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The Irreducibility of the County in theSouth and America, Past and PresentT.R.C. Huttona

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NOTES AND COMMENTS

The Irreducibility of the County in the South and America,Past and Present

T.R.C. Hutton*

Department of History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

(Received 1 July 2013; accepted 22 December 2013)

In the United States county government has remained powerful since before theRevolution, via legal or extralegal arrangements. Even during the nineteenth-century debate over nationalism versus states’ rights, they were the governmentalpower that had the most direct impact on American lives, especially in the South.Challenges to constitutional guarantees of equal protection often come about onthe county level. Neoliberal economics and suburbanization have renewed thescope of county government in some places, often in ways that echo the nineteenthcentury. Although most historians have shown little interest in them, countiescould provide them with a framing device for dissecting little-studied sectors ofAmerican society and an escape from the problems inherent to Americanexceptionalism.

Keywords: counties (United States); the American South; rural; local sovereignty;oligarchs; federalism; post-nationalism

At the end of the twentieth century I had a job as a cub reporter (an archaic term bythen, though apropos) for a weekly newspaper in Virginia. I covered local sports androughly half of the news, all the while drinking quarts of bad coffee in cinderblockpress boxes of high school football stadiums and sparsely attended town councilmeetings in overheated assembly rooms.

One of my regular beats was the biweekly county supervisors’ meetings, manydedicated to paving over Washington County’s pasturelands for Wal-Mart, Petro,Jumbo Buffet, and other Clinton-era shrines of neoliberal progress. One memorablespringtime meeting drew an unusually large crowd who (mostly) objected to a newordinance that was punitive toward owners and renters of house-trailers. The newregulation would make zoning for “trailer parks” (somehow deemed more unsightlythan Jumbo Buffet) nearly impossible, and threatened to have preexistent parkszoned out of existence. It involved “hiding” a common form of low-cost housing that,to use a common petit genterie complaint, “brought down property values.”1 It was1998, the stock market was at an all-time high, gas prices were bizarrely low, and

*Email: thutton2@utk.edu

American Nineteenth Century History, 2014Vol. 15, No. 1, 1–13, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2014.885179

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recently exported factory jobs were being replaced by a low-wage rural service economy(most extant cattle and tobacco farming was not long for the world either). The “pro-business” ordinance passed above the crowd’s protests, but not without laying bare theboard’s indifference toward their working-class constituency. Although in a county witha historically small voter turnout, there was no apparent fallout afterward; or, if therewas, I wasn’t around to report on it. The following fall I left the newspaper to startgraduate school.

Federal and state policies play their parts, but the American county is where business isdone at its most visceral level, the business in which the public sector and private sectoroverlap most openly and most often. States allow county governments to issue the bonds,variances, tax discounts, and other regulatory devices that determine the quantity andquality of jobs and living space within their jurisdictions. The moneyed interests thatusually run for county office (after all, who else has the leisure time?) are typically under theproverbial radar, especially in the most impoverished pockets of rural America. Actionsthat would be considered graft and collusion in Congress are daily business. Sheriff’sdepartments use bribes and confiscations as part of local law enforcement. Balloting forcounty offices, often held at variant times in off-years when voter interest is lowest, yieldslittle turnover. In some cases citizens suffer because of the de jure powers states grant totheir counties, but, just as often, it is simply a de factomatter: themore rural the county, themore leeway public officials have for pursuing their own private interests via loophole ormalfeasance. Meanwhile, policies that affect home equities or drinking water areovershadowed by more sensational news stories. Even in a small town nearly 400 milesfrom Washington, DC, my coverage of local government in the spring of 1998 gained farless hometown attention than did the various rumors, snickers, and innuendossummarized by the name “Monica Lewinsky.”

