| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sally E. Hadden. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. (Harvard Historical Studies, number 138.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 340. $35.00.

This comprehensive study of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from 1700 through Reconstruction appropriately combines Sally E. Hadden's two areas of expertise. Her initial premises are that historians of crime and law enforcement have neglected the American South (a premise easily challenged) and that by studying slave patrols we can learn more about how southern society actually enforced the laws of slavery (a very valid premise). Hadden also argues that nineteenth and twentieth-century southern law enforcement institutions were descended from the system of slave patrols with its features of racism, violence, and brutality. 1

Without question, this is a valuable study. Hadden begins with a textbook account of the evolution of patrols in the three colonies mentioned above. Their purpose, pure and simple, set down by law, was to regulate the behavior of slaves. Early on, the various methods established by southern communities to control their slave population—curfews, militia, night watches—came together into the institution of the slave patrol. Its composition and responsibilities changed over time, always responding not just to the threat, real or perceived, of slave revolts but also to foreign and Native American attacks. In each of the three colonies and states, the patrols had distinct features—some patrollers were compensated, for example, but not all—yet their objectives were essentially the same. They were generally free to decide where to patrol and when. . . .

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