| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. By Sally E. Hadden. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii, 340 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-00470-1.)

Slavery in the Americas rested upon violence, and to assure the sovereignty of the master the use of force was extended to the entire society. Without the active support of slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike, slavery crumbled. In the American South much of that support derived from the little-studied institution of the slave patrol. Sally E. Hadden's Slave Patrols offers the first modern study of this critical buttress to the slave regime, adding greatly to historical understanding of how the slaveholding minority sustained itself. 1

The strength of Hadden's work is her determination to treat the development of the slave patrol over the course of three centuries. Hadden sees the patrol as a necessary element in every racially based slave society in the Americas; it emerged from the slave master's need to control a subordinate work force and from the persistent fears of the white population. But the patrol—like other police forces—did not arise in precisely the same way in Virginia and the Carolinas. The patrol took a different form depending upon the balance of slave and free populations, geography, the character of the planter class, and much else. Those differences were reflected in the patrol's legal authority and financing and its relationship to the militia, constabularies, and other police forces. . . .

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