Three general areas of crime were important during the period of 1754-1815. First, moral crimes violated social sensibilities concerning appropriate individual behavior. These crimes included bastardy, fornication, rape, drunkenness, contempt for authority, and vagrancy. Second, crimes against property centered on stealing or swindling personal and public property. Counterfeiting became an important form of property crime during the early republic with the proliferation of banks printing their own notes with separate designs, making it too easy to fabricate paper money. Third, violent crime entailed attacks on individuals, including assault and murder.

All three types of crime continued to some degree throughout the late colonial and early national era. However, there were important differences in the nature of crime depending on region, and some changes took place over time. The South was more persistently violent than the North: South Carolina had a personal-violence rate that remained around 55 percent of all prosecuted crimes, with a property-crime rate that hovered about 30 percent during the period. In Massachusetts, crimes concerning morality made up almost 51 percent of the prosecuted case before the Revolutionary War (1775-83) but dwindled to about 7 percent during the period from 1790 to 1830. In the same state, crimes against people and property combined reached only 28 percent of prosecutions from 1760 to 1774, while between 1790 to 1830, prosecutions against property crimes alone were about 41 percent. The contrast between South Carolina and Massachusetts reflects extremes between the South and New England. Crime statistics in mid-Atlantic states fits between these extremes, but the pattern of crime was closer to the South than New England. Pennsylvania, for example, persistently experienced more personal and property crime than Massachusetts and had a level of prosecution for moral crimes of less than 10 percent throughout the 18th century. New York's experience was similar to Pennsylvania, with a rise in personal and property crimes in the second half of the 18th century and into the early 19th century.

Several reasons explain the different levels of crime rates. The Massachusetts figures reflect not so much a change in behavior as they do a change in definition of crime from being a sin to being an act that threatened property or persons. South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York had moved their definitions of crime away from sin much earlier than had Massachusetts. In South Carolina, in part because of the legacy of slavery and in part because of the number of Scots-Irish on the frontier, there developed a culture of violence that would cast a long shadow across much of the South's history. On South Carolina's disorderly frontier, an outbreak of lawlessness of all types--attacks on persons, violations of property rights, and immorality--led to the development of the South Carolina Regulation in the late 1760s. This vigilante movement fought crime with a lawlessness of its own. Pennsylvania became increasingly polyglot as the main depot for immigration in the 18th century, and this diverse and often impoverished population added to the property emphasis in its crime rate. New York had been marked by diversity from its inception, and as New York City expanded during the early republic, urbanization seemed to create a new kind of society conducive to crime. In 1811 Charles Christian, a police magistrate, wrote that "the obvious inequalities of fortune" and the baser passions led to "the insatiable appetite for animal gratification . . . in weak and depraved minds" whose inevitable "wretchedness" created "a heterogeneous mass" that committed crimes and somehow had to be controlled.

Beyond the overall trends evident in long-term crime rates, the Revolutionary War itself led to a breakdown of order that increased criminal activity. Wherever government was weak or absent, people seized the opportunity to plunder, rape, maim, and kill. In particular, areas between zones of control, whether it be the no-man's land in New Jersey or New York between the Continental army and the British army, or through large sections of the South after the British invasion of 1780, individuals and groups committed criminal acts. Sometimes these looters, pillagers, and killers were in the bands of militia organized by Whigs and sometimes by Loyalists; often they were just acting independently. Only the conclusion of the war brought an end to this marauding in the settled regions, although criminals and gangs would remain active along the frontier during the early republic and throughout the 19th century.

Bibliography:

1) Douglas Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691-1776 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974)

2) Michael Stephen Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980)

3) Jack D. Marietta and G. S. Rowe, Troubled Experiment: Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)

4) William Edward Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760-1830 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975)

5) Harry M. Ward, Between the Lines: Banditti of the American Revolution (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002)

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