridge, Mass., 2015), 47–67;Google Scholar Capozzola, Christopher, “The Only Badge Needed Is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America,” Journal of American HistoryGoogle Scholar 88, no. 4 (1 March 2002): 1354–82; Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 101–3, 121–22, 133–35; Cohen, Andrew Wender, “Smuggling, Globalization, and America’s Outward State, 1870–1909,” Journal of American History 97, no. 2 (2010): 371–98;Google Scholar Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI: A History (New Haven, 2007), 36–37; William R. Hunt, Front-Page Detective: William J. Burns and the Detective Profession, 1880–1930 (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1990); Peter Andreas and Ethan A. Nadelmann, Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations (Oxford, 2006), 115–16.

4. Several authors offer mechanisms they argue help facilitate fragmented state building. For instance, Gerstle identifies strategies of exemption, surrogacy, and privatization, each of which allow for central state entrepreneurs to expand or “peg” federal authority to local or private action (see Liberty and Coercion, 5–6). Elisabeth Clemens, in turn, identifies “borrowing” state capacity, ensuring “dependence and predation,” and complex interdependence as forms of linking otherwise contradictory public/private or central/local forms of state authority (“Lineages of the Rube Goldberg State,” 191–93). While each of these mechanisms play a critical role in the trajectory of American state building, we still lack a clear sense of when central state actors are actually forced to resort to such strategies, as well as how these options developed to begin with.

5. Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 101.

6. The local nature of nineteenth-century American policing—both rural and urban—has received a large amount of scholarly interest, although the links between local police power (rooted in the common law) and federal law enforcement has not. See Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill, 2009); Walker, Samuel, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (New York, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Monkkonen, Eric H., Police in Urban America, 1860–1920 (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar; Lane, Roger, Policing the City: Boston, 1822–1885 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waldrep, Christopher, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–80 (Urbana, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steinberg, Allen, The Transformation of Criminal Justice, Philadelphia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill, 1989)Google Scholar; Ayers, Edward L., Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Harring, Sidney L, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915 (New Brunswick, 1983Google Scholar); Miller, Wilbur R, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830–1870 (Chicago, 1977)Google Scholar.

7. Miller, Wilbur R., Revenuers & Moonshiners: Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1991), 101, 140.Google Scholar

8. For exceptions, see Johnson, David R., American Law Enforcement: A History (St. Louis, 1981), 73–87;Google Scholar Cresswell, Stephen, Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansman: Federal Law Enforcement in the South and West, 1870–1893 (Tuscaloosa, 2002).Google Scholar

9. Calhoun, Frederick S., The Lawmen: United States Marshals and Their Deputies, 1789–1989 (Washington, D.C., 1990)Google Scholar; Johnson, David R., Illegal Tender: Counterfeiting and the Secret Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C., 1995)Google Scholar; Miller, , Revenuers & MoonshinersGoogle Scholar; Cohen, , “Smuggling, Globalization, and America’s Outward State, 1870–1909”Google Scholar; Shugerman, Jed Handelsman, “The Creation of the Department of Justice: Professionalization Without Civil Rights or Civil Service,” Stanford Law Review 66, no. 1 (2014): 121–48Google Scholar; Cummings, Homer S. and McFarland, Carl, Federal Justice; Chapters in the History of Justice and the Federal Executive (New York, 1937)Google Scholar; Easby-Smith, James Stanislaus, The Department of Justice: Its History and Functions (Washington, D.C.: W. H. Lowdermilk & Co., 1904Google Scholar); Langeluttig, Albert, “The Department of Justice of the United States” (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1927)Google Scholar.

10. Cresswell, , Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansman, 5–6, 15–17, 240–65Google Scholar.

11. Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, 2001).Google Scholar

12. Goldman, Robert M., A Free Ballot and a Fair Count: The Department of Justice and the Enforcement of Voting Rights in the South, 1877–1893 (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Kaczorowski, Robert J., The Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, Department of Justice, and Civil Rights, 1866–1876 (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Swinney, Everette, “Suppressing the Ku Klux Klan: The Enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments, 1870–1874” (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 1966)Google Scholar.

13. Cresswell, Stephen, “Enforcing the Enforcement Acts: The Department of Justice in Northern Mississippi, 1870–1890,” Journal of Southern History 53, no. 3 (1987): 421–40Google Scholar.

