Date of Graduation
2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Type
PhD
College
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Department
History
Committee Chair
Brian Luskey
Committee Member
Jason Phillips
Committee Member
Max Flomen
Committee Member
Joseph Hodge
Committee Member
Gabriel Loiacono
Abstract
Sheriffs served as indispensable legal actors who facilitated the expansion of democracy and capitalist transformation, processes that eventually limited their ability to profit from their work and diminished their social status. This dissertation is organized around specific sheriffs and the actions they performed to illustrate how county officers influenced society beyond the execution of court orders. These men—Rhode Island’s Beriah Brown, Pennsylvania’s John Barker, and Massachusetts’s Elisha Porter, Luke Baldwin, and Charles P. Sumner—believed they understood how to balance community demands and state directives in ways that would produce personal profit and greater authority. The work of these officers and the men themselves did not mirror the Hollywood concept of the Wild West gunslingers who relied consistently upon force and heroism to preserve the peace. Instead, paper represented their authority—writs, newspaper advertisements, and scraps noting fee collections that illuminated the power of the courts to manage and resolve financial and civil disputes, hang convicted murderers, and move property. Sheriffs’ work as court officials, their paperwork that served as conduits of capital, and the cultural perceptions of court officers all shaped the nation’s economy and its modes of governance in vital and underappreciated ways.
I have pulled individual sheriffs from the historical background and brought them forward to the place where their contemporaries put them—at the intersection of their most pressing debates. Sheriffs’ tenures reveal the complexities encountered by court officers tasked with enforcing laws that reflected diverse communal norms that often diverged from imperial and national priorities. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, the role and impact of county officers changed in large part due to the growth in democratic politics, a market economy based on capitalistic motives, and the steady transfer of political authority from local communities to state and national governments. Treating sheriffs as individual actors and unraveling their political, personal, and social biases provides valuable insight into how and why they performed their duties. Rather than assuming sheriffs blindly followed court orders and carried out governors’ directives, we should evaluate how and why officers performed their tasks to more clearly understand what motivated specific officers to enforce the laws while other officers chose to look the other way.
County sheriffs found their way—willingly and unwillingly—into the middle of entanglements between competing parties and interests who looked to county officers to resolve their disagreements. Sheriffs became involved in political disputes between provincial interests and those of Parliament in the Revolutionary Era and between the proponents and opponents of democratization in the Early Republic. They participated in legal and economic disputes, as well, sometimes profiting from others’ financial failure and serving as protectors of property against dangerous mobs. Understanding these entanglements—the sheriffs as individual actors, the legal and political authorities who expected sheriffs to use coercive force, and the actions that sheriffs performed that influenced democratic and capitalistic transformations—is the primary focus of this dissertation.
Recommended Citation
Holmes, Chad R., "“Ingenious Entanglements”: Sheriffs, Capitalism, and Civil Society in America, 1750-1850" (2023). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 12266.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/12266
Embargo Reason
Publication Pending