My first guest post was a brief excerpt from my new book, White Power: Policing American Slavery. Now I want to tell you how it came to be. The short version of the story: this is an extended thank you—to mentors, scholars and colleagues. It is also a tribute to chance and luck. This will be a story familiar to many a second book writer.
The story begins back in the wretched fall and early winter of 2001, in the shadow of 9/11. It was a bizarre moment to be starting a PhD program at the University of Chicago. Further complicating matters was the fact that I’d been at Chicago for my undergrad degree (in history), but being back after a year working in Washington, D.C. didn’t feel like a homecoming. All my friends were gone. My girlfriend was still back in D.C. Sure, the professors were still there and they were welcoming enough. But it just felt different being a grad student.
Then there was the scandalous fact that I’d taken next to no actual history classes at the University of Chicago in the preceding four years, opting instead for lots of theory. Now I had to read and absorb so many monographs per week, and my knowledge of the Frankfurt School and Kant was thoroughly unhelpful in most of my classes.
Thankfully, there was one big exception: William J. Novak’s seminar on the American state. For some reason, Bill had agreed to be my advisor even though I was unfunded and had a very bad idea for a dissertation (the New Left’s influence on the Democratic Party—funny, I know). His class was like an oasis for me because he didn’t (and still doesn’t) shy away from theory and structure and encouraged “big question” thinking about our own research. But beyond my introduction to American Political Development, historical sociology, and critical geography in that course, something else happened that would lead directly to writing this book: Bill sold me on the idea of investigating something called the
posse comitatus.
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| As I got into the posse comitatus history I started looking for it in local court processes in early America by delving into the Rueben T. Durrett Collection at the University of Chicago Library's Special Collections (now called the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center). I also started using spreadsheets to track quotes/sources. |
The posse comitatus is basically a sheriff’s posse—a temporarily deputized, usually uncompensated person or group to assist with a discrete law enforcement issue. I’m fairly certain Bill had been trying to get one of his students to look into this for a while before I came along. And the first time he mentioned it to me I thought it sounded interesting but…not that interesting. But I’d been digging into the records of the federal courts in the Northwest Territory during the early 1800s as well as the records of the federal government’s land sales outfit, the General Land Office, and I kept thinking about this posse comitatus idea for one simple reason: there was no way that the tiny federal workforce of U.S. Marshals and their occasional deputies, or land officers and their contract workers, could do the things being asked of them—especially during crises. These two ideas of deputization and posses would become the crux of my book.
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| A summons from Adams v. The Snow Lion, a slave trade case in the US Circuit Court at Boston, 1804. RG 21 Casefiles, National Archives, Waltham, Massachusetts. For a description of the case, see Hiller B. Zobel, "The Joys and Uses of Legal History," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 84 (1972), 54-56. |
My paper for Bill Novak’s class back in 2001 was about federal officials using posses to enforce laws during the expansion of federal authority during the mid-nineteenth century and Civil War era. It hinged on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which infamously included the posse comitatus as an enforcement mechanism when enslavers’ captures and renditions of alleged fugitive enslaved people required extra force. I would continue to work on the paper over the next few years, even as I’d decided to study a different aspect of federal law (customs regulations and tariff laws) for my dissertation. In 2006 I mustered up the courage to submit it to the
Kathryn T. Preyer Prize for the American Society for Legal History, as well as an article manuscript to the Society’s journal, Law & History Review. To my immense surprise, it won the 2007 Preyer Prize and was published in Law & History Review as “
The Federal Posse Comitatus Doctrine: Law, Compulsion, and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America” (vol. 26, no. 1; February, 2008).
To the extent that an early career scholar can have a reputation, mine became the posse, and someone once referred to me as “the posse comitatus guy.” I sensed that people were a lot less interested in my completed dissertation and soon-to-be-book on custom houses and federal law in the early republic. In fact, after a failed campus visit, I asked the search committee chairperson how I might improve for next time. They responded that people were disappointed I didn’t talk about the posse comitatus since (and this wouldn’t age well) “people weren’t really interested in tariffs.”
