V.
THE REGULATOR.
“Thieves for their robbery have authority,
When judges steal themselves.”—
Measure for Measure.
At the conclusion of peace between England and America, in eighteen hundred and fifteen, the Indians, who had been instigated and supported in their hostility by the British, suddenly found themselves deprived of their allies. If they now made war upon the Americans, they must do so upon their own responsibility, and, excepting the encouragement of a few traders and commanders of outposts, whose enmity survived the general pacification, without assistance from abroad. They, however, refused to lay down their arms, and hostilities were continued, though languidly, for some years longer. But the rangers, now disciplined by the experience of protracted warfare, and vastly increased in numbers, had grown to be more than a match for them, so that not many years elapsed before the conclusion of a peace, which has lasted, with but occasional interruptions, to the present day.
When danger no longer threatened the settlements, there was no further call for these irregular troops. The companies were disbanded, and those who had families, as a large proportion of them had, returned to their plantations, and resumed the pursuits of industry and peace. Those who had neither farms nor families, and were unfitted by their stirring life for regular effort, emigrated further west. Peace settled upon our borders, never, we hope, to be seriously broken.
But as soon as the pressure of outward danger was withdrawn, and our communities began to expand, the seeds of new evils were developed—seeds which had germinated unobserved, while all eyes were averted, and which now began to shoot up into a stately growth of vices and crimes. The pioneers soon learned that there was among them a class of unprincipled and abandoned men, whose only motive in emigrating was to avoid the restraints, or escape the penalties, of law, and to whom the freedom of the wilderness was a license to commit every sort of depredation. The arm of the law was not yet strong enough to punish them.
The territorial governments were too busy in completing their own organization, to give much attention to details: where states had been formed, the statute-book was yet a blank: few officers had been appointed, and even these were strangers to their duties and charge of responsibility. Between the military rule of the rangers—for they were for internal police as well as external defence—and the establishment of regular civil government, there was a sort of interregnum, during which there was neither law nor power to enforce it. The bands of villains who infested the country were the only organizations known; and, in not a few instances, these bands included the very magistrates whose duty it was to see that the laws were faithfully executed. Even when this was not the case, it was a fruitless effort to arrest a malefactor; indeed, it was very often worse than fruitless, for his confederates were always ready to testify in his favor: and the usual consequence of an attempt to punish, was the drawing down upon the head of the complainant or prosecutor, the enmity of a whole confederacy. Legal proceedings, had provision been made for such, were worse than useless, for conviction was impossible: and the effort exasperated, while the failure encouraged, the outlaw spirit.
An alibi was the usual defence, and to those times may be referred the general prejudice entertained among our people, even at the present day, against that species of testimony. A jury of western men will hardly credit an alibi, though established by unexceptionable witnesses; and the announcement that the accused depends upon that for his defence, will create a strong prejudice against him in advance. Injustice may sometimes be done in this way, but it is a feeling of which our people came honestly in possession. They established a habit, in early days, of never believing an alibi, because, at that time, nine alibis in ten were false, and habits of thought, like legal customs, cling to men long after their reason has ceased. It is right, too, that it should be so, on the principle that we should not suspend the use of the remedy until the disease be thoroughly conquered.
In a state of things, such as we have described, but one of two things could be done: the citizens must either abandon all effort to assert the supremacy of order, and give the country over to thieves and robbers, or they must invent some new and irregular way of forcing men to live honestly. They wisely chose the latter alternative. They consulted together, and the institution of Regulators was the result of their deliberations.