beaten without cause, and he points out the person who did it, the others will swear they saw no one beat him.100
Other abuses were also common. Black women faced sexual abuse at the hands of patrollers, both when they were found on the road and during searches of their homes.101 Patrollers sometimes kidnapped free Black people and sold them as slaves.102 They also frequently threatened Black people with mutilation, sometimes with a basis in law: between 1712 and 1740, South Carolina law required escalating tortures for captured runaways, from slitting the nose to severing one foot.103
Masters sometimes complained about the abuses directed against the slaves, but courts were generally reluctant to award damages or discipline the patrollers, for fear of undermining the patrol system.104 The main restraint on the actions of patrollers was the economic value of the slave’s life; slaves were rarely killed, since the local government would then have to compensate the owner.105 In general, however, the patrols were invested with vast authority and wide discretion, as a North Carolina court explained in 1845:
[Patrols] partake of a judicial or quasi-judicial and executive character. Judicial, so far as deciding upon each case of a slave taken up by them; whether the law has been violated by him or not, and adjudging the punishment to be inflicted. Is he off his master’s plantation without a proper permit or pass? Of this the patrol must judge and decide. If punishment is to be inflicted, they must adjudge, decide, as to the question: five stripes may in some cases be sufficient, while others may demand the full penalty of the law.106
To summarize, the state control of slave behavior advanced through three stages. First, legislation was passed restricting the activities of slaves. Second, this legislation was supplemented with requirements that every White man enforce its demands. Third, over time this system of enforcement gradually came to be regulated, either by the militia or by the courts. The transition between these second and third steps was a slow one. Each colony tried to cope with the unreliable nature of private enforcement, first by applying rewards and penalties, and later by appointing particular individuals to take on the duty. Volunteerism was eventually replaced with community-sanctioned authority in the form of the slave patrols. Among the factors determining the rate of this transition, and the eventual shape of the patrols, were the date of settlement, the size of the slave population, the size of the White population, threats of revolt, geography, and population density.107 As this fact suggests, slave patrols developed differently in the cities than in the countryside.
City Guards
Slave control was no less a priority for White urbanites than for their country kin. The growing numbers of Black people in cities were of obvious concern to the White population, and their concentration in distinct neighborhoods presented an unnerving reminder of the possibility of revolt.
In many respects, the cities followed the lead of the plantations. There, too, Black people—slaves especially, but free Blacks as well—were singled out by the law, and specialized enforcement mechanisms arose to ensure compliance. According to Hadden, these agencies “went by a variety of names, including town guard, city patrol, or night police, although their duties were the same: to prevent slave gatherings and cut down on urban crime.”108 (For the sake of simplicity, I refer to the general type as “City Guards.”)
In the initial stage, enforcement would be entrusted to private individuals and the existing watch, but after some period the town might petition the legislature for the funds to form a permanent patrol, with the same group on duty each night.109 The urban patrols, then, did not evolve from the watch system; rather, adapted from the rural slave patrols, they came to supplant the watchmen. Charleston formed a City Guard in 1783. It wore uniforms, carried muskets and swords, and maintained a substantial mounted division. Unlike the watchmen, who walked their beats individually, the City Guard patrolled as a company.110
Louis Tasistro, who traveled through Charleston in the 1840s, described the patrol: “the city suddenly assumes the appearance of a great military garrison, and all the principal streets become forthwith alive with patrolling parties of twenties and thirties, headed by fife and drum, conveying the idea of a general siege.”111 A few years later, in the early 1850s, J. Benwell, an English visitor to Charleston, described the reaction of the Black population to the mounting of the guard: “It was a stirring scene, when the drums beat at the Guard house in the public square … to witness the negroes scouring the streets in all directions, to get to their places of abode, many of them in great trepidation, uttering ejaculations of terror as they ran.”112
Throughout the first part of the nineteenth century, similar urban patrols were created in Savannah, Mobile, and Richmond. The Savannah guard carried muskets and wore uniforms as early as 1796. It was later equipped with horses and pistols.113 Richmond’s Public Guard was formed in 1800, after the discovery of a planned rebellion. It was assigned to protect public buildings from insurrections, and was made responsible for punishing any slaves it found out after curfew.114
The urban patrols, and the laws they enforced, were modeled on the system developed for the plantations. But cities with developing industries had different needs than did the surrounding rural areas, with their plantation economies. For one thing, the large numbers of Black people present in the city often lived in one part of town, away from their masters, making it impossible to maintain the sort of intimate knowledge of the slave’s comings and goings essential to the plantation system. Furthermore, rigid restrictions on daily travel were not even desirable, proving inconvenient for the budding industries. As manufacturers sought cheap sources of labor, the practice of “hiring out” slaves became increasingly common. Under this arrangement, slaves paid the master a stipulated fee, and were then free to take other jobs at wages. The regulations on travel, then, had to be more flexible for slaves to do their work.115
As the masters “capitalize[d] their slaves,”116 the bondsmen became, literally, wage slaves.117 Given the White population’s preoccupation with controlling Black people, the practice of hiring out slaves was quite controversial. As late as 1858 it was denounced in a grand jury “Report of Colored Population.” Spelling out the concerns of the White community, the report states:
The evil lies in the breaking down of the relation between master and slave—the removal of the slave from the master’s discipline and control and the assumption of freedom and independence on the part of the slave, the idleness, disorder and crime which are consequential, and the necessity thereby created for additional police regulations to keep them in subjection and order, and the trouble and expense they involve.118
Industrialization in Southern cities thus not only created new demands for social control, but threatened to alter the entire institution of slavery.
In short, economic changes related to industrialization and urban life relaxed the master’s personal control over the slave but did not reduce the racist obsession with slave control. Additional responsibilities thus fell to the state.
Between 1712 and 1822 South Carolina banned the practice of hiring out slaves, but these laws went almost entirely unenforced, and other means of control emerged.119 Beginning in 1804, Charleston established a nightly curfew for the Black population—free and slave alike.120 A few years later a statewide nine o’clock curfew was established. Free Black people were required to carry a pass from their employers, and patrols beat those who didn’t have their “free papers.”121 A stricter law was passed in Pendleton in 1835, instructing the patrol to “apprehend and correct all slaves and free persons of color” on the streets after nine at night, “whether such slave or free person of color have a pass or not.”122
In Charleston the law requiring passes gradually gave way to a system of badges for slaves being hired out. This procedure allowed the state the opportunity to regulate the practice, and entitled it to a share of the master’s fee (that is, really, of the slave’s wages).123 Slowly, Charleston began to prefigure the segregated South of the twentieth century: in 1848, the city limited the right