The powerful, sometimes oppressive, role of county government has often reflectedbroader trends in American history, but no one seems to want to study them or write aboutthem. This local-est of local governments strikes many Americans as something outside oftheir “mainstream.” This probably stems from the early twentieth century whenProgressive political scientists attacked the county as a degenerate, problem-ridden formof government. “County government is the most backward of all our political units,” theNational Municipal League announced in the early 1920s, “…the most neglected by thepublic, the most boss-ridden, the least efficiently organized and most corrupt andincompetent, and, by reason of constitutional complications, the most difficult to reform.”2

Since the subsequent decline of Progressivism, Americans have habitually preferred to seethem as a signifier of immitigable buffoonery rather than a problem worthy of solving.“County” in popular culture suggests the parochial, the insular, the ostensible polaropposite of the global/transnational approaches that many historians and other academicshave embraced. Narratives containing “county” almost always suggest a vision of anirredeemable American retrograde. The natives of William Faulkner’s YoknapatawphaCounty,Mississippi, lived and died as prisoners of a past that could never be past. Althoughits early episodes suggest a mild rebuke of political corruption in fictional Hazzard County(obliquely placed in Georgia though derived from a Kentucky town name), The Dukes ofHazzard developed into an apolitical Dionysian romp about “two blow-dried Californiastud-muffins” helping strangers and driving recklessly (most people now only remember

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the Confederate flag painted on their Dodge Charger’s roof).3 In the funny papers, BerkeleyBreathed’s Bloom County lambasted 1980s conservatism and the provincials thatengendered it. Real-life Harlan County, Kentucky, has been putty in the hands of popculture at least since Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA (1976) brought the BrooksideStrike into national consciousness (and titled as if to suggest that the county’s placement inthe United States was more ironic than appropriate), and continues as a highly baroquesetting for violence on cable television’s Justified. Although more well-known than thecities it contains, Orange County, California (the only place on earth capable of producingRichard Nixon) has escaped this fate, but it had to be hidden behind the title “The OC” inits most recent glamorous television portrayal; “county” would not have worked for aprogram about wealthy, pretty people living superciliously on the edge of Americanexistence.

In the nineteenth century this mass culture treatment had not yet taken place. Ina country with a rural majority, counties were the rule, not the exception, and mostAmericans seemed to prefer it so. North America has counties because England’s firstcolony there, Virginia, established them, loosely modeled after the old country, in the1630s. Colonial Virginia needed judiciaries to oversee a society that was spread outon and around massive hierarchical plantations with few sizeable towns. Before,during, and after the Revolution, the arrangement suited Virginians’ sense of face-to-face masculine representation while also staying less egalitarian and centralized thanNew England town halls (notably, New England states never completely riddedthemselves of counties, at least as traditional demarcations). Virginia legislaturesanswered petitions to form new counties in isolated places even when it failed to suittheir personal judgment; in 1799, Virginia state delegate Littleton Waller Tazewellopposed forming a new county in the state’s southwestern quadrant but changed hisvote when the opposition cajoled him by naming the new county for his father.4 Onlymen of property had time to serve as judge, justice of the peace, court clerk, orsheriff, and the vicissitudes of popular opinion could be monitored and steadied by acourt that combined legislative, executive and judicial functions (this was the age of“vive voce,” and the secret ballot was far into the future).5

In his old age, Thomas Jefferson bemoaned the malapportionment and oligarch-ical government that county courts sustained.6 Virginia’s county officers, he said,were “self-appointed, self-continued, holding their authorities for life,” establishing“an impossibility of breaking in on the perpetual succession of any faction oncepossessed of the bench.”7 Despite Jefferson’s misgivings, Jeffersonians either acceptedor embraced county supremacy, granting it the same attributes Jefferson associatedwith states’ rights. A delegate to Virginia’s 1829–1830 constitutional convention,Reverend Alexander Campbell, announced what a lot of Virginians already thought.“I may say, more of the happiness of this Commonwealth, depends upon the CountyGovernment under which we live, than upon the State or the United States’ Govern-ment.”8 Like a lot of the convention’s western delegates, he was disenchanted withVirginia’s age-old planter hegemony and the anti-majoritarian capitol it maintainedin Richmond.9 Accordingly, upland Virginians like Campbell (the preacher lived justlong enough to see his section become West Virginia more than three decades later)retreated back to the political unit with “the most limited jurisdiction,” that, in

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Campbell’s estimation, possessed “the greatest power to afflict us, or to make ushappy[.]”10 But which of the two – afflict or make happy – was the county morelikely to do?

