The Posse Comitatus
The common law courts and sovereign citizens are the direct ideological descendants of the Posse Comitatus; any attempt to understand the common law courts must start with the this group. The Posse, though, is not necessarily an easy entity to understand. On one level, the Posse was a right-wing extremist organization with a more or less definable beginning. In 1969 a retired dry cleaner named Henry "Mike" Beach (a former member of the 1930s pro-Nazi group, the Silver Shirts) formed a group called the Sheriffs Posse Comitatus. In California, William Potter Gale started a similar organization, the United States Christian Posse Association, around the same time. From these beginnings, branches formed in other areas of the country, numbering around 80 or so by the mid-1970s. The farm crisis of the early 1980s, for reasons that will be explained below, caused membership to rise greatly, particularly in the plains states.
From the start, the Posse caused problems for local, state and federal authorities. As early as 1974, Thomas Stockheimer, head of the Posse in Wisconsin, was convicted on charges of assaulting an Internal Revenue Service agent. Indeed, the normally placid state of Wisconsin became a hotbed of Posse activity, due to leaders Stockheimer, James Wickstrom and Donald Minniecheskie. In northeastern Wisconsin, Wickstrom-who styled himself the "national director of counterinsurgency" of the Posse and liked to conduct paramilitary training-established the "Constitutional Township of Tigerton Dells," a "township" that consisted of a compound of trailers on a farm lot. From there Wickstrom waged a war against local authorities that resulted, in the mid-1980s, in the eventual destruction of the "township" and Wickstrom's arrest (one of many). In other states as well, most notably Kansas, Posse members repeatedly clashed-with resulting deaths and injuries-with local authorities.
It was, however, Gordon Kahl of North Dakota who achieved the most notoriety and became the Posse's first real martyr. Kahl was a virulent racist and tax protester who traveled to farm protest meetings across the country's midsection to win converts to the Posse cause. In 1983 four U.S. marshals and two local law enforcement officers set up a roadblock to arrest Kahl for violating the terms of his probation. A shootout ensued which resulted in the death of two of the marshals and the wounding of two others. Also wounded was Kahl's twenty-year-old son. When Kahl fled the state, a nationwide manhunt-and nationwide publicity-began. Months later, Kahl was tracked down in Arkansas, where he died during another gunfight in which a county sheriff was killed.
Eventually, though, the Posse declined as an effective organization, largely through loss of leadership. Faced with repeated imprisonment, some leaders such as James Wickstrom scaled back their activities. Other leaders, such as Henry Beach and William Potter Gale, died of natural deaths, the latter while appealing a conviction for threatening IRS agents. Still others, like Kahl, died violently. The result was that by the late 1980s the Posse was floundering. Always locally based, pockets of the Posse continued to survive here and there, but it was no longer a force.[4]5
As an organized right-wing group, the Posse did not really survive. But the Posse had never been simply an organization-indeed, it was hardly ever well organized. The Posse Comitatus was much more durable as an ideology. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people who never formally belonged to any Posse group nevertheless subscribed to Posse ideology. The belief system survived even as the group faded.
The Posse ideology and the justifications that results from it are complex, but stripped of racist overtones, there are three main tenets to Posse ideology that are crucial to understanding how the Posse mindset works. In order of increasing importance, these tenets are 1) the importance of local control, 2) the need to avoid legal and financial authority, and 3) justifications derived from the revelation of "hidden history." The Importance of Local Control
The importance of local control to adherents of Posse
ideology was the simplest and most visible feature of their philosophy. Indeed,
the term "posse comitatus" itself is a Latin phrase that means
"power of the county." Accordingly, Posse teachings argued that the
county government was the highest authority of government in the country, a
belief sometimes misreported as the county being the only form of legitimate
authority. Actually, the Posse recognized the other levels of government, but
contended that federal or state officials had to bow before the power of the
county sheriff.[5]