Reconstructing Local Government

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe township system is an [e]ducator [i]n Self-Government, and has been commended, at all times, by political thinkers, who have at heart the good of the people. It is one of the grandest of political principles, leaving absolutely to neighborhoods the right to govern themselves in local matters . . . .1Slavery is an indispensable police institution . . . .2In 1860, the population of Granville County, North Carolina, was evenly split: half of the residents were free and half were slaves.3 Local government for the free white citizens took the form of the old county court system-appointed county justices of the peace (generally drawn from the social and economic elite) ran the business of local government.4 Where slavery was strong (as it was in Granville County), the counties were largely controlled by planter elites.5 In every instance county governments were primarily dedicated to protecting the property rights of residents. Counties provided courts and minimal law enforcement, but few other services (schools, aid to the poor, etc.).One reason that the counties were weak was because another, much stronger system of local government existed alongside and within them. The slaves of Granville County were subject to the despotic feudal control of slaveholders on their home plantations.6 With a few minor limitations, slaveholders had wide jurisdiction over slaves' bodies and social lives.7 Although there were certainly circumstances when slaves came into contact with the county court system,8 plantations were the primary unit of local government for the vast majority of the black population.In 1865 at the end of the Civil War, the once stable systems of local government in Granville County (and across the South) were broken. The feudal control of the planters on their plantations was eradicated with emancipation. With the stroke of a pen at Appomattox, the county's citizenry had doubled. More importantly, that citizenry was, for the first time in American history, evenly split between white and black voters. The weak county government that had been run by the planters to protect their property was now tasked with representing and governing a newly integrated population which presented problems of local governance that had never been faced. All of the thorny difficulties of Reconstruction were present: How should freed slaves be integrated into the political community? How should they live as neighbors with their former masters? How should property, power, wealth, and influence be redistributed? How should the South be modernized, reborn, protected? In the face of all this, unable to return to the old system under slavery or chart a path forward, local government floundered and failed.9 What remained was a question: What would local government look like in the post-bellum South?This Article tells the story of the struggle over the answer to that question. At the center of that struggle is an untold legal history of local government reform during Reconstruction. In the years immediately after the Civil War, idealistic Yankee10 reformers went south to help renovate the conquered Confederate states. These men and women were not shy about their desire to remake the South in the image of their northern homes. Specifically, in North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, these reformers saw the need for functional local government and embarked on a reform experiment that sought to remake the very fabric of southern local government by imposing the model of the New England town through the new state constitutions.Seeing Reconstruction through the history of what I will call the "township experiment" changes the focus from state and national institutions to the local, where the lived difficulties of the post-slavery, post-war South were at play.11 The problem of local government in Granville County was typical of the problem across the region. Emancipation and integration were overlaid onto well-worn social, political, and class structures, which combined to create a strong sense of a southern "way of life" independent of government institutions. …