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Book Review
| Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 340. $35.00 cloth (ISBN 0-674-00470-1); $17.95 paper (ISBN 0-674-01234-8).
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| Touring the American South in the spring of 1861, London Times correspondent William Howard Russell detected a nagging yet unspoken apprehension. "There is something suspicious," he noted, "in the constant never ending statement that 'we are not afraid of our slaves'"; a statement belied by the mechanisms—most notably slave patrols—with which white southerners had long tried to quiet their fears of slave resistance (172). The existence of slave patrols has been no secret, to be sure, but even as historians have investigated so many other aspects of southern slavery, they have given only cursory attention to the enforcement of slave law. Sally Hadden's Slave Patrols is the first full-length work to look thoroughly at patrols' origins, character, variations, demise, and legacy. |
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The framework of North American slave patrols, like the law of American slavery more generally, evolved from early Caribbean prototypes in a series of trial-and-error responses to particular problems. Though certain aspects of law enforcement could simply be transplanted from Europe, the peculiarities of the racial plantation system demanded some innovation. When it became clear that regulating slaves' behavior required more than edicts alone, the burden of enforcement was initially placed on individual masters. The next, critical step in the evolution of formal slave patrols came with the recognition that a collective, state-sponsored response was necessary to police the enslaved. White masters realized the obvious fact that black slaves, becoming locked into an exploitative system of racial slavery, were likely to resist oppression by any means available—whether through attempted escape, illegal trading, or anything between. Laws prohibiting such acts clearly required enforcing agencies with the authority to discipline transgressors, violently if necessary. Propelled by the fact and the fear of slaves' resistance, colonial leaders on the mainland followed their island counterparts, instituting official slave patrols in South Carolina (1704), Virginia (1727), and North Carolina (1753). |
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By the time of the American Revolution, according to Hadden, the basic structure of slave patrols was in place and would remain constant until the patrols' demise in the Civil War. The core chapters of Slave Patrols examine aspects of patrols in mature form: their organizational structure; their distinctiveness from institutions such as militias and from figures such as constables and slave-catchers; the types of people who manned them (not solely, as previous historians had assumed, lower-class whites); and their principal activities in times of peace, war, and rebellion. While Hadden is attentive to differences between patrols in the three states (only North Carolina, for instance, consistently paid its patrollers), it is the broad similarities that stand out. Typically comprising between four and six men, patrols were charged with visiting slave housing and searching for weapons or stolen property; with dispersing unauthorized gatherings; and with ensuring that slaves carried written passes when away from home. The urgency of patrols' duties, unsurprisingly, intensified during times of war or rebellion, whether genuine or rumored. And with the Civil War patrols died—slowly, unevenly—along with the institution of slavery itself. Violent enforcement of the South's racial order did not cease, though, but merely changed form, and in a thought-provoking epilogue Hadden evaluates the connections between prewar patrols and postwar extralegal vigilante groups, most notably the Ku Klux Klan. |
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Hadden might have done more to place slave patrols in other antebellum contexts. For instance, some readers will be interested in patrols' connotations for the idealized master-slave relationship. A recurrent obstacle to increasing the authority of patrols was individual masters' unease at the interposition of state authority between themselves and their slaves. After all, as North Carolina jurist Thomas Ruffin explained most famously in the 1829 State vs. Mann decision, slavery rested in theory upon the premise of the master's absolute authority over the slave. How was this ideal reconciled with patrollers' ability to physically discipline another man's slaves? Hadden only touches on this question; further analysis would have been welcome. Similarly, Slave Patrols suggests but does not explore in any sustained fashion what its subject reveals about the Old South's system of class as well as race—and the relationships between the two. From the colonial period onward, slave patrols and their quasi-legal equivalents often regulated the unruly behavior of whites as well as blacks, and, furthermore, Hadden recognizes that patrols were often an arena in which class relations between white male patrollers were constructed and maintained. Further scrutiny might find that slave patrols policed hierarchies of class as well as race and perhaps complicate the binary model of white authority versus black subjection. |
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Other readers will doubtless find other avenues that they wish had been explored—those interested in gender, for instance, might think of patrols, with their violence, their camaraderie, their basis in men's obligations to the state as citizens, as sites of the production of southern masculinity. But the success of the first work to open up a new subject should be measured in its raising of new questions, and here Hadden does a fine job. Drawing on an impressive range of evidence, from court records and eighteenth-century tithable lists to planters' papers and, importantly, the testimony of slaves themselves, Slave Patrols provides a valuable overview of this hitherto neglected subject. |
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| Paul D. Quigley
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| University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
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