From the first permanent English settlement in North America to 1800, the character and causes of violence in Anglo-America revealed both continuities and changes.

A persistent source of violence was the inability of the state to suppress and sanction it. Especially in the seventeenth century, colonial governments were feeble and contested, and were unable to suppress the exorbitant violence of colonists.

In the seventeenth century the Europeans who migrated to eastern North America left a remarkable record of criminal violence. Eastern North America was contested ground, a ‘frontier', lacking government and law enforcement, with ill-defined political boundaries, populated by distinct ethnic, racial and cultural groups, predominately men, insecure, schooled in violence and pursuing, variously, wealth, personal or public power and autonomy or exclusivity. They, in turn, confronted indigenous peoples who themselves had different identities, languages, histories and territorial claims.

It was a dangerous mix. In the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century violence and homicide pervaded the European settlements: in New England, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island; in the mid­Atlantic, New Netherlands and New Sweden, later New York and New Jersey; in the Chesapeake region, Virginia and Maryland.

At Plymouth, the Pilgrim colonists, religious refugees who enjoy good repute in American memory, murdered seven offending Massachusetts Indians in 1623. Myles Standish, one of the career soldiers who accompanied migrants to America, led this murderous foray. He mounted the head of the most offensive Indian, Wituwamat, on a pole at Plymouth to intimidate any other presumptuous natives. But Englishmen victimised not just Native Americans; they killed fellow Englishmen who allegedly threatened them. The homicide rate in New England exceeded 100 per 100,000 persons in the first quarter of the century.^{[616] [617]}

The earliest Virginians, on the other hand, were a notoriously aggressive and contumacious lot, and it is not surprising that their homicide rate doubled that of New England, at 200 per 100,000. With the discovery in 1618 of tobacco as a lucrative marketable commodity, the demand for labour in the Chesapeake outstripped demand in any other region of mainland American. For most of the century, Virginians imported indentured servants, overwhelmingly male, from the British Isles. Especially because their owners, with the collaboration of the government, oppressed them remorselessly, these servants presented the greatest problem of American crime and violence during the latter half of the seventeenth century. Vengeful, alienated and armed, former servants and escaped servants composed a bandit proletariat in Virginia that committed assault, theft, vandal­ism, arson, sedition and, in 1676, insurrection.

The exorbitant homicide rates in colonial Anglo-America did not persist long past 1675, however. Epochal events of the last quarter of the century propelled an unmistakable decline in violence in both New England and the Chesapeake and changed the course of law enforcement. Wars deserve most of the credit for this change. When one rival dispatched another, imposing its will and law in a formerly contested territory, violence subsided. In New England it was King Philip's (or Metacom's) War of 1675; in Virginia it was civil war - Bacon's Rebellion of 1676.

King Philip's War was probably the most punishing conflict ever suffered by Anglo-Americans; not until the 1720s did New England's economy recover its pre-1675 level. Most obviously the war eliminated the common­place acts of aggression between Natives and Anglo-Americans: the Natives were either expelled or killed. From more than 100 per 100,000 in the first quarter of the century, the homicide rate among unrelated adults fell to less than 4 per 100,000 in the last quarter. That momentous decline included not just interracial homicides but homicides within the Anglo-American com­munity. Whereas the cause of the decline in violence between colonists and Native Americans is obvious - the Natives were dead or removed - the decline among the colonists needs additional explanation. Racism caused much of that decline. The war generated widespread, virulent racism directed towards the Native enemy; it created a barrier of colour between colonists and Natives, white versus ‘red'. It unified the colonists and generated fellow feeling that curbed hostility and violence among them. With the Native enemy at the gates, they could not suffer divisions among themselves. They were consequently less inclined to violate each other's persons and more inclined to respect each other's rights and religious and social distinctiveness.

