Slave Patrols

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas Book Reviews
Published by EH.NET (July 2002)

Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii + 340 pp. $35 (cloth), ISBN: 0-674-00470-1.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, William C. Bark National Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

The slave patrols of the antebellum South have long remained a gaping hole in the scholarly literature on U.S. slavery. Nearly every authority has recognized their existence and acknowledged their importance. But until now, no single book-length study has been devoted solely to this institution. The best discussions consisted of fairly brief sections in the works of John Hope Franklin, Howell M. Henry, Leslie Howard Owens, Anthony Scott, Kenneth Stampp, and Peter H. Wood. What little had been written, moreover, tended to be more concerned with the patrol's impact on the slaves rather than its impact on free whites or on law enforcement generally. This is why Sally E. Hadden's new book, based on a Harvard dissertation done under Bernard Bailyn, is such a valuable and noteworthy contribution.

Slave Patrols, in its six chapters and epilogue, has mined an array of sources to provide a detailed portrait of this institution in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The first chapter explores the slave patrol's origins, the second its organization and administration, the third its personnel, the fourth and fifth its operations, during periods of both tranquility and crisis, and the sixth, its demise during the Civil War. Hadden's epilogue looks at the extent to which the slave patrol's legacy endured through the postwar Ku Klux Klan and other southern vigilante and police groups.

Slave patrols, rather than being desultory or inadequate, turn out to be one of the chief ways that the southern states enforced their peculiar institution. The patrols apprehended runaways, monitored the rigid pass requirements for blacks traversing the countryside, broke up large gatherings and assemblies of blacks, visited and searched slave quarters randomly, inflicted impromptu punishments, and as occasion arose, suppressed insurrections. The patrollers generally made their rounds at night, with their activity and regularity differing according to time and place. And patrol duty was often compulsory for most able-bodied white males. Some professions were exempt, but otherwise avoiding duty required paying a fine or hiring a substitute.

The patrols inspired well-justified fear on the part of black slaves. The author quotes W. L. Bost, a former slave from western North Carolina who was interviewed by the WPA in 1937, as reporting that "the paddyrollers they keep close watch on the pore niggers so they have no chance to do anything or go anywhere. They jes' like policemen, only worser" (p. 71). Patrollers, however, did face some social and legal checks on how harshly they behaved, because masters did not take kindly to excessive or unnecessary damage to their human chattel.

One of Hadden's most intriguing discoveries is variation in the patrol's organization. The South Carolina and Virginia patrols were directly linked with the compulsory state militias. Militia officials would select patrollers from each district's rolls to serve for designated periods. The North Carolina patrol, in contrast, was distinct from the militia. That state vested patrol powers in county courts and later court-appointed patrol committees. North Carolina also paid patrollers and provided them with other positive incentives, as did Virginia, whereas South Carolina did not. Municipalities provided for their own independent urban slave patrols that became increasingly prominent over time in all three states.

Hadden is the first to give us any detailed knowledge of who actually manned the slave patrols. The tithable (tax) lists for two Virginia counties, Norfolk and Amelia, identify those who served before and during the American Revolution, and there is similar data from Perquimans County, North Carolina, for 1810 and 1860. These records overturn the observation of at least some scholars that poor whites filled patrol ranks almost exclusively. In all these records, those owning one or more slaves constitute at least half or more of patrol personnel. This suggests that the burden of patrols was somewhat evenly shared, with slaveholders sometimes over-represented and sometimes under-represented relative to total households. Hadden does conclude that, as the institution evolved from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, relative participation begin to shift toward more non-slaveholders and smaller slaveholders, although her evidence for this is more anecdotal than quantitative.

When a scholar sheds much-needed light on a hitherto neglected topic, it is churlish to complain about the nooks and crannies she did not illuminate to the reviewer's satisfaction. Nonetheless, the economist in me cannot but wish that Hadden had given greater attention to the degree of coercion versus voluntarism, which would reveal much about how the patrols were ultimately financed. Her discussion of patrol fines is intriguingly sparse. My own study of slave patrol statutes during the 1850s finds that every slave state outside of Delaware provided for the system, and that only in Kentucky and Missouri was service purely voluntary. Every other southern state imposed a fine for failure to serve that varied from $2 to $20. Only a few of those also mandated salaries for patrollers.

Were these fines high enough to create a tax-in-kind that conscripted all but the wealthiest white southern males? Were they only nominally enforced, making patrol duty then like jury duty today? Or did they operate more like a monetary tax, in which most of those selected for duty either paid the fine or hired a substitute? Answers would tell us a great deal about the socialization of slavery's enforcement costs and the resulting transfers within the southern economy. Yet Hadden does not address these questions head on. Undoubtedly the system varied. Some of her evidence implies that patrol duty could be truly universal and compulsory; other passages from the book seem to hint that patrollers were often a quasi-professional class of hirelings. What is clear from her book is that southern towns and cities went furthest in the direction of a tax-supported professional patrol. My own admittedly tentative impression is that for the deep South, where the proportion of slaveholders was higher, the mandatory features of the system predominated, whereas for the upper South, with a smaller proportion of slaveholders, patrol personnel were more likely to be hired. And this distinction may have very roughly coincided with that between states using a militia-based patrol versus those using a court-based system.

But all this means is that we need further research to follow up on the trail that Hadden has blazed. No longer can scholars dismiss or overlook the vital role played by slave patrols. Having finally lifted this institution from obscurity and misconception, Hadden's book is must reading for anyone studying the history of American slavery, the Old South, or U.S. law enforcement.

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel is the author of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (Chicago: Open Court, 1996).

Geographic area: North America (7)
Time period: 18th Century (6), 19th Century (7)
Subject: Servitude and Slavery (N)
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Citation
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, "Review of Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas." EH.Net Economic History Services, Jul 22 2002. URL: http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/0513