New England and the Mid-Atlantic states eventually reduced counties’ managerialrole, but the South followed Virginia’s precedent. Reverend Campbell’s observationabout Virginia counties and their courts reflected a broader span of southern opinion,and during his lifetime versions of the “Virginia system” were imitated further to thesouth and west.11 In the North immigration swelled cities and challenged the oldarrangements. In the South, a slave-based economy discouraged the growth of townsand cities, thereby furthering a form of government patterned around rural life, as wellas the hierarchies it maintained. Most nineteenth-century southerners were willing tosacrifice majoritarian rule for close and unobtrusive management, something likewhat modern Americans call “small government,” answerable to the smallest numberof white males possible, even when dominant political families fulfilled ThomasJefferson’s fears. Newer southern states of the early republic shed themselves ofVirginia’s property requirements for voting, but the ability to hold office remained ade facto privilege. As Jacksonian universal manhood suffrage swept over the countryin the 1830s, county governmental positions in many states were nevertheless passeddown in families as inheritances.12 Southerners with ambitions of railroads, canals,and markets erred on the side of courthouse localism while simultaneously courtingfederal dollars: Kentucky Whigs fought for federal dollars to build the “MaysvilleRoad,” even as their state capital could barely enforce tax collection from its ever-multiplying county seats. Nevertheless, counties, and the paradox of liberty theyembodied, were deemed good government by a population who knew better thananyone in the free states what the absolute lack of liberty looked like.

The more southerners liked counties, the more counties they created from theChesapeake Bay to the Rio Grande. Historical maps of states below the Ohio Rivershow a century-long mitosis driven by the elusive dream of antinomian sovereignty.Their cartographic imprint remains with us to this day. Of the seven states with100 or more counties, five are former slave states. Texas has far and away the mostwith 254; Georgia 159 and Kentucky (a state with two-thirds Georgia’s land area andmuch, much smaller than Texas in both size and population) 120. South Carolina’srelatively small number of 46 counties stands in stark contrast to Maine’s 16,although the two states are very close in terms of area; North Carolina, onlymarginally smaller than New York, has an even 100 counties while the Empire Statemanages with 62. Connecticut and Rhode Island have, in recent years, removed alladministrative roles from their small number of counties. Many western states havecounties larger than some states, and some have allowed them considerable controlover local affairs, although sparse populations have not encouraged them toproliferate further. Throughout, not all states grant counties with the exact samestatutory authorizations. However, county governments in the South are perhapsmore important than ever, especially in the Sunbelt. In the era of suburban sprawl,county governments have taken on responsibilities for city-sized populations despitetheir provincial connotations. They remain the most “territorially pervasive units oflocal government in the United States.”13

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Nevertheless, it is safe to say that, in the South or elsewhere, the county is not theauthoritative jurisdiction that it was in the past. Indeed, in the nineteenth-centuryAmerican South, the county constituted the state as Max Weber later envisioned it:the body that monopolized “legitimate use of physical force” (i.e., military or lawenforcement).14 County courts organized slave patrols, the earliest versions of policeforces in the United States. Companies for the American Revolution, the War of1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War were all assembled by county officials and,in the next century, draft boards operated on the county level until the Vietnam era.Capital punishment remained the domain of the county in some states until justbefore World War I when reformers began to realize how closely public executionsresembled lynch mobs.

Even when violence surpassed legitimacy during the Civil War, the countyremained paramount. The southern delegates who voted for or against secession in1861 did so at the behest of their countywide electorates and, once war commenced,control over county government was tied up with support for, or defiance of, theConfederacy. Nearly nine decades ago southern historian Frank Owsley ventured,irony of ironies, that the Confederacy had ultimately died from states’ rights dueto the recalcitrance of governors like Georgia’s Joseph Brown and North Carolina’sZebulon Vance.15 Recent wartime county studies suggest that even as theyflummoxed Jefferson Davis’s quasi-national project, their own regimes were fallingto internal subversion. Mississippi’s “Free State of Jones” was only one of perhaps adozen counties throughout the South that seceded from secession, with or withoutbeing noticed by state or “national” authorities (it’s doubtful that Davis was privy tothe internecine chaos of Louisiana’s Florida Parishes or the fifth columnist intriguesof northern Alabama’s “Republic of Winston [County]”).16 Some of the fiercestdefenders of the Union in the South were apparently motivated by the same localismthat had caused the propagation of southern counties before the war. Before thewar southern states had made themselves too decentralized to make states’ rightsfunction – or, at least, function well enough to fight a war.