Meanwhile, I’d (somehow) graduated, (somehow) convinced someone to marry me, (somehow) gotten a great job, and started transforming dissertation to book, but I was still collecting more and more archival evidence about the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and
posse comitatus enforcement. Every conference became an opportunity to get into the archives to see what I could find. I’d also undertaken several dozen readings of Sally Hadden’s magisterial,
Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, and started to think more broadly about the
posse comitatus, not just as a federal law enforcement mechanism, but as a general model for the aggrandizement of enforcement authority in early America. Like all transformational books, Hadden’s is full of insights that launch future scholars down their paths, and in my case it was the observation that the American slave patrols “evoke memories of the posse comitatus, the bands of men called out in early modern England to chase down and arrest fleeing felons.” (3) Hadden’s stunning primary source research led me to see this firsthand: slave patrols, militias, enslavers’ associations, municipal sheriffs in places like Richmond—the posse model was at the heart of it all. And so, it wasn’t just the federal marshals that could use a posse to help enslavers seeking their alleged fugitive property in the north and Midwest; the idea of temporarily deputizing people to add force and violence was pivotal to how local, county, and state level officials were enforcing slave codes in the colonies and early republic.
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| Rules for the Government of the Patrols, November 1846, Chowan County, Chowan County Slave Records Criminal Actions Concerning Slaves; Box 33 (Miscellaneous Slave Records), North Carolina Division of Archives and History. Sally Hadden's incredible primary source research got me into the inner workings of the slave patrols, which were documented by records like this. Mass vigilance and public violence deployed through temporarily commissioned patrollers. Record-keeping without anything close to the trappings of a bureaucratic state. |
By 2016, I’d been collecting archival documents and writing about the posse comitatus and enslavers’ legal authority for over a decade. On one hand, the project had grown into an inquiry into a much bigger investigation into how enslavers translated their power as private citizens into an entire branch of public and criminal law—deputizing themselves, expanding slave patrols, manipulating military institutions, and deploying an imperial gaze across the continent with an eye to national (and federal) authority. If I’d started with a narrow focus on the early republic, I was increasingly heading in the path of a longue durée project. When that durée ended was also yet to be seen. In the era of Black Lives Matter, I found myself inspired by the emerging carceral state historiography (and especially, for example, books by
Adam Malka,
Khalil Gibran Muhammad,
Max Felker-Kantor, and
Emily Brooks) wondering about whether there was a connection between the slave policing regimes of early America and the racialized policing crises of the 2000s.
As the scale of the project grew, so did the word count. I think I got as high as 250,000 words at one point—and that was only a few chapters. But a brief conversation with my then colleague
Ibram X. Kendi would soon change everything. I can’t remember exactly how he said it, but Ibram suggested it might be a good idea to write the book for a broader audience than just legal historians. I told myself it would be madness to start over. But I just couldn’t get that comment out of my head. And so, by 2021—while moonlighting as an amateur Spanish teacher (I don’t speak Spanish other than soccer and food words) for a six-year-old in Spanish immersion zoom school—I started writing a shorter, non-technical, accessible manuscript about a very complicated and long history.
I also got very lucky when I decided to try to get a literary agent. I had inquired with some of the bigger names but predictably, and understandably, they weren’t interested in working with someone who had only ever published work for scholars. All except for one.
Dani Segelbaum, then of the Carol Mann Agency, and now of Arc Literary, agreed to work with me, and helped me to understand—sometimes line by painstaking line—what I had to do. Dani also connected me (with an assist from
Mark Simpson-Vos) to the
Hodding Carter III Books imprint at the University of North Carolina Press, which was aiming to do exactly what I was trying with this manuscript: translating the complex scholarly project into an accessible book. The editor at Hodding Carter III was Debbie Gershenowitz, and once the book was theirs, Debbie improved the manuscript immensely. Not only did she have a knack for simplifying prose, but she also turned to two amazing outside readers, who offered generous and incisive commentary. I can’t know for certain how this book would have worked had it landed in different hands, but I’m thrilled I got to work with Debbie and her team.
My first foray into the ideas and sources that became this book happened at the University of Chicago in 2001. Twenty-five years later, and after a fairly unlikely series of events, the book was published. I’ve been doing lots of book events and I’ve been asked a few times: what’s my favorite part of the book? There are paragraphs and sections I really love, but the real answer is the acknowledgments, because in writing it I finally had license to remember the many, many people who helped make it a reality. It takes a village for some people. It took a small country for me.