The famous witchcraft trials at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 appear to contradict the claim that tolerance and civil peace grew after King Philip's War. After all, the state judicially murdered nineteen women and men upon convicting them of witchcraft. But after the rash of prosecutions in 1692-4, only two additional persons were tried. Historian Karen Karlsen has com­mented on the remarkable nature of the decline, but the relatively peaceful aftermath of the episode does conform to the longer trend of increased tolerance in the community of white New Englanders.^[620]

Also, the witchcraft trials occurred in the context of war, race phobia and growing English solidarity that had originated in King Philip's War. War with France began in 1689, following the Glorious Revolution in England and the ousting of Catholic James II from the throne. The revolution further con­firmed the Protestant identity of Englishmen, which now significantly expanded to include dissenting Protestants. In New England, the Catholic French and their Indian allies attacked villages on the northern perimeter of Massachusetts, feeding the phobia that persisted from 1675. The phobia against Indians appeared in the trial testimony of afflicted Salem women. Mercy Lewis testified that among her afflicters were French and Indians who appeared to her, brandishing their Roman Catholic missals.

In Virginia, the route to reduced homicide and greater fellow feeling differed from that of New England, even though both ways involved war with Native Americans. Bacon's Rebellion pitted not only Anglo-Americans against Indians, but also English against English. It was partly a civil war. The first of the three parties to the conflict was Nathaniel Bacon and his followers, who included some men of property and status who were aggrieved at the slights they had allegedly suffered from Governor William Berkeley. In addition, Bacon also enlisted the support of suffering and impoverished freed servants. Together, Bacon's clique and the freedmen waged war against the second party to the conflict, the Natives. When Berkeley and the government would not sanction the war against the Indians, Bacon, whom Berkeley pronounced a rebel, waged war against Berkeley and the government - the third party to the conflict. Bacon and his rebels, although failing in their rebellion, frightened the planter elite into realising how precarious their position, power and property were. The colony had dangerously many angry, poor, white freedmen - men who had been the planters' solution to the labour shortage in a commodity econ­omy. Planters needed an alternative to indentured servitude.

That alternative already existed in the Chesapeake. From the earliest dec­ades Africans lived in Virginia in an ambiguous civil status, some of them free and some enslaved. If lifelong slavery were made the civil status of all African Americans, and many more were to be brought from Africa, then the danger of proletarian, white rebellion could be dispelled. Thus, in the last quarter of the century planters shifted from white servitude to racial, chattel slavery.

After Bacon's Rebellion and with the shift to chattel slavery, the poor white population of Virginia escaped the prospect of continual oppression by white planters. Moreover, they enjoyed the positive benefits of lighter taxa­tion, the franchise and increased access to land. There was also the matter of fellow feeling. In New England white solidarity complemented increased hatred of Native Americans. In Virginia, with the assistance of lawmakers, race prejudice was focused upon Negroes, justifying in the minds of whites their universal enslavement and repression. Hereafter, and at least until emancipation in 1865, the poor whites, erstwhile criminals and rebels, instead of disrupting the peace of Virginia would secure it - manning the slave patrols, filling the ranks of the militia that would suppress Negro revolts, and executing the constables' and deputy sheriffs' duties. This change had the most profound consequences upon crime and justice of any in American history reaching into the twenty-first century.^[621]

In the decades after 1680 the justice system of Virginia subdued resistance to enslavement that the newly transported Africans offered. From 1706 to 1784 at least 567 slaves were sentenced to death - and possibly additional hundreds from counties whose records are lost. There were no appeals, no reprieves and no pardons. By contrast, there were only seventy free persons sentenced to death in the same period. Violent repression by the State was complemented by the power owners wielded over slaves, which the law sanctioned and violations of which were rarely recorded. Thus, after 1710 no white person was prosecuted for causing the death of a slave whom he or she was ‘correcting'.

Although the problems of violence and justice that plagued the seven­teenth century before 1675 - arising, for example, from intimate contact with Native Americans and contested governments - did not disappear in the eighteenth, there were many fewer incidents for eastern North America for extended interludes. The violence that attended the earliest European encroachment on Native American lands receded into the Appalachian regions, leaving the seaboard communities in greater peace and security. Native Americans in the east had been evicted or subdued. The need for labour never diminished and the labour supply - enslaved Africans in the south and immigrant Europeans to the north - continued to disrupt the public peace. Late in the seventeenth century Americans grew their tolerance for other white Americans. Generations of creole whites arose creating more homogeneous communities. Nevertheless, new arrivals to America would test their tolerance again; but now governments functioned regularly and citizens treated their authority and power as legitimate. Courts convened, juries were impanelled, judgements rendered, sentences executed. A civil society had arisen in most of America, most of the time.

