The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Local governance consisted of a collective order of duties and privileges rather than universal rights. As long as citizenship remained local, as it always had been in the United States, citizens were manifestly unequal.94 Americans endowed their local governments with remarkable powers. Such governments in the United States had long regulated “public safety, public economy, public mobility, public morality, and public health.” They controlled whom people could marry, what they could print, and what they could send through the mail. They regulated how citizens conducted their businesses, how they built their houses, what they could do in them, and how they managed their livestock. They determined where, and if, people could carry firearms and where and with whom their children went to school. Local governments intervened constantly in daily life.