And even as they fought a war supposedly “between the states,” combatants likeUnion General George Stoneman and Confederate Genderal Hylan Lyon, as well ascountless other commanders, understood that hearts and minds were affected moreby a burning courthouse than by newspaper stories of far away battles. At the sametime sheriffs and judges “conducted themselves in ways approaching secession.”17

County-ordained “home guards” fighting for either side complicated Americans’understanding of “regular” and “irregular” warfare. Amid all the chaos, a civil waronly heightened the importance of the county court. Amid political and civil entropy,Washington, DC, Richmond, and state capitals offered little relief to loyalists orrebels in the border states, and so civilians and soldiers turned to the nearestgovernmental institution available. Abraham Lincoln probably understood this whenhe strategically exempted certain enumerated Virginia counties, and parishes inLouisiana, from the immediate effects of the Emancipation Proclamation, leavingslavery alone for most of the rest of the war “as if this proclamation were not issued.”

After the war was over rebels and loyalists showed up to vote at their localprecincts. For those who chose peace, county governments provided a forum in

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which former enemies became reacquainted as citizens – of course many from bothsides found their common cause in establishing a white-supremacist polity. In thegrand scheme, the American Civil War had dealt a serious blow to the micro-federalism that counties represented. But this was all the more reason for whitesoutherners to hunker down. As the southern states were gradually reinstalled intothe Union (some in more altered form than others) county government represented athing of permanence in a society that had been forcefully dismantled. In WestVirginia, the state created by the war, the fundamental “southerness” of countygovernment was displayed during Reconstruction. When the new state broke offfrom Virginia and reentered the Union in 1863 its new constitution laid out atownship arrangement patterned from New England, thereby symbolizing thenew state’s disengagement from the rebellious Virginia. When more conservativeelements prevailed nine years later, their new constitution reestablished a countycourt system more like that of the Old Dominion.18 It was just in time for the newstate’s dedication to industrial extraction; not long after the revisionist constitutionwas ratified courthouse elites began forming bonds with the out-of-state investorswho had eyes on its wealth of coal and timber. Over the next half century, WestVirginia’s industrial workers often found that the first barrier to decent wages and aneight-hour work day was a county sheriff’s badge (or, more to the point, the guns heand his deputies carried to enforce the policies of local capital).

In years to come, the Fourteenth Amendment would call the doctrine of statesovereignty into serious question, while leaving states’ internal districts to their ownaffairs. And then, due to a Supreme Court case initiated by one of these obscuredistricts, this one far from the former Confederacy (San Mateo County, California tobe exact), the amendment’s meaning was permanently modified when the high courtdeclared that corporations, not just people, were protected under its Equal ProtectionClause.19 Of course, elsewhere, equal protection was only as good as the will to enforceit. Many, perhaps most, of the egregious acts of counterrevolutionary violence duringReconstruction and after were carried out to prevent black southerners fromcontrolling the apparatus of county government (or, in the case of Louisiana’s 1873Colfax Massacre, parish government). Soon thereafter, county government becameone of the primary vehicles of Jim Crow. State legislation meant to winnow the votingpopulation (e.g., poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses) empowered elected orappointed county officials more than they did the state capital.20 Georgia’s “countyunit system” did little to strengthen the state’s county governments per se, but it didmitigate the allegedly pernicious effects of growing urban influences.

County government was intertwined with the American South’s historicalproclivity toward poverty, especially in states with stark disparities between theirlowland and upland sections. As early as the 1850s, there was already a growingconcern over “pauper counties,” districts whose debts to their states surpassed theirrespective revenues year after year. It was a simple but far-reaching problem: thesmaller the land mass contained within its borders, the smaller the number oftaxpayers. By the beginning of the Civil War many of Kentucky’s 110 counties couldnot produce enough wealth to match their tax burdens. By 1859 decades of county-creation had created a state deficit of more than $53 million – this before the

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legislature carved out 10 more over the next 53 years (and most of them inKentucky’s more impoverished areas).21 By the early twentieth century paupercounties’ drain on state funds was a ready excuse for fiscal austerity in other states aswell. Thirteen years before his 1926 North Pole flight, Richard Byrd blamedVirginia’s poor counties for all of its economic woes, and recommended a systemof property assessment that relieved wealthier cities and counties of their poorerneighbors’ shortfalls.22 His older brother Harry became governor a few years later,and applied a similar policy that gave county political cliques sole duty over taxcollection, while also eliminating a number of electable statewide offices.23 It wasprobably the most disjointed revenue systems in the country, in a state that had aremarkably low rate of voter participation, even by southern standards. GovernorByrd’s “pay as you go” austerity policy was described as reform (and, in the Coolidgeera, perhaps this made some sort of perverse sense), although in many ways it was areversion to a tax policy reminiscent of Alexander Campbell’s day. Overreliance oncounties, or zeal for making new ones, was not necessarily the chief cause for povertyin what we might call the South’s long nineteenth century. However, either couldexacerbate preexistent problems.