14. Kaczorowski, , The Politics of Judicial Interpretation, 161–88Google Scholar.

15. Brandwein, Pamela, Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction (Cambridge, 2011)Google Scholar; Valelly, Richard M., The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago, 2009)Google Scholar.

16. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 362; Goldman, Robert M., “The ‘Weakened Spring of Government’ and the Executive Branch: The Department of Justice in the Late 19th Century,” Congress & the Presidency 11, no. 2 (1984): 165–77Google Scholar; Cresswell, , Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansman, 256–57Google Scholar; Cummings, and McFarland, , Federal Justice, 521Google Scholar; Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 104–8Google Scholar; William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge, 1982), 295–99.

17. Friedman, Lawrence, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York, 1994), 270.Google Scholar

18. The information for this and all other figures is taken from the Annual Reports of the Attorney General of the United States (1870–1900) and is available in an online appendix. All aggregated data for the United States as a whole exclude Washington, D.C., which was reported in the original tabulations (the district technically came under the jurisdiction of the federal government, even though policing was in the hands of a municipal department). These graphs are scaled and smoothed by a five-year moving average to permit comparison.

19. The annual reports of the Attorney General only rarely made specific complaints with regard to local resistance to policing, for instance—between 1875 and 1890, the reports include persistent complaints about Utah’s refusal to pay for territorial prison infrastructure and often argue for additional revenue and manpower or reforms in procedure, but rarely address specific and widespread resistance to federal enforcement outside election law. Attorney Generals did offer more general concerns about the need to offer legal protection to federal officers, but did not tie these arguments to specific regions or tasks. See, for example, Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1877), 19; Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1878), 18. Local resistance to revenue collection in the South was, of course, the subject of a great deal of consternation on the part of Internal Revenue officials, as well as Congress. See Testimony Before The Senate Special Committee to Investigation the Administration of the Collection of Internal Revenue in the Sixth District of North Carolina, S.Mis.Doc 116 (1882), 47th Cong. 1st sess.

20. Chicago’s population comprised approximately 45 percent of the population of the Northern District of Illinois from 1870 to 1900, on average.

21. The increase in Northern District of Illinois Court in the 1890s was mostly due to an increase in post-office crimes, which were vigorously used to combat striking during the first several years of the decade. Increases in Chicago police arrests, in turn, were related to increases in rioting, assault, and other common-law crimes. See United States Strike Commission, Report on the Chicago Strike of June–July 1894, S.Ex.Doc. No. 7 (1895), 53rd Cong. 3rd sess., xviii–xix and Sam Mitrani, “Reforming Repression: Labor, Anarchy, and Reform in the Shaping of the Chicago Police Department, 1879–1888,” Labor 6, no. 2 (2009): 73–96.

22. A broadly similar pattern holds for New York as well, though federal prosecution rates in New York are more difficult to compare to municipal policing figures given the division of casework across multiple federal district courts. For policing reforms and professionalization in the late nineteenth century, see Johnson, , American Law Enforcement, 55–72Google Scholar; Fogelson, Robert M., Big-City Police (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar.

23. See the online appendix for a depiction of these trends over time.

24. Data from Annual Reports of the Attorney General of the United States, Statistical Abstracts of the United States Census, and Eric Monkkonen, Police Departments, Arrests, and Crime in the United States, 1860–1920 (Ann Arbor, September 1999), distributed by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, ICPSR 7708.

25. Calhoun, The Lawmen, 6.

26. Ibid., 100–106.

27. Schmeckebier, Laurence F., The Bureau of Internal Revenue: Its History, Activities and Organization (Baltimore, 1923), 6–22.Google Scholar