The clearest evidence of improvement occurred in New England's record of violent crime. The New England rate of homicide among European Americans remarkably fell below 2 per 100,000 until the American Revolution.^[622] A more homogeneous population accounted for much of the fall. European immigrants of the eighteenth century mostly avoided New England, and the region escaped the disruption that immigrants caused elsewhere in America. New England communities did not welcome new­comers, nor did its meagre economy and natural resources attract them. The colonies south of the Hudson River had to deal with the next mass arrivals from Europe and the violent behaviour attributed to them

The Chesapeake region did not enjoy as dramatic a drop in violence as New England. There, the rate of homicide among unrelated adults declined to 9 per 100,000. Chesapeake tobacco planters were substituting African slaves for white indentured servants and the change reduced one source of violence and increased another. As noted earlier, Virginians applied both public and private violence against Africans in order to reduce them to obedient labourers. Former indentured white servants and their descendants shared a common racial identity with the wealthier, governing planter class. Similarly to the dynamic in New England after King Philip's War, that sense of unity and fellow feeling staunched the urge to avenge oneself on some fellow white Virginian. The Chesapeake did not escape an influx of trouble­making Europeans, however. Before the American Revolution ended the practice, Britain transported some 50,000 convicts to Virginia and Maryland, who served there as indentured labourers. And as in the past, these convicts were freed or they escaped and became drifters. Colonists in the Chesapeake complained abundantly of their crimes, but so too did magistrates from nearby colonies; from New York, William Smith Jr labelled them ‘a Herd of the most flagitious Banditti upon Earth'.^[623]

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century Virginia began receiving an exodus of Scots-Irish from Pennsylvania who were migrating south on the ‘Great Wagon Road'. Some Virginians encouraged the migration, for one reason: that these pugnacious folk would serve as a barrier between hostile Indians and the older settlements in the Tidewater. Their presence had its regrettable side, in the opinion of yet other Virginians. Anglican minister Charles Woodmason called them ‘beggarly Irish Presbyterians', ‘the Scum of the Earth and Refuse of Mankind'. ‘They delight,' he continued, ‘in their low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life.'^[624] When they illicitly sold liquor to Indians, or especially when they defied government by moving west of the Appalachians onto Indian lands, Virginians realised that their pugnacity and defiance created danger as much as security and safety for the Tidewater. Aside from their clashes with Indians, the Scots-Irish brought with them impetuousness, pride, sensitivity to honour and a willingness to fight that marked them and the character of the south where they settled. In short, they were violent; before 1765 in Virginia, they were 26 per cent more likely to be murdered or to commit murder than other colonists, according to Randolph Roth.^[625] From Virginia they dispersed into the Carolinas and beyond and took with them their violent behaviour and reputation.

In 1682 Pennsylvania was the next to last colony founded by the English in continental North America (and destined to have its largest population of free persons), and its record of crime and justice benefited immensely from that late start. It did not need to be settled by the conquest of indigenous peoples confronting Europeans for the first time. The Dutch and Swedes had entered the Delaware Valley as early as the 1620s. The English populated adjacent New Jersey, and some were migrating across the Delaware River before 1682. The indigenous Lenape people were long familiar with Europeans by the time founder William Penn arrived.

Nor did Penn have anything like conquest in mind. He wished that no lands be settled without the consent of local Indians and, in 1682-4, he and the native Lenape devised treaties that peacefully admitted colonists to the region’s south­east. For decades Pennsylvania escaped the interracial violence that characterised almost all other American settlements. It was unique. Besides having a Quaker founder, Pennsylvania’s immigrants during its first three decades were very largely Quakers. Their religious profession included pacifism and non-violence. Long after the first three decades, most of the magistrates were Quakers and pacifists. Finally, Pennsylvania did not have an agricultural staple like tobacco, which encouraged a massive servile labour force. It would later confront pro­blems with indentured servants, but not in the way Virginia confronted them.

