Reviews of Books

Slaveholders on Guard

Reviewed by Walter Johnson, New York University

Sally Hadden's Slave Patrols fills an important gap in the historiography of American slavery. A comparative study of one of the slave South's most commonly recognized and yet heretofore understudied institutions, Slave Patrols ranges widely over time and space, tracking the history of state-sponsored slave discipline in Virginia and the Carolinas from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. It is a deeply researched, directly (if sometimes peculiarly) argued, and truly interesting book that should become the standard text for those who wish to learn more about slave patrols and the military history of southern slavery.

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The book begins with an institutional history of slave patrols: how they were organized, charged with responsibilities, regulated (in the matter of providing for substitutes, for example), and remunerated. Like their Caribbean antecedents, Hadden argues, North American patrols evolved out of the slave catching and disciplining functions of colonial militias. For most of the seventeenth century, she further maintains, the patrols and pass laws that later came to characterize the slaveholders' regime were more often used to track the movements of Indians and even Euroamericans (who, according to laws in both Virginia and North Carolina, had to obtain a pass proving they were neither indentured nor in debt before boarding a ship out of the colony). A series of slave insurrections in the first quarter of the eighteenth century and the attenuation of Spanish, French, and finally British threats to the sovereignty of American slaveholders combined to focus the attention of colonial lawmakers on providing a public disciplinary apparatus to control slaves when they were out of the reach of their masters. "As other threatening groups receded in the distance," Hadden contends, "the only remaining menace to the white community was slaves, which a subgroup of the militia—patrols—was specifically designed to control" (p. 47).

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