28. Johnson, Illegal Tender, 66–67; Cummings and McFarland, Federal Justice, 369–70. For the establishment of the Internal Revenue, see “An Act to Provide Internal Revenue to Support the Government and to Pay Interest on the Public Debt,” Ch. 119, Stat. L. 432 (1862); for the Provost Marshal’s service, see “An Act for Enrolling and Calling out the National Forces, and for Other Purposes,” Ch. 75, 12 Stat. L. 731 (1863); for increases in the enforcement of postal surveillance, see “An Act to Prevent Correspondence with Rebels,” Ch. 60, 12 Stat. L. 696 (1863), and “An Act Relating to the Postal Laws,” Ch. 89, Stat. L. 504 (1865). Between 1855 and 1865, the number of special agents hired by the Post Office increased from 18 to 26. See C. E. Caine, “Special Agents and Post Office Inspectors Up to and Including 1938” (Washington, D.C., 1938), 2. Each draft district had a Provost Marshal, and each state had a Provost Marshal General—Illinois, for example, was ultimately divided into 11 draft districts, while there were 178 total draft districts across the country. Moreover, the Provost Marshals themselves were frequently former law-enforcement officials. Cyrus Bradley, the first Chief of Police in Chicago in 1855, was also appointed a Provost Marshal in the city in 1861. See Final Report Made to the Secretary of War by the Provost Marshal General, 1866, Part 2 (Washington, D.C., 1866), 16–17; John J., Flinn, History of the Chicago Police from the Settlement of the Community to the Present Time (Chicago: Under the auspices of the Police book fund, 1887), 75–76.Google Scholar

29. Cresswell, , “Enforcing the Enforcement Acts: The Department of Justice in Northern Mississippi, 1870–1890”; Calhoun, The Lawmen, 106–19Google Scholar.

30. “An Act to Establish the Department of Justice,” Ch. 150, Stat. L. 16 (1871). Sections 3, 7, 9, and 15 of the act consolidate the department’s control over the solicitors and law officers from departments such as Treasury and State and bureaus such as Internal Revenue and the Post Office.

31. Shugerman, “The Creation of the Department of Justice,” 149.

32. Hall, Kermit L., “The Civil-War Era as a Crucible for Nationalizing the Lower Federal-Courts,” Prologue 7, no. 3 (1975): 177–86Google Scholar.

33. See, for example, “How Republicans Deal with Rogues,” New York Times, 2 November 1871; Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation, 93–94. For the goals of the Radical Republicans with regard to enforcing voting laws in general, see Lou Falkner Williams, “The South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials and Enforcement of Federal Rights, 1871–1872,” Civil War History 39, no. 1 (1993): 47–66.

34. For example, “Rumors of War,” The Vindicator (Natchitoches, La.), 4 July 1874.

35. Cresswell, Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansman, 61–65.

36. Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation, 86–87; 46th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record 9: 1691–96.

37. See Testimony Relating to Expenditures in the Department of Justice: Frauds Under Fee System, 48th Cong., 1st sess., 1884, H. Misc. Doc. 38; Sworn Statements in Cases Involving U.S. Marshals in Alabama, May 1883, General Records of the Department of Justice, Record Group 60, National Records and Archives Administration Building, College Park, Md.

38. Quoted in Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation, 88.

39. Ibid., 81.

40. Cummings and McFarland, Federal Justice, 246.

41. 46th Cong., 1st sess., Appendix to the Congressional Record 9: 3–121.

42. The debate over the use of the army in domestic law enforcement partly about Reconstruction policy and partly a conflict between those who wanted to preserve the professional reforms initiated by the Civil War and those who hoped to streamline and limit the size and scope of the U.S. Army. In this sense, it tracked the debate over bureaucracy in the Department of Justice. See Skowronek, Building a New American State, 102–3.

43. Calhoun, The Lawmen, 189.

44. James, Scott C. and Lawson, Brian L., “The Political Economy of Voting Rights Enforcement in America’s Gilded Age: Electoral College Competition, Partisan Commitment, and the Federal Election Law,” American Political Science Review 93, no. 1 (1999): 115–31.Google Scholar

45. Quigley, David, “Constitutional Revision and the City: The Enforcement Acts and Urban America, 1870–1894,” Journal of Policy History 20, no. 1 (2008): 64–75Google Scholar.

46. See “The Lodge Election Bill,” The Nation, 27 March 1890.

47. The Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago (Chicago: The Chicago Directory Company, 1880), 46; Report of the General Superintendent of Police of the City of Chicago to the City Council for the Fiscal Year Ending December 31st, 1880 (Chicago: Clark & Edwards, 1881), 11.