For these reasons and others, political scientists have taken great interest in countygovernment in the South and elsewhere, although historians have not followed suit inrecent decades. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Federal Writers’ Project turned outindividual histories for counties that had previously been bereft of their ownchronicles, and these remain rudimentary but significant secondary sources forhistorians of rural America. There are indispensable, hard-hitting monographs fromthe 1970s through the 1990s that used counties as case studies. Orville VernonBurton’s In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions (1985), a quantitative study offamily life in Edgefield County, South Carolina, is a model social history. WayneDurrill’s War of Another Kind (1990), using Washington County, North Carolina,remains one of the most illuminating Civil War era local studies and an inspiration formany others.24 An intense focus upon one specific locality avoids many of thehistorian’s pratfalls of generalization and complicates broad narratives that studentshave taken as rote.

However, as is the case with most social histories, in each of these, the part wasmeant to speak to the whole. An examination of one county in either of the Carolinaswas meant to reveal something about each respective state – perhaps the entireSouth – over a period of time. These books were dedicated to approaching Americanhistory “from the bottom up,” and the county served solely as an enclosure foravailable or useful data. What of the county government itself? Is it possible thatcounties, scrutinized as bodies unto themselves, might reveal something other than asynechdoche of their surroundings? Very few historians, however, have looked atcounty government “from the top down.” The second chapter of Charles Sydnor’sThe Development of Southern Sectionalism (1948) is perhaps the only multi-statecomparison of southern county courts, and this limited to the timespan between theEra of Good Feelings and the Mexican War. His conclusion, that antebellumsectionalism was a by-product of the southern “squirearchy,” remains appreciatedand unchallenged (even the aforementioned local war histories do not directly

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address the fact that they seriously complicate Sydnor’s interpretation of thesecessions that followed).25 Professor Robert Ireland of the University of Kentuckyhas dedicated most of his career to exposing the deleterious “prevailing condition oflocalism” in the Bluegrass State, brought on by its acquiescence to the wishes of its“little kingdoms.”26 Like Sydnor, Ireland shows a nineteenth-century state legislaturemanned by solons whose interests in their respective counties superseded anyconcern for a greater good (we might assume the same could be said for Kentucky’scongressional delegation). In his telling, nineteenth-century Kentucky was conse-quently less than the sum of its parts.

Also like Sydnor, no one has found Ireland’s thesis provocative enough to expandupon it or engage it critically, let alone compare his findings with the county systemof another state. The importance of southern county government in the nineteenthcentury is never denied, but it is also taken for granted and, understandably, upstagedby the constant bugbear of states’ rights. County histories of varying quality, oftenself-published vanity products or outsized brochures commissioned by publiclibraries, remain in print. For the most part, however, academic historians havelost their former interest in the county, especially as they have moved on from theirlate twentieth century embrace of social history. How can the most parochial ofAmerican political institutions have any future in historical scholarship? Arecounties, in the South or elsewhere, simply small potatoes?

Part of the problem might involve a measure of cognitive dissonance among thosewho consider counties too déclassé to take seriously. The county is no more parochialor small than a fifteenth-century French commune or a nineteenth-century Mexicanpueblo, yet these bodies of government have not faced the same sort of rejection – it’spossible that the American county has been overlooked or taken for granted for thesame reasons that the Progressives wanted to eradicate it a century ago. Why does theintellectual class find the parochial so distasteful (except, of course, when it includesattractively quaint “folk” elements)? Perhaps because, unlike the French commune,the American county is still very much with us, complete with updated versions of thecommensurate problems they carried with them long before Progressivism. Even ifyou live within the boundaries of a broad-minded civic government that regulatescarbon monoxide emissions and builds greenways, somewhere not far away thesevestiges of pre-Revolutionary North America continue to place the frailties of the USConstitution on display with their scattershot approaches to democracy. Rather thanstudy, this is something academics would prefer to escape.

