the Citty Each Hour in the Night with a Bell and there to proclaime the season of the weather and the Hour of the night and if they Meet in their Rounds Any people disturbing the peace or lurking about Any persons house or committing any theft they take the most prudent way they Can to Secure the said persons.61
Like police, the colonial watch was public in character and accountable to a central authority, usually either a town council or state legislature. Unlike the modern police, however, the watch had only limited authority to use force, with no training and usually no equipment for doing so. As far as “modern” characteristics go, the watch shared responsibility for enforcement with the constables, sheriffs, and sometimes other inspectors. Thus it was not the major body responsible for law enforcement. Its personnel rotated with deliberate frequency, and many places it only patrolled part of the year. Hence, it lacked continuity in office and procedure. While the watch was concerned with crime, it was often more concerned with other dangers, especially fire and military attack; thus it lacked the specialized policing function. Except in times of emergency, the watch only patrolled at night. And for the most part, its personnel were not paid. In sum, by our criteria, the colonial watch may be counted as a policing effort, but in no way did it constitute a modern police agency.
The standard story in the history of policing, if we may speak of such a thing, presents the modern American police force as a direct adaptation of the night watch, following the English pattern.62 But this story leaves out significant stages in the development of American policing. Or, put differently, it omits an entire branch of the American police family tree. As Dennis Rousey recounts:
[The] first major reform of the traditional system did not occur in any of the big northwestern cities in the mid-1800s but in the cities of the Deep South in a much earlier period. As early as the 1780s Charleston introduced a paramilitary municipal police force primarily to control the city’s large population of slaves. In later years, Savannah, New Orleans, and Mobile did the same.63
These police forces, which I will refer to as City Guards, were distinct from both the militia and the watch. They were armed, uniformed, and salaried; they patrolled at night but kept a reserve force for daytime emergencies. In most respects, they resembled modern American police departments to the same degree as did the London Metropolitan Police of 1829—though much earlier.
Of course, these City Guards did not arise out of nothing. To understand their origin, we should consider the peculiar institutions of Southern society, its social and economic systems, and the police measures that arose to preserve them.
Slave Codes, Slave Patrols
Relying on a slave economy, the American South faced unique problems of social control, especially in areas where White people were in the minority. Regardless of their own economic class or ethnic background, White people were haunted by the prospect of a slave revolt. They became utterly obsessed with controlling the lives of Black people, free and slave, and developed a deep and terrible fear of any unsupervised activity in which Black people might engage.64 As a result, the South developed distinctive policing practices. Called “slave patrols,” “alarm men,” or “searchers,” by the authorities who appointed them, they were known as “paddyrollers,” “padaroles,” “padaroes,” and “patterolers” by the populations they policed.65
Michael Hindus cites three related reasons why the criminal legal system in the South developed along different lines than it did in the North: 1) tradition, 2) social and economic development, and 3) slavery.66 Of these three, slavery exerted the most powerful influence. It held a central place in Southern society, in the social and political as well as the economic life of the region. For many Southerners, a future without slavery was literally inconceivable.67 Thus the whole of Southern society was, at times, directed to the defense of the “peculiar institution.” Where the demands of slavery conflicted with the region’s traditions and social development—and to a lesser extent when it interfered with economic development—the maintenance of the slave system was nearly always preferred.68
Faced with the difficulties of keeping a major portion of the population enslaved to a small elite, Southern society borrowed from the practices of the Caribbean, especially Barbados. There, slave owners used professional slave catchers and militias to capture runaways, while overseers were responsible for maintaining order on the plantations. The weaknesses of this system led to the creation of slave codes, laws directed specifically to the governing of slaves. Beginning in 1661, the slave codes shifted the responsibilities of enforcement from the overseers to the entire White population. Shortly thereafter, in the 1680s, the militia began making regular patrols to catch runaways, prevent slave gatherings, search slave quarters, keep order at markets, funerals, and festivals, and generally intimidate the Black population.69 As Sally Hadden writes in her authoritative study, Slave Patrols:
The final move in policing Barbadian slaves in the seventeenth century came with the importation of two thousand professional English soldiers, who were installed on plantations as intimidating “militia tenants.” Arriving between 1696 and 1702, they did not perform manual labor but instead functioned exclusively as slave control forces. Their presence served the White colonists’ purposes well: throughout the eighteenth century only one slave rebellion attempt was reported in Barbados.70
During the same period, South Carolina passed laws restricting the slaves’ ability to travel and trade, and created the Charleston Town Watch. Beginning in 1671, this watch consisted of the regular constables and a rotation of six citizens. It looked for any sign of trouble—fires, Indian attacks, or slave gatherings. The laws also established a militia system, with every White man between sixteen and sixty years old required to serve.71 In 1686, South Carolina passed a law enabling any White person to apprehend and punish runaway slaves.72 A few years later, the 1690 Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves required “all persons under penalty of forty shillings to arrest and chastise any slave out of his home plantation without a proper pass.”73 Those who captured runaways would receive a reward. In 1704, fears of a Spanish invasion, combined with the ever-present threat of a slave revolt, led South Carolina to form its first official slave patrols. The colony faced two types of danger and divided its military capacity accordingly. Henceforth, the militia would guard against outside attack, and the patrol would be left behind to protect against insurrection.74
Patrollers would gather from time to time and, as instructed by the law,
ride from plantation to plantation, and into any plantation, within the limits or precincts, as the General shall think fitt, and take up all slaves which they shall meet without their master’s plantation which have not a permit or ticket from their masters, and the same punish.75
In 1721, the law was revised to shift its focus from runaways to revolts. The new law ordered the patrols to “prevent all caballings amongst negros [sic], by dispersing of them when drumming or playing, and to search all negro houses for arms or other offensive weapons.”76 Books and paper were often confiscated as well, education itself being deemed subversive. The patrollers also seized other goods—especially linen, china, and horses—alleging them to be stolen, and were permitted to keep for their own whatever they took.77
Racist Contradictions
The patrol was essentially an institutionalized extension of the more informal system described by the 1686 law. The law’s intention was, foremost, to divide the means of protecting the city so that both internal and external threats could be met simultaneously. It did not represent an effort to specialize slave control, or to reduce the obligations of each White citizen, or to interfere with the personal authority of the slave owner. But whatever the intention behind it, the law did, or threatened to do, all three. Hadden explains:
Reform required increasing the amount of time each man devoted to protecting the safety and property of others, which was repugnant to Southern White ideas of individual freedom and, indirectly, their sense of personal honor. No White