48. Shugerman, “The Creation of the Department of Justice,” 166. For example, Hiram Whitley, the chief of Secret Service from 1869 through 1874, engaged in a major administrative reorientation of the force during his tenure, which led to the hiring of dozens of new operatives. Similarly, the Postal Inspection service increased from a force of fifty-three in 1875 to more than one hundred by 1895. See Johnson, Illegal Tender, 80–82; Caine, “Special Agents and Post Office Inspectors Up to and Including 1938,” 2. Between 1877 and 1890, the number of deputy collectors in the Revenue Bureau grew from 25 to 162. See Annual Report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue (Washington, D.C., 1877), xxxiii–xxxiv; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue (Washington, D.C., 1890), 13.

49. Skowronek, Building a New American State, 39–162; Johnson, Illegal Tender, xi–xvi, 73, 92; Johnson, American Law Enforcement, 86.

50. Miller, Revenuers & Moonshiners, 61–62, 69.

51. Over 80 percent (around 1,120 of 1,335) of the arrests for moonshining in 1877, for instance, took place in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. See Annual Report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue (Washington, D.C., 1877), xxxii.

52. Miller, Revenuers & Moonshiners, 102–3; George Wesley Atkinson, After the Moonshiners (Wheeling, W.V.: Frew & Campbell, 1881), 33–63, 117–49, 165. Raiding was not the only tactic used to police revenue violations. The famous Whisky Ring of the early 1870s, for instance, was the target of a large-scale investigative effort, much of which relied on the same tactics pioneered by the special agents in the Post Office. See James J. Brooks, Whiskey Drips: A Series of Interesting Sketches, Illustrating the Operations of the Whiskey Thieves in Their Evasions of the Law and Its Penalties (Philadelphia: W. B. Evans, 1873).

53. Miller, Revenuers & Moonshiners, 115, 145. See also Annual Report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue (Washington, D.C., 1885), xii; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue (Washington, D.C., 1890), 18.

54. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue (1877), xxxii; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue (Washington, D.C., 1879), xiii.

55. Miller, Revenuers & Moonshiners, 99–101.

56. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue (1879), iii–iv; Atkinson, After the Moonshiners, 29.

57. Mashaw, Jerry L., Creating the Administrative Constitution: The Lost One Hundred Years of American Administrative Law (New Haven, 2012), 256–60.Google Scholar

58. Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 142–44Google Scholar.

59. Ibid., 128–29.

60. Ibid., 119.

61. United States Pension Bureau, General Instructions to Special Examiners of the United States Pension Office, revised (Washington, D.C., 1881), 31Google Scholar.

62. McMurry, Donald L., “The Bureau of Pensions During the Administration of President Harrison,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 13, no. 3 (1 December 1926): 361.Google Scholar

63. Logue, Larry M. and Blanck, Peter, “‘Benefit of the Doubt’: African-American Civil War Veterans and Pensions,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38, no. 3 (2008): 377–99Google Scholar.

64. Mashaw, Creating the Administrative Constitution, 265–66.

65. Fowler, Dorothy G., Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office (Athens, 1977), 17Google Scholar.

66. Ibid., 49–54.

67. Johnson, American Law Enforcement, 78.

68. Caine, “Special Agents and Post Office Inspectors Up to and Including 1938,” 2.

69. See, for example, Brewster Cameron to David Parker, Chief of Special Agents, Department of the Post Office, 31 May 1877; Box 4, 675–92; Correspondence and Reports of Special Agents, 1836–78; Office of Special Agents and Mail Depredations; Records of the Post Office Department, RG 28; National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.; Woodward, Patrick Henry, Guarding the Mails: Or, The Secret Service of The Post-Office Department (Hartford: J. P. Fitch, 1882), 284Google Scholar.

70. Ibid., 32–33, 313–14; Holbrook, James, Ten Years Among the Mail Bags: Or, Notes from the Diary of a Special Agent of the Post-Office Department (Philadelphia: H. Cowperthwait & Company, 1855), 41–42, 64Google Scholar.

71. Testimony Relating to Expenditures in the Department of Justice: The Star Route Cases, 48th Cong., 1st sess., 1884, H. Misc. Doc. 38, pp. 2, 10, 67–68.

72. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy.