A late founding, William Penn, pacifism and no staple crop resulted in some thirty years of grace. Between 1682 and 1719 Pennsylvania recorded only sixteen homicide indictments, which was a homicide rate of 1 per 100,000. It was the lowest rate ever for Pennsylvania and a memorable record for any time or place. The colony imposed capital punishment for only two crimes, murder and treason. That amounted to extraordinary leniency in the English­speaking world, and it caused critics of Penn and the Quakers to predict an abundance of crime. The courts in that period sentenced only two convicted persons to die, further defying the critics.

The consequences of erecting an open, pluralistic society emerged towards the fortieth anniversary of Pennsylvania’s founding. Thousands of non-Quaker immigrants arrived after 1717 - ‘shoals’ of them, wrote James Logan, Pennsylvania’s pre-eminent administrator, who called it an invasion.^[626] The population grew by 40 per cent every decade from 1700 to 1780. The timing of the initial surge was unfortunate; by 1722 Pennsylvania had plunged into economic depression. Violence and disorder occurred in ways pre­viously unknown in the province. In 1726 a mob attacked instruments of criminal justice, burning down the pillory and stocks in Philadelphia and destroying the stalls of butchers, whom people believed were profiteering. Two years later a mob vandalised Logan's home and physically intimidated members of the legislature. Homicide rates doubled and quadrupled: from 0.9 in the whole province to 3.6 per 100,000 in the 1710s and 4.5 in the 1720s. Chester County recorded 9.0 for the period 1718-32.

Logan complained that ‘The Quaker Countrey, as this is called abroad, is become a scene of the vilest, most extravagant Licentiousness'. The Society of Friends blamed the criminal turmoil on immigrants, who, it wrote, were ‘great Numbers of the vicious and scandalous Refuse of other Countries'. The immigrants they especially had in mind were the Scots-Irish. ‘What is to become of us,' Logan ranted, ‘with those additions [of more Scots-Irish] to ye Poyson in our Bowels.'^[627] The records of the courts reflect the dismay at the Scots-Irish influx. In the 1710s criminally indicted Scots-Irish amounted to 23.3 per cent of the total in Chester County, 3.9 per cent more than their share of the county population. By the 1730s it had grown to 49.2 per cent, 21.9 per cent greater than their share. At the western edge of settlement, as in Donegal Township, the Scots-Irish predominated. There the courts hardly operated and crimes went unprosecuted. The rapid growth of population and expansion of the colony had brought it the unwelcome experiences of other less fortunate and idealistic settlements in America. Pennsylvania's period of grace was over.

Excellent court records, tax lists and city directories from Pennsylvania facilitate analysis of the criminally accused or prosecuted. The single most significant fact to be obtained about these persons was that a majority were transients, strangers, men without homes, wives, children, neighbours, churches or affiliations. In Chester County 61.5 per cent of the accused are missing from the county tax rolls; in Philadelphia 70 per cent or more are missing from tax rolls and city directories. Poverty alone does not explain their absence, because townships listed poor or unfortunate residents excused from taxation. The accused were not among these communities' own poor. Except for their appearance in the criminal court records, they are effectively invisible. Significantly, a large minority of the victims of crime were these invisible men as well.

Pennsylvania - and probably all the colonies south of New England and north of Virginia - had very mobile, heterogeneous populations.^[628] In Chester and Lancaster Counties of Pennsylvania, between 30 and 50 per cent of the residents in representative townships disappeared within ten years. At the edge of western settlement, a third of the taxpayer population disappeared every year. Urban Philadelphia registered the same high mobility as rural Pennsylvania. In this environment of very mobile people, the correlation between criminals and transients is not surprising.

