Policing the Southern City

the long version

In this first book-length study of the police in a nineteenth-century southern city, Dennis C. Rousey demonstrates that the distinction of introducing the first major reform of the traditional colonial police system belongs not to any of the large northeastern cities in the mid-1800s, as is generally understood, but to Deep South cities of a much earlier period. As early as the late 1700s, Rousey argues, southern cities, including New Orleans, developed military-style municipal police forces to deal with their large concentrations of slaves, making the southern concept of the role of police markedly different from that of the North, whose forces at the time consisted mainly of unarmed constables and night watchmen. Rousey's examination reveals a great deal about the city itself - its complex ethnic and racial traditions, its fluctuating economy, its politics, and its judicial organization and standards. A wealth of comparative data from Charleston, Savannah, and Mobile places the New Orleans police force within the context of law enforcement systems of this period this period throughout the Deep South.