73. Prassel, Frank Richard, The Western Peace Officer: A Legacy of Law and Order (Norman, Okla., 1972), 225Google Scholar; Ball, Larry D., The United States Marshals of New Mexico and Arizona Territories, 1846–1912 (Albuquerque, 1978), 7–8Google Scholar; Cummings and McFarland, Federal Justice, 367–68.

74. Ball, The United States Marshals of New Mexico and Arizona, 73–74. Problems with local enforcement did arise in the West—in particular in Arizona, Utah, and Oklahoma (where more than eighty federal law officers were killed between 1870 and 1900)—but resistance on the part of white homesteaders seems to have been much less common than in areas plagued by a long-standing battle between tax evaders and the Bureau of Revenue and, indeed, the federal marshal’s force was viewed as an important aid in the control of native populations. See Cresswell, Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansman. Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States 1890, xiii–xiv, and Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States 1893, xx–xxi.

75. Calhoun, The Lawmen, 182–87; Cresswell, Mormons and Cowboys, Moonshiners and Klansman, 81–105.

76. Burton, Jeffrey, Indian Territory and the United States, 1866–1906: Courts, Government, and the Movement for Oklahoma Statehood, Legal History of North America (Norman, Okla., 1995), 32–36Google Scholar; Harring, Sidney L., Crow Dog’s Case: American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994), 134–38Google Scholar.

77. Prassel, The Western Peace Officer, 228–38.

78. Fort Smith National Historic Site Database, National Park Service, https://web.archive.org/web/20161223204629/https://fosmcourtdatabase.nps.gov/search.cfm (accessed 2016).

79. Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1897), 236–95. A comprehensive census of USDMs will likely never exist due to missing records, but Jim Fulbright and Mollie Stehno have nevertheless identified more than six thousand USDMs commissioned from 1850 through 1920 in western states. See Jim Fulbright, Western Lawmen: U.S. Marshals and Their Deputies, 1850–1920 (Goodlettsville, Tenn., 2015). Crucially, even though territories were more likely to be policed by federal agents than states, simply attaining statehood did not necessarily reduce federal police presence. Indeed, for some new states, including Montana, the Dakotas, and Washington, federal prosecution rates per capita actually increased after gaining statehood.

80. Pomeroy, Earl S., The Territories and the United States, 1861–1890: Studies in Colonial Administration (Philadelphia, 1947), 59–61.Google Scholar

81. The y-axis of these graphs is scaled differently so as to highlight trends.

82. Annual Report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (1876; 1897).

83. The American and English Encyclopedia of Law, vol. 9 (Northport, N.Y.: Edward Thompson Company, 1889), 369.

84. Calhoun, The Lawmen, 14.

85. Murfree, William L., A Treatise on the Law of Sheriffs and Other Ministerial Officers (St. Louis: Gilbert Book Co., 1884), 12–16.Google Scholar

86. Morn, Frank, “The Eye That Never Sleeps”: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (Bloomington, 1982), 22–23Google Scholar.

87. Rao, Gautham, “The Federal Posse Comitatus Doctrine: Slavery, Compulsion, and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Law and History Review 26, no. 1 (2008): 1–56.Google Scholar

88. “The Law of Citizen’s Arrest,” Columbia Law Review 65, no. 3 (1 March 1965): 503.

89. Sklansky, David A., “The Private Police,” UCLA Law Review 46 (1998–99): 1186.Google Scholar

90. Johnson, Illegal Tender, 76–77.

91. For an excellent example of this dynamic, see the story of “Billy” Beery’s arrest by a postal agent in 1872 in Woodward, Guarding the Mails, 220–27.

92. United States Postal Inspection Service, Proceedings of Conference of Post-Office Inspectors in Charge, Held at Department Building, Washington, D.C., Nov. 24–Dec. 5, 1890 (Washington, D.C., 1891), 38Google Scholar.

93. See Burton, Indian Territory and the United States, 1866–1906, 36–38, 131–32; Miller, Revenuers & Moonshiners, 145.

94. U.S. Department of Justice, Instructions to Marshals, District Attorneys, and Clerks of the United States Courts: Compiled by Authority of the Attorney-General (Washington, D.C., 1889), 63–64Google Scholar. Most U.S. Commissioners and U.S. Attorneys seemed to agree that common-law forms of deputation held even for federal officers. See Charles C. Waters, U.S. Attorney, to Charles Devens, Attorney General, 22 August 1877; Letters Received by the U.S. Attorney General, 1871–1884: Western Law and Order (University Publications of America, 1996), AR 2, 394–96.