Almost 45 per cent of the men missing from tax and other records had Scots-Irish surnames. In Chester County, of persons accused of theft, bur­glary and robbery, servants outnumbered all other known occupations combined. In sum, the prosecuted criminal in Pennsylvania was most likely to be a white male immigrant, younger than 35, from the British Isles and probably Ulster, who owned only what he wore and carried with him.

An example of these men was William Gumley, indicted for theft in Chester County in 1771. Nine years earlier, he had come from London to Maryland as an indentured servant. He served two masters until freed, after which he went to Baltimore and worked at menial jobs. Then back to work for his last master, and then back to Baltimore where he enlisted in the regular British army. Discharged in Philadelphia, he laboured at a farm in New Jersey, then on the docks in Philadelphia, then back to New Jersey. Finally, on his way to Lancaster County he was indicted in Chester.

While Pennsylvania was tending towards greater crime and disorder before 1730, the older colonies were putting behind them their experience of widespread crime. Homicide rates in New England fell from between 8 and 10 per 100,000 (for unrelated white adults) before 1675 to less than 2 from 1700 to the 1760s. The Chesapeake, to begin with, suffered more violence than New England but enjoyed a much greater decline into the eighteenth century. From more than 30 its rate for the equivalent population as New England dropped to approximately 10. Roth found that in these two regions there was almost no chance that within this white Protestant sodality colonists would kill each other over questions of land, boundaries, legal jurisdictions, rights or religion.^[629] By the middle of the eighteenth century homicides of blacks also declined, as slaveholders felt more secure in their control of their chattels.

In the eighteenth century the Anglo-French wars that began in 1689 only fixed more securely the common identity of English colonists and lessened their inclination to harm each other. From its troubled decade before 1732, Pennsylvania's homicide indictments fell from 3.4 per 100,000 to an admirable 1.0 in the years of the French and Indian War, 1755-64. In Chester County it fell from 9.0 to 1.2. Philadelphia, the largest city in the colonies, lowered its homicide rate to 1.6. The peace of the first forty years seemed to have returned.

The conditions in Pennsylvania that made for civil peace on the home front for 1755-65 could not thrive long in a growing and diverse province fractured by politics and religion. As decades passed, the burgeoning popula­tion of the province shared little of the peaceable ideals of the Quaker leadership. At mid-century the chief justice rued that 4,000 mostly Scots- Irish families lived beyond the Susquehanna River, out of reach of govern­ment and justice. The Scots-Irish, Lutheran and Reformed Germans and Anglicans earnestly wished to oust the Quakers from the government and reshape its policy towards Indians and imperial enemies. Since 1739, war had exposed ethical and policy divisions in the province. But it was not until the 1760s that these differences ruptured the colony and fuelled violence from the western frontier to the Delaware River.

Before 1763 there existed some ‘dark figure' of unprosecuted crime and homicide between Indians and whites. One frontiersman, Edward Marshall, boasted that he alone had murdered at least twenty Indians. The Indians in turn murdered Marshall's wife and son. Many adversaries singled out their victims from some memory of earlier unjust treatment. It was not imperso­nal war, but murder and revenge.

In December 1763, after an Anglo-French peace had been declared, men from Paxton, on the Susquehanna River, rode to Lancaster and murdered six peaceful Conestoga Indians in their homes, returning two weeks later to kill fourteen more. They boasted that they would march to Philadelphia and kill 140 more Indians, and that they would come after some of the pacifist Quaker legislators and defenders of the Indians. Many Philadelphians believed that an insurrection was afoot and they armed themselves for battle. Governor John Penn asserted that in the Susquehanna Valley 10,000 of the King's soldiers could not bring even one of the perpetrators to trial. He exaggerated, but he understood the frailty of the justice system in the west.

