In recent years, a tremendous number of subfields within the study of history have gained a great deal of attention by scholars of all stripes. The development of social, cultural, economic history, along with the study of women, slaves and other groups of people, have added dramatically to the overall corpus that is our understanding of the past. By endeavoring to better understand these specific subgroups, historians can more fully uncover the mysteries of the past.
One important but neglected subfield has been the arena of “crime studies” particularly in early Colonial America. As an umbrella term, crime studies encapsulates the study of crime, law enforcement, justice and punishment. Despite some recent developments, this subfield has gone ignored and neglected by scholars. As the Late Historian Douglas Greenberg pointed out:
American historiography has ordinarily been nothing if not responsive to the past dimensions of current problems. Yet when crime remains among the most pressing issues of contemporary public concern, the field of American criminal justice history is only beginning to develop…We Americanists have only infrequently applied new methodologies to the history of crime. In short, the history of criminal justice in the United States ought to be booming, much as other fields of social history are. Instead, however, it is moving ahead rather fitfully, and one wonders why this should be so. Why is it that subjects as black history, women’s history, labor history, and a variety of other sub-fields have made great strides in recent years and have produced a considerable body of distinguished scholarship while the history of crime in this country is still in its infancy?[1]
It is important to note that Greenberg made these observations forty years ago, and to this day the subfield of crime studies remains on the outskirts of the historical horizon.
My endeavor is to attempt to "fill the void" of this historical subfield, and in particular, the subfield of crime studies in early America, by focusing on the night watch systems of both Philadelphia and Boston. For people of Colonial America, the night watch system was the most obvious form of law enforcement/crime prevention in their daily lives and is the precursor to modern policing. By studying how the night watch impacted people on a daily basis will allow us greater insight into the origins of American policing but also how the earliest generations of Americans understood and dealt with crime prevention methods.
MY research will focus primarily on the many legal documents that are to be found in both Philadelphia and Boston libraries. I intend to visit both cities in the near future to study these documents, which include court records, night watch registers and ligers, broadsides, newspapers and other town records. These documents will provide me with the necessary information from which I hope to "flesh out" how the night watch was effective and ineffective in meeting the needs of the people.
Several questions are likely to arise in the course of my studies. For example, was the night watch a welcomed presence for people, or a nuisance? One should also consider how the night watch dealt with issues of race and gender. In addition, the night watch dealt almost exclusively with the daily minutia of the common citizen, so how did those of the upper gentry class experience the law enforcement of the night watch (if at all)? I have decided to juxtapose the cities of Philadelphia and Boston not only due to their size and importance in Colonial America but to see how each system succeeded and failed when compared to one another. As the largest and arguably most important cities in their respective colony, both Philadelphia and Boston serve as a litmus test for the colonies of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and since both colonies were founded for different reasons and motivations, a comparison between their night watch systems will be quite revealing.
Since little to nothing has been produced on the night watch systems of Colonial American cities and colonies, I believe my dissertation is well positioned to potentially (hopefully) make a splash in the overall historiography of crime studies. A detailed look into the night watch systems of Philadelphia and Boston is both overdue and potentially open for harvest. It is my hope that this dissertation might shed light on how everyday Americans in colonial society experienced law enforcement measures. In short, the night watch is the closest and most intimate way in which we can see where the rubber met the road. It is my contention that the night watch systems of Colonial America best represent how early Americans experienced crime (since watchmen were oftentimes the primary investigators), how they dealt with enforcement (both good and bad) and how the law was actually carried out (since the process of passing laws and enforcing laws is oftentimes quite different). By endeavoring to better understand the relationship of the night watch to their Colonial American citizenry we will be better positioned to see the evolution of American policing, the struggle between crime and enforcement and the way these earliest of Americans chose to interpret the tug-o-war between personal freedom and communal responsibility.
[1] Douglas Greenberg, "Crime, Law Enforcement, and Social Control in Colonial America." The American Journal of Legal History vol. 26, no. 4 (1982). Pp. 293. JSTOR doi:10.2307/844939
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