Question

what major changes did the civil war bring to law and government?

what was the difference between law enforcement and vigilantism in the west?

Answer 1

The origin of the American Civil War lay 15 years ago in the result of another war: the Mexican-American War. The question of whether slavery could spread to the 700,000 square miles of former Mexican land that the United States had purchased in 1848 polarized Americans and embittered political discussion for the next twelve years.

Northern congressmen pushed through the Wilmot Proviso in the House of Representatives to specify that slavery should be excluded from Mexico in all regions won. Southern force defeated this proviso in the Senate.

These opposing views set the conditions of the next decade's dispute. When, after the discovery of gold in 1848, 80,000 Forty-Niners poured into California, they organized a state government and petitioned Congress as the 31st state for admission to the Union. Because the new constitution in California prohibited slavery, this application met with fierce southerners opposition. They uttered secession threats if they were denied their "right" to take slaves to California and Mexico's other territories.Congressional dispute grew so heated that Mississippi's Senator Henry S. Foote flourished a loaded revolver during a discussion, challenging an Illinois congressman to a duel. The country appeared to be held together by a thread in 1850 with an alarming prospect of conflict between free and slave states.

The Civil War tipped the North's sectional power balance. From the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 to 1861, slaveholders from states joining the Confederacy had served as U.S. presidents for 49 of the 72 years— more than two-thirds of the time. Twenty-three of the House's 36 Speakers and 24 of the Senate's pro tem presidents were southerners. Before the Civil War, the Supreme Court had always had a southern majority; slave states had appointed 20 of the 35 judges up to 1861.

Originally, American vigilance emerged as a frontier reaction to crime threat and reality. A criminal justice system did not protect the first ##s who went to the Deep South and the Old West. There were no law enforcement agencies, no regular court sessions, no neighboring jails or prisons, and vast open spaces for offenders to escape their victims. In the lack of any legal system, correctional facilities or institutional processes to remedy grievances, victims and their allies felt forced on a regular basis to monitor and round up outlaws and "bring the law into their own hands"

Vigilance committees were voluntary men's associations (including rarely females) working together to combat real, exaggerated or imagined hazards to their groups, families, assets, authority, or privileges. Usually these short-lived organisations had official hierarchies, strictly defined command chains, written bylaws, and paramilitary rituals. Their leadership typically was drawn from the elite of frontier society, including local businessmen, plantation owners, ranchers, merchants, and professionals. The middle strata hired the participants.

Violence in Vigilante is the reverse of violence in the revolution. In order to overthrow the established order and create new arrangements, revolutionaries resort to force, while vigilantes unleash violence to restore order and maintain the status quo. Vigilance committees declared in their manifestos that their coercive campaigns were intended to stop destabilizing trends, reinforce faltering structures, revive fading traditions, and support current relationships. Their actions were meant to quash challenges from below or outside to local elites.