Posse Comitatus and the End of Reconstruction

• In Event: African American Political Thought

Abstract

The current popular understanding of the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA) in the United States is that it embodies an enduring principle of American political thought: that in its cultural skepticism of standing militaries and state authority, U.S. Americans have always rejected the idea of an internal policing role for the military. This paper argues that this is not the case. First, I show that the public did not generally reject a domestic policing role for the military. Second, I demonstrate that the PCA actually represents an agreement between Congressional Republicans and Congressional Democrats to abandon federal enforcement of Black civil rights in the former Confederate states, rather than any principled understanding of how military power ought to be applied. This study of the end of Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction period indicates that political and social variables, not principle, drove both public and elected official positions on domestic uses of the military, and that the public’s feelings about military policing depended largely on whom and what they were policing rather than abstract beliefs about appropriate military roles.

Author

• Lindsay P. Cohn, Naval War College