MDDM book: Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

[Doug Millison]

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=237221013790736
Sally E. Hadden. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the
Carolinas. Harvard Historical Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2001. xi + 340 pp. Tables, maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
$35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-00470-1.


[...] Hadden begins her analysis with the founding of the colonies and
finds that all three had similar motivations for establishing slave
patrols. As slave populations increased and the threat of foreign invasion
loomed, southerners saw a need for racial control above and beyond what
individual slave owners could do. In other words, fear drove southerners to
institute community policing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, and continued to motivate them to refine, expand, and fund
patrols through the Civil War. Due to its Caribbean influence, early black
majority, and threats from Native Americans and the Spanish, South Carolina
established the earliest formal patrols by 1704, followed by Virginia by
1727 and North Carolina by 1753. By the American Revolution, "the main
contours of patrols became evident" (p. 40) and "remain[ed] largely
unchanged until the Civil War" (p. 31). [...]

Wealthy slave owners consistently resisted not only serving on the patrols
themselves, which is not that surprising, but also refused in their
capacities as legislators to approve many pieces of legislation that would
have strengthened the scope of authority and effectiveness of the patrols
in policing slave behavior (pp. 64-66, 70, 74, 82, 99). Hadden explains
why: "patrols, by their very nature, were communal, intrusive in the
master-slave relationship, and implied that the individual alone could not
adequately control his bondsmen" (p. 70). Hadden effectively explores the
complicated psychology of southerners' fear of slavery and slave rebellion.
English newspaperman William H. Russell described the fear that most
southerners felt but hesitated to admit to themselves: "'[t]here is
something suspicious in the constant never ending statement that 'we are
not afraid of our slaves.' The curfew and the night patrol in the streets,
the prisons and watch-houses, and the police regulations prove that strict
supervision, at all events, is needed and necessary'" (p. 172). [...]

Hadden proves that southerners, across time and space, needed and wanted
slave patrols in their communities. Southerners were willing to commit
resources for patrols and some individuals nearly made careers out of
patrolling, even taking positions in what developed as the urban South's
first police forces. She also proves that "patrols constituted [such] an
important presence in the lives of black and white Southerners" (p. 72)
that whites, seeing patrols "as their true instrument of 'law enforcement'"
(p. 216), reformulated them into vigilante groups like the KKK during
Reconstruction, and ex-slaves could speak in detail about patrol activities
and individual patrollers when interviewed in the 1930s. [...]