In the ten-year run up to the American Revolution the peace of the first half of the century disappeared in more than just the frontiers of Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania as a whole the homicide rate quadrupled or more, from 1.0 indictments per 100,000 to 4.2. In Philadelphia, remote from the frontier, it rose from 1.0 to 11.6. Whereas the late war with the French and Indians strengthened community and raised empathy among most Anglo- Americans, the approaching revolution - a civil war, in fact - alienated them from each other. Issues of British taxation, colonists' rights, petitions, boy­cotts, forceful resistance and, finally, the legitimacy of governments gener­ated arguments and loosened tempers. New antagonistic political identities were emerging: Tory and Patriot. In this atmosphere of hostility homicides leapt in number. The seaboard cities, like Philadelphia, suffered this political mobilisation and violence before the countryside.

At Pennsylvania's frontiers unprosecuted homicides continued as before. In the Wyoming Valley, land contested by Pennsylvanians, Connecticut migrants and Delaware Indians, rivals rotated among killing each other. One Pennsylvanian who allied himself with the Connecticut intruders was Lazarus Stewart, a Scots-Irishman and leader among the Paxton murderers. Stewart had once beaten a constable with an axe handle and had outstanding warrants against him for murder, assault, riot, arson and treason. In 1770, with his henchmen he destroyed the properties of Pennsylvanians in the valley. Connecticut people had earlier murdered the Delaware Indian leader Teedyuscung, for which Teedyuscung's son led Delawares to massacre the Connecticut settlers. After the declaration of American independence, a force of British and Delaware and Iroquois Indians killed more than 200 Connecticut settlers at Wyoming; Lazarus Stewart was among them. Violence at Wyoming arose before the Revolution, expanded during it, but outlasted the century. Hostility towards Native Americans had usually influ­enced white Americans to coalesce and treat each other more civilly, but not in Pennsylvania; there, the white population was deeply divided over the appropriate treatment of Indians.

North and South Carolina, too, suffered the violence of the 1760s that accompanied contested authority, but not in a way equivalent to Pennsylvania. Later than neighbouring Virginia, North Carolina had emerged from the violence of the seventeenth century and then enjoyed a declining homicide rate until the 1760s. Following war with the Cherokee Indians in 1761, upland South Carolina and western North Carolina des­cended into anarchy and brigandage. Settlers suffered from criminal bands and neglect by the colonial governments and the eastern political elites. They were aggrieved at the lack of government, law enforcement and public peace, and so they took up arms against the brigands, but they also lashed out at colonial officials, assaulting them and destroying their property. The royal governor of North Carolina resolved to suppress these so-called Regulators, sent the militia after them, and in a pitched battle at Alamance Creek in 1771, triumphed. Later, the colony hanged six of the Regulators for treason, a record toll in North Carolina judicial history. The epilogue to this conflict in the backcountry was the Revolution, since local hatreds did not disappear by 1776 but re-emerged in deadly conflict between revolutionaries and Loyalists, especially in South Carolina.

When the British attempted to enforce the Stamp Tax in 1765, Americans protested violently - rioting, assaulting and vandalising tax and customs collectors and British officials in the port cities, especially in Boston and New York. Even the governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, saw a mob all but destroy his home and, in his opinion, threaten his life. This putatively patriotic behaviour was simply crime in the minds of the British - crime that went unpunished in cities and counties in New England where magistrates and courts sympathised with the resistance. In 1770 disorder in the streets produced five American deaths when a mob of Bostonians assaulted a detachment of British soldiers and the soldiers fired upon the crowd.

The resistance that Americans showed after 1765 to laws and to local magistrates exposed the weakness of the Crown in America. As resistance expanded and patience with Parliament and the Crown was exhausted, Americans needed to find some replacement authority vigorous enough to maintain the local peace. Otherwise, venal men, some under the colour of patriotism, could use the lapse in authority to prey upon others.

When war broke out and independence was declared, the struggle for control of the political commons intensified and violence along with it. Had all Americans been revolutionaries (Patriots) the event would have been simply a popular anti-colonial revolution. But Americans were not anywhere near unanimous about revolution and consequently the engagement was a civil war as well, between American Loyalists and American Patriots. Where the Patriots outnumbered the Loyalists, and resistance to Britain was strongest, internecine violence was least common; where the numbers of Patriots and Loyalists approached equality, and the outcome was in play, Americans fought each other desperately. Added to this condition were other catalysts to violence: the presence of Native Americans (allied with the British); the legacy of past internal clashes, as in the Wyoming Valley or North Carolina; and occupation and departure of British armies.

