Patrols and Privilege

I, [patroller's name], do swear, that I will as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons among the slaves in my district, faithfully, and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power. So help me, God.

The historical record of slave patrols, stretching from the mid-16th century to the post-Reconstruction night terrors of the Ku Klux Klan, is wide and deep and, until now, largely unrecounted. Sally E. Hadden's new book, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Harvard University Press, 2001), the first detailed treatment of American slave patrols, exposes yet another ugly facet in American history of racial oppression.

It traces the evolution of slave patrols, within a conscious, systematic tradition of brutal social control, as the first line of community-organized oppression of African slaves, and as one of the principal social institutions which constituted American racial oppression from the colonial period to Reconstruction. In six chapters Hadden examines the colonial experiments which were the background of fully-developed slave patrols; the mode of patrol supervision in both urban and rural areas; the changing social identity of patrollers themselves; how patrols functioned, in both everyday and crisis situations; and the terroristic social forces -- principally the KKK -- which, in the postbellum period, inherited and modified the patrol's work.

Slave patrols existed wherever there were slave economies, especially in the colonial and antebellum American South. "Only a very few counties," Hadden writes, "never had any type of functional patrol prior to the Civil War" (p. 69). And, while there was some variation in the social structure of patrols, the point of establishing them was constant: to maintain white supremacy and privilege. "Patrollers' night-to-night enforcement of slave control laws," Hadden says, "undergirded the entire structure of slavery", which, in a slave economy, meant undergirding the entire structure of society per se (p. 72).

In the colonial period, white settlers, especially in coastal areas, feared both widespread slave insurrection -- perhaps the first mass, apocalyptic terror of American culture -- and invasion or attack by competing colonial powers. The militia system could not respond to both threats simultaneously. Slave patrols were developed as a kind of supplementary force. African slaves were thus the first in a series of social groups suspected of "fifth columnist" activity -- the first moment in a long American tradition of paranoia and demonization, one that's active today in the detainment of hundreds if not thousands of persons, held without trial, since the 11 September attacks.

Of course white settlers had reasons to fear insurrection, reasons which were embedded in a context of systematic injustice. Slaves were justified in trying to overturn oppression, despite white claims about Africans being a race of natural slaves. And, as Hadden points out, three insurrections demonstrated the resolve and determination of slaves: the Stono Rebellion (1739) and the insurrections of Denmark Vesey (1822) and Nat Turner (1831).

Slaves not only planned insurrection secretly, at meetings and gatherings which patrols were expected to break up, their freed fellows pleaded for it publicly. One of the most notable public pleadings was David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), a jeremiad of such vehement, ferocious righteousness that William Lloyd Garrison , a staunch white abolitionist who consistently eschewed moderate rhetoric, could not support it without reservations. In his Appeal Walker wrote that,

The whites want slaves, and want us for their slaves, but some of them will curse the day they ever saw us. As true as the sun ever shone in its meridian splendor, my colour will root some of them out of the very face of the earth. They shall have enough of making slaves of, and butchering, and murdering us in the manner which they have.

Walker's Appeal was taken so seriously that Georgia's state legislature offered, to anyone who would forcibly return him to the South, $10,000. And in North Carolina it prompted the legislature to authorize county patrol committees, the three members of which, chosen by the county court from the local elite, were entrusted with the supervision of county patrol operations. The Appeal left North Carolina's governor, John Owen, in a frenzy. Hadden quotes a letter of his to state senators in which he wrote: "'I beg you will lay this matter before the police of your town and invite their prompt attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation [of Walker's Appeal]; I would suggest the necessity of the most vigilant execution of your police laws and the laws of the State'" (p. 48). As Hadden shows, the ordinary tasks of the patrol, carried out at night on the patrol's "beat", were less dramatic than thwarting insurrections but more routinely repressive. They included breaking up slave gatherings; enforcing the pass and badge system, which evolved to control slave movement (and which were used to control whites in cities like Richmond and Charleston as Union forces approached during the War); searching locally for and returning runaway slaves; searching slave quarters for weapons or contraband; and preventing slaves from engaging in independent economic activity, known as "huckstering". Patrollers routinely punished transgressions by lashing. They were obligated, however, to respect the human property and property rights of whites when punishing slaves. During the colonial and antebellum periods, if a patroller administered a beating that lowered the economic value of a slave, the slave's owner could take legal recourse. Since non-voluntary patrollers acted as authorized state agents, the state reimbursed an owner if a patroller beating resulted in a slave's death, severe crippling, or economic diminishment. Volunteer patrollers, however, could be held personally liable, despite the fact that it was generally thought to be the responsibility of the entire white community to regulate slave behavior.

After the repeal of slave patrol laws during Reconstruction, the "work of controlling 'marginal' members of Southern society...shifted from slave patrollers to Klansmen and policemen", Hadden says, work that was often aimed at an explicitly political end, such as preventing African Americans from voting for Republican candidates or from holding appointed or elective office themselves (p. 220). And in the absence of master-slave property relations, KKK terrorists observed no limits to the kind of violence they dispensed. The instensification of white violence against individual African Americans, while de jure prohibited, was a de facto sanctioned component of the lynching phenomenon, which was endemic to the South in the late 1880s and 1890s and which lasted until mid-century. In this regard, Slave Patrols forms a fitting prologue to Philip Dray's At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America or C. Vann Woodward's classic The Strange Career of Jim Crow.

