Bibliographic Essay
The definitive history of homicide in America is Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). An earlier and briefer treatment of homicide is Roger Lane, Murder in America: A History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997).
Very few histories contain statistical data on violence and other crimes in early America. Roth is exceptional for his systematic data. All the statistics on homicide rates in this chapter, except for those for Pennsylvania, are from Roth. The second exceptional history for supplying quantitative data on homicide as well as all other crimes is Jack D. Marietta and G. S. Rowe, Troubled Experiment: Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Donna J. Spindel, Crime and Society in North Carolina, 1663-1776 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989) also contains useful statistics.Most histories of crime and justice limit themselves to particular colonies, states or regions of Anglo-America. For Virginia and the Chesapeake region see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975); Freeman H. Hart, The Valley of Virginia in the American Revolution, 1763-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942); Gwenda Morgan, The Hegemony of the Law: Richmond County, Virginia, 1692-1776 (New York: Garland, 1989); A. G. Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680-1810 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); and Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
For the south outside the Chesapeake see Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Fox Butterfield, All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf/Random House, 1995); Roger Ekirch, ‘Poor Carolina': Politics and Society in Colonial North Carolina, 1729-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Spindel, Crime and Society; and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).For New England see Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); William E. Nelson, Dispute and Conflict Resolution in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1725-1825 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); David Thomas Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1h6a2p9el16H92ill(:CUniversity of North Carolina Press, 1979); Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977); Edgar J. McManus, Law and Liberty in Early New England: Criminal Justice and Due Process, 1620-1692 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Leonard L. Richards, Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); Russell Bourne, The Red King's Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, 1675-1678 (New York: Atheneum, 1990); James D. Drake, King Philip's War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (New York: Viking, 2006); and Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
For Pennsylvania and the Middle Colonies see Marietta and Rowe, Troubled Experiment; Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: ‘The People', the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Francis S.
Fox, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Ordeal of the American Revolution in Northampton County, Pennsylvania (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); John B. Frantz and William Pencak, Beyond Philadelphia: the American Revolution in the Pennsylvania Hinterland, ed. John B. Frantz (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Douglas Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691-1776 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Gregory T. Knouff, The Soldiers' Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter, Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2004); Sharon V. Salinger, ‘To Serve Well and Faithfully': Labour and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).