New England, the most patriotic region and one which escaped extended British occupation, experienced the least violence. Resistance by Loyalists was hopeless there. Major cities like New York, Philadelphia and Charleston were home to large numbers of Loyalists and were occupied by British armies. Where the hinterlands of these cities joined the occupied areas, regular and irregular warfare occurred and violence raged among civilians. In the late stage of the war the British occupied Charleston, South Carolina, and Lord Cornwallis and his army ranged across the southern backcountry and encouraged numerous Loyalists to suppress their Patriot neighbours, producing the most vicious violence of the Revolution. Homicide rates in the southern rural hinterland reached even higher than 200 per 100,000, which repeated the worst levels of violence from the seventeenth century.

An outstanding example of southern frontier homicides was the Cloud's Creek massacre of 1781 in upland South Carolina. A band of Loyalists captured thirty Patriots who had just retrieved horses stolen by Loyalists. The Patriots surrendered but the Loyalists killed all but one of them anyway. They said they did it in retaliation for earlier brutality by the Patriots. A year later, a Patriot affiliated with the twenty-nine Patriot victims killed a defenceless Loyalist who had tortured his mother to death to get her to reveal her son's whereabouts. Events like these caused a visitor to upper South Carolina to observe that society ‘seems to be at an end... Robberies and murders are often committed on the public roads. The people have been peeled, pillaged and plundered... the morals of the people are almost entirely extirpated'.^[630] Memories of old wounds were not permitted to die and revenge followed upon revenge. Long after the peace with Britain, former Loyalists and Patriots assaulted and murdered each other for reasons that were historical and political but also familial and clan-related. Southerners practised makeshift justice or ‘lynch law' when they had no confidence in, or wish for, government to solve their differences.

Pennsylvania was more complicated than most states, especially because the year 1776 brought not only anti-colonial revolution but also the over­turning of the charter government of 1682 - revolution at home as well as revolution for home rule. Unlike in Massachusetts and Connecticut espe­cially, in Pennsylvania the populace was divided over revolution and whether state and local governments were legitimate. In south-eastern Pennsylvania Loyalists and pacifists were the majority and refused to support revolution. Central Pennsylvania just as clearly had a majority of Patriots who enthu­siastically supported it. Western Pennsylvania and the Ohio River Valley were politically precarious due to the proximity of enemy Native Americans and British; it was frontier America.

In much of the state courts closed in the summer of 1776 when Pennsylvania revolutionaries overthrew the existing government, and did not reopen until 1778. Even when public offices opened, in their first year ‘the new state regime contained not a single provincial executive or judicial office holder from the old’.^[631] In view of this absence of courts, their questioned legitimacy and inexperienced office holders, it is not surprising that the recorded homicide rate in the state dropped from 4.9 indictments per 100,000 (1765-75) to 1.9 (1776-83). The official record misrepresents the actual history of all the assaults, murders and other felonious crimes that occurred.

In a Patriot stronghold like York County, community members tarred and feathered a pacifist Mennonite man who refused to be co-opted into the county militia. In such a case, who deserved to be criminally prosecuted? In the contested ground of Bucks County, adjacent to occupied Philadelphia and hostile to the Patriot cause, Loyalists and neutrals trafficked with the British. At his wits end as to how to stop it, General John Lacey of the county militia ordered his men to shoot on sight anyone going to the city who tried to escape. To discourage others he ordered, ‘You will leave on the road, their bodies and marketing lying together.’^[632] According to Loyalists, Patriots accused John McKenny of trading with the British and then tied him behind a horse that dragged him at a gallop until he almost died.