The problem with that dismissal is the fact that counties remain an inescapableproblem for anyone who believes that the Constitution’s jurisdiction includes everypart of the United States. The county should be recognized as a valid historical subjectnot only for the power it wielded in the 1800s but also for the alarming authority ittakes on in the twenty-first century. In doing so, echoes of less democratic centuriespeal out. A 2004 study showed that supervisors in 26 of Mississippi’s 82 counties hadbeen indicted for various kinds of kickbacks in the 1980s and that, in many casescitizens had come to see these types of corruption as a matter of course.27 It is littlesurprise that the US Supreme Court’s recent dismantling of the 1965 Voting RightsAct was at the behest of a Deep South county (Shelby County, Alabama, as it happens,

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a wealthy Birmingham exurb) elector. Questions abound about the constitutionality ofputting religious iconography in or around county courthouses. County school boardsordain creationism in high school science classes, impose odd curricula in historyclasses (some textbooks, it seems, measure Rush Limbaugh’s role in American historyas greater than that of slavery) and, on occasion, champion book-banning. Theseactions are not confined to the former Confederacy, although a sort of half-thoughtregional determinism shapes the manner in which Americans and their mediainterpret them. When word of these refutable edicts reaches the national ear, earnestconcern for civil rights violations is typically drowned out by a collective shrug overthe “backward” nature of this or that neck of the American woods. The structuralability of county government to undermine constitutional government is neverexamined.

Far more appalling are the actions of Joe Arpaio, sheriff of Maricopa County,Arizona. Arpaio has clothed himself with immense ex officio power in the name ofAmerican nationalism, and a supposedly overbearing Federal Government can dolittle more than investigate him. Whether this has more to do with the JusticeDepartment’s limitations, the hidden power of county government, or Arpaio’s ownpolitical personality cult, is up for conjecture. What is definite is the basis for hisparamilitary duchy: enforcement of US policy on illegal immigration. Moreover,Arpaio proves that problems with county government and jurisprudence are notlimited to rural backwaters; Maricopa County contains Phoenix and all it entails,arguably the most profound display of the county’s significance to suburbanization.In a part of the United States that has long been a borderland, counties have becomethe stuff of transnational intrigue.

Elsewhere, county officials have been empowered by the same FederalGovernment in the name of Homeland Security. Less notorious county sheriffscommonly express interest in obtaining drone technology as fears emerge thatcounty or civic police forces have become “militarized,” in places unlikely to sufferattacks from international terrorists. Conversely, amid discussions of re-expandingfederal gun control in the wake of a mass killing in Newtown, Connecticut, dozensof sheriffs in the South and West announced their refusal to enforce any new laws.This trend is especially notable in Colorado where a recent history of massshootings has not deterred several sheriffs from announcing a nullification compactagainst state gun regulations.28 Whether or not any of this would ever come toanything remains to be seen, but it seems that the relative independence of countiescould become an actual political debate, and maybe a constitutional question likestates,’ rights, in years to come. Historians may eventually find themselves forcedto set aside what I believe is a Menckenian disdain for the corners of Americawhere local government is most likely to hinder equal protection, due process, andseparation of church and state. Though far away from high-end groceries andMontessori schools, these are parts of the United States, too, even if populatedby trailer park residents.

In his earnest book-length plea for renewed political engagement, For CommonThings, Jed Purdy evoked the lost possibilities of county governments, mostspecifically school boards, those “anachronistic, slightly silly institutions” that often

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serve as “launching pads for hacks and political extremists.”29 Awful as they mayseem to progressives, school boards still serve (or, at least, did so in Purdy’s WestVirginia Gen-X childhood) as a starting place for those who truly believed inpolitical engagement within their own communities, a temple for true believerswho weren’t afraid to see how the proverbial sausage is made, and armed withnobler intentions than those of the hacks and extremists. The avarice and nonsenseassociated with county government notwithstanding, one need not be a member ofa pre-established political elite in order to get elected to something so humble asthe school board, and the opportunity to do good in it was every bit as available asthe opportunity to do evil – just as fellow West Virginian Alexander Campbellhad said nearly nine score years earlier. Campbell and Purdy knew that, states’rights or media-fed scandals (Purdy wrote For Common Things around the time of“Lewinskygate”) aside, local government matters, and therefore American countiesmatter.

