Lanterna Rally

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Published: 2012

Total Pages: 668

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"The Rights of Men" analyzes policing and power in post-Revolutionary Baltimore and argues that the growth of individual rights--as guaranteed, defined, and protected by state power--did not replace an older tradition of white men's power over blacks, women, and children, but rather reinforced it. Although historians have typically focused upon the virtues of liberal state protection, this dissertation focuses upon its costs. For in a world in which the political culture defined the liberal subject as a white man, the liberal state necessarily protected white men's police power over everyone else as a legal entitlement. Possession of rights not only, then, made white men sovereign individuals. It made them sovereign rulers over everyone else. In Baltimore, two interrelated police systems coexisted between the city's 1796 incorporation and the aftermath of Civil War slave emancipation. One system relied upon amateur and ordinary white men to guard the city, enforce its criminal laws, and govern in its name; the other, which began to emerge during the 1830s and 1840s, employed policemen to protect individual rights and built disciplinary asylums, reformatories, and prisons to reform individuals who infringed upon those rights. "The Rights of Men" demonstrates that these two systems worked in tandem for much of the nineteenth century, as complementary state institutions designed to protect white men's rights also protected white men's power over non-rights bearing others. Even as white men authorized public officials to uniform policemen and build asylums, they continued to deploy racial and patriarchal power over other Baltimoreans; as the century went on, what had been a customary practice became entrenched as a protected right. Meanwhile, free and enslaved blacks, white women, and children found themselves subject to the violent caprices of white men and, as supposedly unreformable people, became increasingly alienated from the penal institutions of the state. In chapters covering slavery, households, and intra-white male violence, this dissertation ultimately concludes that the liberal state coexisted with, and was from the onset shaped by, a slaveholding, patriarchal order that assumed white male supremacy as the essence of "liberal" freedom.