Playing Whoop and Hide

Abstract

In nearly every piece of writing about the Old South, whether personal narrative, fiction, or scholarly exegesis, sooner or later a group of white men, usually mounted, bursts figuratively into the text in hot pursuit of wayward slaves. Sometimes they are merely looking for slaves who might be out at night without a pass, or gathering for a clandestine religious meeting, or in possession of goods other than their own meager entitlement; sometimes, as in Harriet Jacobs's narrative, their quarry is free blacks who could be assisting slaves bent on revolt-or merely living too well. The groups of armed white men in question are slave patrols, charged with enforcing the public regulation of slaves throughout the colonial and antebellum periods all over the South. Ubiquitous but largely unexamined in texts on other aspects of slavery, slave patrols have seldom been the focus of extended scholarly attention. Hence Sally Hadden's Slave Patrols, the first published study of the patrol system to appear since 1914, is a welcome and important addition to the scholarly literature on slavery and the Old South. Hadden gives us a comparative survey of the patrol systems in Virginia and North and South Carolina in the course of two hundred years. The first and last chapters are primarily chronological: the first traces the introduction of systems of slave regulation in the colonial period and their evolution through the Revolution, while the last describes the impact of the Civil War on the patrol system and its demise with the abolition of slavery. In between, four chapters are organized around thematic concerns but also move somewhat chronologically through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into the War. An epilogue looks at the legacy of patrolling in the operation of police forces and the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. For this wellresearched study, Hadden draws on an extensive body of archival material, including colony, state, county, and municipal records, court records, newspapers, and private diaries and papers.