One stubbornly persistent myth about slavery, perpetuated by white "lost cause" historians since Reconstruction, claims that slave owners composed a small part of Southern society, a claim that's been widely refuted. The political import of the myth was to cast the South as a victim, both of elite planter avarice and of misguided Northern zeal. The slave patrol analogue of this myth is that only poor whites were involved in patrolling, the political implication of which is to mitigate blame and to misconstrue the nature of slavery. Otherwise fine historians, including Eugene Genovese in Roll, Jordan, Roll, as well as, Hadden notes, scholars in other fields, have claimed that slave patrols were made up principally of poor whites.

Hadden shows, however, that -- while there was provision for paid stand-ins, an elite privilege obtaining to both sides during the Civil War -- patroller duty was widely shared across class lines; that the most common patroller eligibility criterion was state law establishing militia eligibility; that most adult white men -- and at times white women, too -- were obligated to patrol; and that ruling class whites routinely served as captains of the patrol. "[A]lmost all patrol captains in the colonial and antebellum periods," Hadden notes, "owned slaves, usually in significant numbers" (p. 88). Hadden also shows that fines for failing to patrol could be substantial, sometimes levied as a percentage of yearly taxes, a progressive structure set in place to compel patrolling by the planter elite, the class which owned the most slaves and had the most to gain by an active, vigilant patrol, especially absentee planters.

Maintaining patrols required a significant investment of a local communities' resources. Counties often tried to socialize patrol costs by appealing, not always successfully, to state legislatures for assistance in paying them. Given the relatively uneven disbursement of slaves in North Carolina, for example, that legislatures were willing to pay for local patrols with state-wide public funds suggests that it was in the best interests of all whites, slave-owning or not, to maintain vigilant patrols. Which casts further doubt upon the South's traditional insistence that state's rights and local autonomy were the real issues, not slavery and slave economies. Despite the fact that fines were levied for failure to patrol, participation could mean a significant financial windfall. Patrollers were exempted from taxation for the duration of service and exempted other forms of community service like road work, jury duty, and local militia muster. Patrolling was in many ways the most valued form of community service one could perform.

Hadden's principal task in Slave Patrols is not to illuminate contemporary forms of racial injustice, though it would have been impossible to write this book adequately without it doing precisely that. Because the historical transition from slavery and Jim Crow to the modern civil rights period has been a transition from formal racial inequality to formal guarantees of equality but substantive inequality, there yet remain too many continuities between the social structures Hadden describes and contemporary American life.

Hadden briefly remarks upon the continuity between urban slave patrols and the development of the institution of modern policing, which owes its historical genesis more to patrols than to militias. Slave Patrols is invaluable to people engaged in understanding and struggling for justice in the criminal justice and prison systems. It suggests, for example, that the idea that racism is ultimately reducible to class inequality is shortsighted. Hadden says that there is no evidence that any free blacks served on patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas. "Even the inclusion of lower-status individuals in patrol groups," Hadden says, "did not lead to the appointment of free blacks as patrollers..." (p. 103). Racial oppression has always been about securing and maintaining economic and class privilege, but it's not always only about class.

But the history of patrolling highlights some discontinuities, too. It suggests that white Americans were willing to suspend ostensibly transcendent civil values in order to regulate slaves, protect slave economies, and maintain white privilege. Perhaps the most revealing part of Hadden's recounting is the degree to which whites were willing to mold or distort their property rights. Patrols were authorized to enter any plantation to perform their duties without any need of a warrant. White property owners could plead and threaten, but they were legally powerless to prevent patrols, as authorized state agents, from searching their property. While patrollers often sought permission, they did not need it, nor could a failure to secure it prevent them from performing their duty.

This contortion of property rights -- in which patrollers were supposed to avoid damaging the human property of slave owners, but could roam, warrantless and at will, through the physical property of a white citizen -- is every bit as revealing as the gross violations of due process at the heart of lynching, especially when you recall that the very idea of African Americans possessing due process rights was disputed by many whites. Lynchings were the way white people enacted that dispute, directly on the bodies of African American men whom they slandered as, and no doubt believed to be, sexually monstrous. But precious few, if any citizens disputed white rights to property and legal search. The violations of property rights routinely undertaken by patrollers were violations of white rights. The freedom of patrols to conduct warrantless searches of white-owned property suggests the degree to which whites were willing to give up ostensibly transcendent, founding civic values in order to secure racialized communal goods.

The novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany once said the problem of race in America isn't that we aren't color-blind, but that we are color-deaf. Delany meant that race isn't discussed often or intelligently enough. Gross historical ignorance can cause deafness, too, preventing us, especially white people, from hearing the reconstitution of oppressive patterns today. Sally E. Hadden's Slave Patrols, which contains riches unsounded here, is a powerful cure for color-deafness. It speaks in clear and honest tones about one facet of the history of racism and privilege in America, the slave patrol. Its voice echoes the past and sounds the present with a care and intelligence sufficient to unstop our ears, if we will attend to it.