Organized in 1631, Boston’s watch patrolled only at night, monitoring the town to ensure the protection of property and persons. In the post-revolutionary period, Boston’s citizens voiced the desire for a more active and efficacious government to protect private property and combat issues of crime, nuisance, and vagrancy. Changes made to the “police of the town” resulted in the establishment of daytime police, new officers, and new methods such as the “patrolling watch.” Policing developed from the customary practice of keeping order to a professionalized institution over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. It was not until 1838 that Boston established a municipal police force to offer services during the daytime and nighttime. Undergoing a period of intense urbanization, Boston’s officials responded to increased immigration, crime, and unrest by increasing the number of men employed to patrol and monitor the city. For sixteen years, Boston’s municipal police and Boston’s watch remained separate entities that performed several overlapping duties: attending to fire, patrolling commercial areas, and monitoring for social ills and crime.
By the 1850s, a debate raged as to the efficiency of the dual system; once again, citizens voiced a desire for a more “energetick government” and police. Debates emerged on the implications of creating a unified policing force. On a recent archival research trip, I was struck by a quote I read in an 1851 pamphlet on the matter. The author wrote, “The Police Department of a great city like Boston is a machine of vast power and energy. It may be so conducted as to do great good; and it may also be managed as to cover and perpetuate great abuses and evils.” The pamphlet brought my thoughts to the broadside posted in Boston in 1851 at the height of tensions over the Fugitive Slave Act. Distributed by abolitionists in response to the provision of the Act that allowed local officials to act as “kidnappers,” the poster called for people of color to beware of the “Police and Watchmen of Boston.” I wondered, could Boston’s town government or the men who called for the watch’s expansion and “more police” have imagined a “machine of vast power” or a need to fear “abuses” of it? Would the men who served in Boston’s colonial watch or in the early decades of the new nation have recognized themselves as agents of the enslavers or an entity that struck fear?