95. John W. Griggs, Attorney General, to J. H. Southard, House of Representatives, 23 March 1898; Semi-Official Letters of the Attorney General, 1 February 1898–13 June 1899, 134; Confidential and Semi-Official Letters Sent, 5 June 1877–21 March 1901; General Records of the Department of Justice, Record Group 60, National Records and Archives Administration Building, College Park, Md.

96. Ibid.; John W. Griggs, Attorney General, to Hon. Mark A. Hanna, 2 August 1898; Semi-Official Letters of the Attorney General, 1 February 1898–13 June 1899, 297–98; Confidential and Semi-Official Letters Sent, 5 June 1877–21 March 1901; General Records of the Department of Justice, Record Group 60, National Records and Archives Administration Building, College Park, Md.

97. Ball, Larry D., Desert Lawmen: The High Sheriffs of New Mexico and Arizona Territories, 1846–1912 (Albuquerque, 1996), 34–35.Google Scholar Marshals and deputy marshals were not salaried until 1896.

98. Alexander, Bob, Six-Shooters and Shifting Sands: The Wild West Life of Texas Ranger Captain Frank Jones (Denton, Tex., 2015), 290.Google Scholar

99. See Appointments and Oaths of U.S. Marshals and Deputy Marshals, https://research.archives.gov/id/295651 (accessed 26 June 2015).

100. For the career patterns of violence specialists in the trans-Mississippi West, see Obert, Jonathan, “The Six-Shooter Marketplace: 19th-Century Gunfighting as Violence Expertise,” Studies in American Political Development 28, no. 1 (April 2014): 49–79Google Scholar.

101. John W. Griggs, Attorney General, to Edson S. Bishop, U.S. Marshal, 23 May 1900; Semi-Official Letters of the Attorney General, 15 June 1899–21 March 1901, 134; Confidential and Semi-Official Letters Sent, 5 June 1877–21 March 1901; General Records of the Department of Justice, Record Group 60, National Records and Archives Administration Building, College Park, Md.

102. Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1887), xx.

103. Miller, Revenuers & Moonshiners, 122, 153–56, 173.

104. DeArment, Robert K., Assault on the Deadwood Stage: Road Agents and Shotgun Messengers (Norman, Okla., 2011), 161;Google Scholar Parker, David Bigelow, A Chautauqua Boy in ‘61 and Afterward: Reminiscences (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1912), 256–58.Google Scholar

105. Dennett, Mary Ware, Birth Control Laws, Shall We Keep Them, Change Them, Or Abolish Them? (New York: F. H. Hitchcock, 1926), 31–32.Google Scholar

106. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 109–10.

107. See the online appendix for a description of this data.

108. See the online appendix for regional information on arrests.

109. Calhoun, The Lawmen, 207–15.

110. Noakes, John Allen, “Enforcing Domestic Tranquility: State Building and the Origin of the (Federal) Bureau of Investigation, 1908–1920” (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1993), 72–78Google Scholar.

111. Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI, 57–80.

112. Frydl, Kathleen J., “Kidnapping and State Development in the United States,” Studies in American Political Development 20, no. 1 (2006): 18–44Google Scholar. The pattern of local-federal cooperation—and occasionally cooperation between federal officers and local citizen groups—was also critical to the enforcement of prohibition by the Prohibition Unit in the Internal Revenue Bureau. See McGirr, Lisa, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York, 2015), 69–70, 123–55Google Scholar.

113. See “An Act to Empower Certain Members of the Division of Investigation of the Department of Justice to Make Arrests in Certain Cases, and for Other Purposes,” Pub. L. No. 73-402, 48 Stat. 1008 (1934).

114. A recent DOJ report indicates that in addition to more than 120,000 law-enforcement officers employed by various agencies in the federal government, there are 24 agencies with more than 250 employees that grant full arrest powers. See U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2008, by Brian A. Reaves, NCJ 238250, Washington, D.C., 2008, 1–2Google Scholar.