were an unequivocal manifestation of White fear. Southern honor required the individual to protect his name and family without the assistance of courts or the community; 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.78
The slave patrols represented a departure from the traditional values of Southern culture, and though the patrols were created to defend slavery, their efficacy was limited by the same ideology that justified the slave system. Rather than develop more formal means of control, Southern ideology encouraged a reliance on informal systems rooted in racism.79 While the rest of the country developed systems of authority that were formal, legalistic, and centered on the state, the South maintained a unique commitment to a system that was informal, personalistic (characterized by deference and paternalism), diffused, and in which the state was kept deliberately weak.
When compared to Northern cities of the nineteenth century, plantation life seems positively feudal. As H.M. Henry described it, “the plantation was a sort of governmental unit as to the police control of the slave, and to its head, the slaveowner, was given in large measure the sovereign management of its affairs under certain restrictions.”80 The arrangement was, in the fullest, traditional sense of the word, patriarchal; not only slaves, but also White women and children were subject to the personal authority of male heads of households.81 Any intercession in these relationships was apt to be viewed negatively. Slaveowners felt that any outside intervention—especially that of the state—represented not only a usurpation of their authority but also a personal slight, implying that the master was not up to the task of controlling his slaves.82
This sentiment, an important aspect of Southern “honor,” created a major impediment to the effective control of the Black population. It discouraged White elites from enhancing the means of social control. Hadden writes:
[O]nly the state (through the agency of the courts, councils, and militia) could force whites to act in concerted fashion to protect their own self-interest. And some state legislatures, like South Carolina’s, simply refused to reform patrol practices in order to coerce more public service from their constituents.83
Slave patrols were both a product of White racism, vital to the survival of slavery, and a manifest contradiction of the ideology and culture it was meant to protect. As Hadden put it, “To admit that danger existed was to concede the possibility of fear; to admit that slaves posed a threat could undermine confidence in an entire way of life.”84 Of course, to ignore the threat of insurrection could prove equally as dangerous.
Thus, progress (if that is the word) came not as the result of continual efforts at critique and improvement, but in a rush during times of crisis, typically following real or rumored revolts. Aside from minor alterations in 1737 and 1740, the patrol system established in 1704 survived in rural areas, virtually unaltered, until 1819. The 1737 and 1740 acts limited the personnel of the patrols, first to landowners of fifty acres or more, and then to slaveowners and overseers.85 But in 1819, the South Carolina legislature—spurred by two separate slave revolts shortly before—again made all “free white males” aged eighteen to forty-five liable for patrol duty, without compensation. Substitutes could be sent, for a fee, and discipline came in the form of fines.86 After this revision, the structure and activities of the patrols remained relatively unchanged until the Civil War.87
Across the South
While the South Carolina patrols, in the estimation of Philip Reichel, were “the oldest, most elaborate, and best documented,” other colonies followed suit. Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi all had similar arrangements, with variations. In Georgia, slave patrols were also responsible for disciplining disorderly White people, especially vagrants.88 In Tennessee, the law required slaveowners to provide patrols on the plantations themselves, in addition to those that rode between plantations. In Kentucky, after a series of revolts, some cities established round-the-clock patrols. And in Mississippi, the first patrols were federal troops; these were gradually replaced by the militia, and then by groups appointed by county boards.89
Until 1660, Virginia relied more on indentured European servants than on African slaves, though both groups sought to escape their bonds. Initially, the colonists used the hue and cry to mobilize the community and recapture runaways. In 1669, the colonial legislature began offering a reward (paid in tobacco) to anyone who returned a runaway. And in 1680, as the slave population grew, slaves were required to carry passes, as debtors and Native Americans already had been. Slaves were singled out for special enforcement measures beginning in 1691, when the legislature required sheriffs to raise posses for their recapture. In 1727, this responsibility was transferred to the militia, creating the colony’s first slave patrol. At first the militia only patrolled as needed, but after a failed rebellion in 1730, it began regular patrols two or three times each week. In 1754, county courts began paying patrollers and requiring reports from their captains. After that point, Virginia’s patrols remained essentially the same until the Civil War.90
North Carolina’s system developed along similar lines, driven by the same concerns. The colony required passes for slaves, debtors, and Native Americans beginning in 1669. In 1753, patrols were instituted. Called “searchers,” the patrols were initially responsible for searching the slaves’ homes, but couldn’t stop them between plantations. This function reflected the motives behind their creation: the lawmakers were more afraid of revolts than escapes. In 1779, paid patrols were established, with expanded powers for searching the homes of White people and stopping slaves whenever they were off the plantation.91 With this they came to closely resemble the patrols already in place elsewhere, and after 1802 they were placed under the auspices of the county court, rather than the militia.92
Whether supervised by the militia or the courts, whether chiefly concerned with escapes or revolts, whether paid or conscripted, whether slave-owners or poor White people, the rural patrols all engaged in roughly the same activities and served the same function. “Throughout all of the [Southern] states during the antebellum period,” Robert Wintersmith writes, “roving armed police patrols scoured the countryside day and night, intimidating, terrorizing, and brutalizing slaves into submission and meekness.”93 They patrolled together in “beat companies,” on horseback and usually at night.94 Along the roads they would stop any Black person they encountered, demand his pass, beat him if he was without one, and return him to the plantation or hold him in the jail. For this, they carried guns, whips, and binding ropes.95
One patroller recalled that his company was instructed to “apprehend every negro whom we found from his home; & if he made any resistance, or ran from us, to fire on him immediately, unless he could be stopped by other means.” They were also ordered to search “the negro cabins, & take every thing we found in them, which bore a hostile aspect, such as powder, shot &c.”96
The patrols would break up any unsupervised gathering of slaves, especially meetings of religious groups the patrollers themselves disliked. Baptist and Methodist services were specifically targeted.97 One former slave, Ida Henry, recalled an assault against her mother:
De patrollers wouldn’t allow de slaves to hold night services, and one night dey caught me mother out praying. Dey stripped her naked and tied her hands together and wid a rope tied to de handcuffs and threw one end of de rope over a limb and tied de other end to de pummel of a saddle on a horse. As me mother weighed ’bout 200, dey pulled her up so dat her toes could barely touch de ground and whipped her.98
Patrollers couldn’t legally interfere with a slave carrying a pass, but they would often harass Black people whom they felt to be traveling too far or too often.99 Moses Grandy, a former slave, verified that the law did little to restrain the patrollers:
If a negro has given offense to the patrol, even by so innocent a matter as dressing tidily to go to a place of worship, he will be seized by one of them, and another will tear up his pass; while one is flogging him, the others will look