I sympathize with Purdy’s sanguine mindset, and I hope that historians of theUnited States might be inspired by it enough to give county government in any timeperiod (the only failing I see in the work of Charles Sydnor and Robert Ireland wasthat they limited their respective works to the nineteenth century) a serious look.Personally, I am tempted and fascinated by the more appalling implications ofAmerican county government that only come to me via a comparative approach tohistory. The very constitutional problems mentioned earlier demonstrate picayunebut glaring exceptions to the assumptions many Americans have about themselves asa nation, or even the validity of referring to the United States as a nation. In aperverse manner, these constitutional problems can provide us with a fresh scholarlyangle. Free from the oversight of larger state forces, counties tear at the fringes ofAmerican exceptionalism. They make the United States look astonishingly like therest of the world. They hold tremendous sway over American lives while saidAmericans are busy imagining the much larger community (in 1998, everyone whohad come to speak out against the board of supervisors’ punitive zoning ordinanceput their complaints on hold long enough to join the board members in pledgingallegiance to the flag), and this may be part and parcel to all of the problems withdemocracy mentioned here. Anglophone historians have long rejected the constric-tions of hard and fast nation-based histories, but a post-national history has beendifficult to grasp for historians of North America. Nation states, it seems, dwindleslower than the glaciers (actually, some county school boards may mandate sciencetextbooks that insist that the glaciers aren’t dwindling either), and the same can besaid for national narratives despite predictions made around the time of the “end ofhistory” forecast awhile back.30 The American county may seem to some a thing toosmall and trivial to provide a replacement for “imagined communities.” When youget into a subject like the United States, so vast and heterogeneous, imperial but notquite an empire, there might be reason to look past the sheen of national identity tothe smaller bodies that challenge the whiggish assumptions of American right, might,and prosperity. Hopefully, historians will be able to take it as seriously as mostAmericans are obliged to do.

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Notes1. For an analogous vignette on modern county government (and a different “pro-business”

approach to zoning) in another part of Virginia, see Frank, The Wrecking Crew, 26–30.2. Quoted in Ogg and Ray, Introduction to American Government, 732. See also Beard,

Readings in American Government and Politics, 556–66; Forman, Advanced Civics, 195–202; “Lobbyists and Legislatures,” 197. For a secondary assessment of the Progressiveattack on the county (and its long-lasting scholarly legacy), see Menzel, “Introduction.”

3. Quoted from Williamson, Hillbillyland, 133.4. Pendleton, History of Tazewell County and Southwest Virginia, 396–7.5. Williamson, Problems in American Democracy, 519–520.6. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 39, 40, 46, 51.7. Ibid, 40.8. Proceedings and debates of the Virginia State Convention of 1829–1830, 526.9. Bruce, The Rhetoric of Conservatism, 34, 53–56, 61–62, 102, 125.10. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention of 1829–1830, 526.11. Brewer, Developing a County Home Rule Charter Government, 23.12. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 42, 285.13. Marando and Thomas, The Forgotten Governments, 1.14. Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 78.15. Owsley, “Local Defense and the Overthrow of the Confederacy,” 490–525.16. See, for instance, Bynum, The Free State of Jones; Downing, A South Divided; Hyde, Pistols

and Politics.17. Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 60.18. Brisbin, West Virginia Politics and Government, 108–110, 112.19. Beatty, Age of Betrayal, 172.20. Creech, Righteous Indignation, 105–106, 157–61; Schultz, The Rural Face of White

Supremacy, 182–4; Harris, Deep Souths, 70.21. Charleston Mercury, December 5, 1859; “Assassination in Kentucky,” 778; Ireland, Little

Kingdoms, 5–6, 124–32, 152.22. Report of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Virginia State Bar Association held at

the Homestead Hotel, Hot Springs, VA, 131–133.23. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 229–30.24. Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions; Durrill, War of Another Kind.25. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 52.26. Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 1.27. Karahan et al., “No Pretense to Honesty,” 211–227.28. “Sheriffs Refuse to Enforce Laws on Gun Control,” New York Times, December 15, 2013;

“Growing Number of Sheriffs Saying”.29. Purdy, For Common Things, 189–90.30. See, for instance, Robin, “The Exhaustion of Enclosures, 367–380.”

Notes on contributor

T.R.C. Hutton teaches U.S. History at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. His firstbook, “Bloody Breathitt”: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South, was published by theUniversity Press of Kentucky in 2013. He is currently preparing for a new project on GildedAge politician William Goebel.

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