This violence operated under the alleged colour of organised war. Other violence was mere banditry, the most famous bandits being the Doan Gang. They robbed, whipped and burned out residents, rustled cattle and robbed the Bucks County treasury of £650. In Chester County, James Fitzpatrick raided tax collectors and militia recruiters, and terrorised them and others until he was hanged in 1778. In Philadelphia, Patriot mobs terrorised Quakers, when the British did not occupy the city, vandalising and ripping apart their homes and businesses, sometimes pitching firebrands and shooting muskets into their houses.

In the west, the worst violence was interracial and the worst example involved militia from western Pennsylvania and Christian Delawares at Gnadenhutten (Ohio). In March 1782 the militia bludgeoned to death some

Crime and Justice in Anglo-America ninety Delawares and took scalps - while the Indians sang hymns. Later that year, Delawares captured Colonel William Crawford while he led an expedition against the British. They excruciatingly tortured Crawford, but they explained to him that they did so because in his command was Colonel David Williamson, who had led the extermination of the Gnadenhutten Delawares. Patriots in the west conflated their political contest with a racial contest: the enemy was the British, allied with the Indians; if an American supported the British, in the eyes of the Patriots he was not just making a political choice, he ‘committed the most monstrous sort of treason' - against his race.^[633]

Unshackled from the British Empire, some pre-eminent Patriots expected in 1776 that Americans would become a better people, more virtuous, in the image of idealised republicans of the ancient world. Samuel Adams envisioned a ‘Christian Sparta'. Virtuous, republican Americans would, for example, not need England's 200-plus capital crimes; signally, Pennsylvania and Virginia reformed their criminal codes. However, Americans did not live up to the aspirations of Adams or the Pennsylvania and Virginia Solons. After 1783 interracial homicide in the southern backcountry and Ohio Valley continued, to the despair of diplomats in the Confederation and Constitution govern­ments who sought peaceful resolutions. In the backcountry, aftershocks fol­lowed the Patriot-Loyalist clashes of the war years; vengeance and vigilantism substituted for lawsuits and organised law enforcement. Most conspicuously, uprisings against government reverberated: Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1787; the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in 1794; and Fries's Rebellion in Pennsylvania in 1799. Tax collectors and magistrates were assaulted, tarred and feathered, shot at and driven out. In 1787 the optimistic Sam Adams of 1776 wanted the Shaysites to be hung immediately.

Resistance to government occurred much more often in less conspicuous outbreaks, especially rioting. Of the 2,127 charges of rioting in all of Pennsylvania, 1682-1800, 73.6 per cent occurred between 1781 and 1800. In America's largest city, Philadelphia, the rate doubled between the last two decades of the century. In Chester County it tripled. Infrequently, events became deadly, as when three rioters were killed in Philadelphia in 1795 and the militia was called to put it down.

Homicides in Pennsylvania in the 1780s numbered 154, the highest ever, and the rate was the second highest ever, at 4.0 per 100,000. Assaults surpassed

previous records. In rural Mifflin County, the rate in 1794 was 511 accusations per 100,000, the highest for any county in any year in Pennsylvania history. Those assaults could be merely verbal, as when Thomas Hall shouted in Bernard Watters's face that ‘By God he had fucked... Bernard's wife oftener that he [Bernard] had himself.' Or, the assaults could include battery, as when Henry Seegar bit off Benjamin Williams's finger and Williams chewed off Seegar's nose.^[634] Property crimes, mostly theft, jumped from 252 in Philadelphia in the 1760s to 997 in the 1790s. After 1760 Pennsylvania prosecuted more cases of burglary per decade than Massachusetts prosecuted in 1750-1800. And it executed sixty-one burglars in all.

The disappointing, unwelcome effects of revolution in the United States did not abate; criminal violence persisted to the end of the century. When, after 1800, civility began to grow, it grew for several reasons. The enmities of the Revolution - Loyalist and Patriot - faded. By the 1820s universal white male suffrage was enacted and this prospect of the revolution became a reality. More men felt respected and empowered; they took ownership of government and trusted its courts to resolve their differences. Decades of war in Europe had shut down immigration, and Americans felt greater kinship with each other. African and Native Americans, however, remained unassi­milated and unempowered, and in their situation especially lurked future violence in the United States.^[635]