On a Friday afternoon in March, 2013, a sheriff’s sergeant named Jody Hoagland noticed a red Nissan pickup truck drifting off a road. Hoagland was two hours into his shift patrolling Liberty County, Florida, eight hundred square miles of the state’s Panhandle. He had just come from a small shed fire, and was driving through the Apalachicola National Forest, which carpets the southern half of the county in longleaf pines. Two-lane roads meander past grazing cows, Baptist churches (“Good News: Jesus Loves You”), Confederate flags, and roadside stands peddling stink bait. Signs of humankind vanish, save for the solitary roadside mailbox. You live here because you want to be left alone.

Hoagland signalled the truck to pull over. A scruffy bearded man was driving and a blond woman was in the passenger seat. A silver .357 revolver lay between them. Two Chihuahuas barked excitedly. Hoagland asked the man, whose name was Floyd Parrish, to get out of the truck, and noticed a bulge in his right jeans pocket—a Titan .25-calibre handgun, it turned out, with one round in the chamber and the safety off. Parrish didn’t have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. It was easy to get one—all you had to do was take a class and pay a fee. Hoagland arrested Parrish and drove him to the county jail. Not long afterward, the sheriff, Nick Finch, called.

Finch had been Liberty’s sheriff for less than three months. He first decided to run for the job during a garage sale, after a customer locked her keys in her car and Finch called the sheriff’s office for help. There was only one deputy on the road, he was told, and the deputy was tied up in a funeral procession. Finch, who was raised on a farm in Iowa, had spent close to two decades in the Army and in the Air Force Reserve, so he was fluent in the language of God and country. White-haired and blue-eyed, with a meaty build, he was appealing to voters, and was helped by the fact that his wife’s family had lived in the area for generations.

Liberty County, with eighty-seven hundred residents, is the state’s second least populous. It is whiter, poorer, and less well educated than Florida as a whole. Timber has long been the chief industry, though the federal government has slowed logging in recent decades to protect the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. One local told me, “The saying goes, ‘In Liberty County, if you run out of toilet tissue try a woodpecker.’ ” A number of side roads bear the names of residents; when I visited recently, I drove down Jimmy Lee Drive and ran into the actual Jimmy Lee. The closest thing to a community history, “The Heritage of Liberty County, Florida,” has entries on the region’s tupelo honey; homecoming queens; and worm grunting, or coaxing worms out of the earth with a wooden stake and a metal strip. Several pages are devoted to a theory that the Apalachicola River’s east bank was the original Garden of Eden.

Liberty’s sheriff and his dozen or so deputies are the only law-enforcement agents in the county. As in much of rural America, the sheriff is far more than an administrator. He’s an aspirational figure and a moral touchstone. Eddie Joe White, the current sheriff, told me, “There’s no way to define the parameters of sheriff. From one day to the next, you’re a fireman, you’re a paramedic, you’re a grief counsellor. You can’t back away from any responsibility and say it’s not your job, because, as sheriff, you are responsible for everything as it deals with humanity.”

Finch won the election on his second try, in 2012, just after his fiftieth birthday. Before taking office, he went online to research his new position. Finch is conservative, and the sites he visited argued that the sheriff, in his county, is more powerful than the President. That argument was consistent with the beliefs of Finch’s law-enforcement hero, Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who last year was convicted of defying a court order to stop the racial profiling of Latinos. “I like Joe, because Joe’s a lot like me,” Finch told me. “He doesn’t take shit from nobody. He knows what his role is, and come hell or high water, he was going to do what he thought was right.” On Facebook, Finch posted a Breitbart story, about a sheriff named Denny Peyman, headlined “Kentucky Sheriff to Obama: No Gun Control in My County.”

There are roughly three thousand sheriffs in America, in forty-seven states. Arpaio and Peyman are among the dozens aligned with the “constitutional sheriffs” movement. Another is David A. Clarke, Jr., the cowboy-hatted Wisconsin firebrand who considered joining the Department of Homeland Security. (He now works at America First Action, a pro-Trump political-action committee.) There are even more followers of constitutional policing across America among law enforcement’s rank and file. One group, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or C.S.P.O.A., claims about five thousand members.

C.S.P.O.A. members believe that the sheriff has the final say on a law’s constitutionality in his county. Every law-enforcement officer has some leeway in choosing which laws to enforce, which is why it’s rare to get a ticket for jaywalking, for example. But, under this philosophy, the supremacy clause of the Constitution, which dictates that federal law takes precedence over state law, is irrelevant. So is the Supreme Court. “They get up every morning and put their clothes on the same way you and I do,” Finch told me. “Why do those nine people get to decide what the rest of the country’s going to be like?” To the most dogmatic, there’s only one way to interpret the country’s founding documents: pro-gun, anti-immigrant, anti-regulation, anti-Washington.

Finch was on the way to Dirty Dick’s Crab House with his wife when he started getting calls about the arrest. (If you are a rural sheriff, everyone has your cell-phone number.) After speaking with Hoagland, he drove to the county jail, where Parrish, a former logger, told his version of the arrest. He and his partner, Sherry Chumney, lived in a wooden house on forty acres of land, a half mile down a dirt road, past a barricade of tangled brush and two “No Trespassing” signs. Parrish carried the .357 revolver in case he came across an unfriendly panther or bear. He carried his small gun because he had a chronic lung disease; if he felt woozy, he fired it, and Chumney rushed over with his inhaler. That afternoon, Parrish said, he had driven to his brother’s place and forgotten that the small gun was in his pocket.

Finch listened to the story, and then told him, “Fortunately for you, young man, I’m a believer in the Second Amendment.” He let Parrish go, a practice that people in Liberty call getting “unarrested.”

Since its inception, in ninth-century England—when the sheriff was called the shire reeve, or county guardian—the office has been a kind of one-man government. The first sheriffs were appointed by the king, and charged with collecting taxes, investigating deaths, and commanding the posse comitatus, a gang of locals dispatched to hunt fugitives. (In Latin, the term means “the force of the county.”) The British brought the idea with them to America, where the office took on the characteristics of its new home. In 1652, when Virginia’s royal governor told each county to choose a sheriff, Northampton County let its voters decide.