Slave Patrols Research Articles

“Within the Circle”: Space and Surveillance in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

The detailed and chilling descriptions of physical violence in many slave narratives often overshadow the fact that slaveholders in the American South also relied on an intricate system of surveillance to control and exploit their slaves. In this essay, I argue that Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave pictures surveillance, especially its production of space, as a central tool of slavery. The resulting spatial boundaries are invested with metaphorical meaning and serve as an expression of Douglass’s emancipation. The first part of the paper considers the plantation architecture and outlines how overseers, slave patrols and panopticism create seemingly impermeable boundaries for Douglass, which are both of physical and psychological nature. I further demonstrate how the architecture of Baltimore’s city space leads to a loosening of surveillance and allows Douglass to become literate. Finally, I draw on Jurij Lotmann’s theory of aesthetic space in order to analyze how spatial boundaries are crossed and metaphorical boundaries between whiteness and blackness are rendered contingent in the Narrative.

Racialized Mass Imprisonment: Counterinsurgency and Genocide

Mass imprisonment and the growth and concentration of increasingly militarized police in the oppressed communities are, like the slave patrols and racial terror of the old plantation slave system, ...

Ignoring the Past: Coverage of Slavery and Slave Patrols in Criminal Justice Texts

The authors reviewed 18 criminal justice and 13 policing texts published since 2000 to explore the amount of coverage these texts give to the relationship between slavery, slave patrols, and the early American criminal justice system. To provide a basis for comparison, 14 introductory texts published in the 1970s were also reviewed. We found coverage of topics related to slavery to be nearly nonexistent in the 1970s texts and to be perfunctory in the majority of the current texts. We argue that given slavery’s importance to American history, introduction to criminal justice and policing texts should be more comprehensive in their discussions regarding how this peculiar institution shaped American criminal justice and law enforcement.

The Rebel Within: Unruly Slaves, Women, and Children in Colonial Virginia

Was British North America a deferential society, as most American historians have argued, or was it a defiant one? Before rebellion turned into revolution, did ordinary colonists—artisans and merchants, yeoman farmers, indentured servants, and slaves—submit to their social superiors, or did they refuse the counsel of their betters? In “Tocqueville, Turner, and Turds: Four Stories of Manners in Early America,” Michael Zuckerman, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, challenged conventional wisdom. As part of a round table discussion about deference or defiance in eighteenth-century America, published in The Journal of American History in June of 1998, he took exception to the view that deference characterized colonial America, thus complicating the current narrative concerning colonial politics and society and, ultimately, the very meaning of the American fight for independence. Judging from Sally E. Hadden’s Slave Patrols, Terri L. Snyder’s Brabbling Women, and Rhys Isaac’s Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom, Zuckerman’s contention appears to be a fair one—particularly with respect to eighteenth-century Virginia.

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

Echoing the Past, Sounding the Present

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas by Sally E. HaddenThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

In the Hands of Strangers: Readings on Foreign and Domestic Slave Trading and the Crisis of the Union , and: Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (review)

In the Hands of Strangers: Readings on Foreign and Domestic Slave Trading and the Crisis of the Union , and: Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (review)

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

Playing Whoop and Hide

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.

Reviews of Books:Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas Sally E. Hadden

Reviews of Books:Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas Sally E. Hadden

Slave patrols: law and violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

Slave patrols: law and violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsSally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the CarolinasJames L. RoarkJames L. Roark Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 86, Number 2Spring 2001 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/1350169 Views: 40Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 2001 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

Obscured from our view of slaves and masters in America is a critical third party: the state, with its coercive power. This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, the nature, and the extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late 17th century through the end of the Civil War. Mining a variety of sources, Sally Hadden presents the views of both patrollers and slaves as she depicts the patrols, composed of respectable members of society as well as poor whites, often mounted and armed with whips and guns, exerting a brutal and archaic brand of racial control inextricably linked to post-Civil War vigilantism and the Ku Klux Klan. City councils also used patrollers before the war, and police forces afterward, to impose their version of race relations across the South, making the entire region, not just plantations, an armed camp where slave workers were controlled through terror and brutality.

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas

Religion, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward , and: Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy: The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Religion, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward . Edited by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Pp. xxxvii, 463. $25.00.) Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy: The Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures. Edited by Thavolia Glymph and John J. Kushma. (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1985. Pp. 119. $17.50.) The essays which comprise the 1982 C. Vann Woodward festschrift and die 1983 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures have this in common: they represent much of the best contemporary scholarship treating the American South, and they express the uncertainty which continues to characterize historical assessments of the Old Souths capacity to accommodate or resist the new industrial order. This element of uncertainty is not new. Nineteenth-century discussions ofslavery and its legacy raised the issue of Southern distinctiveness and did so in terms which, in large measure, continue to describe conflicting historical assessments ofthe same issue. Some Northern advocates ofprogress conceived slavery to be an anomalous relic of barbarism and regarded the economic woes of the postemancipation South as an unhappy but temporary legacy of the slave Souths backwardness . Others, equally progressive in temperament, understood the antebellum South to be in transition to free labor and regarded a swift postwar restoration ofcivil liberties and free market relations to be a necessary and sufficient antidote to the social dislocations and economic hardships produced by war and emancipation. From both points ofview, emancipation and die defeat of the. slave power breached die barriers of Southern regionalism and bound Old Dixie to die Northern industrialjuggernaut. This prevailing faith in progress provided die cement for sectional reunion, between the Northern middle class and die Soudi's former master class, but it did not erase all doubts regarding die extent of the Northern triumph. For former masters—secure in their landed wealth despite civil war—memories of antebellum slave society sustained a postwar hostility toward the intrusion ofNorthern men and methods. With similar doubts, a core of former abolitionists and diehard reconstructionists denounced persistent acts of Southern barbarism as evidence of the region's continued resistance to the triumph of Northern liberalism. For those who doubted the totality ofthe North's triumph, die Soudi stood 170CIVIL WAR HISTORY apart from industrial America, either as a citadel oftraditional liberties or as a region opposed to progress. These two views ofthe relative strength ofmodern and antimodern tendencies in the nineteenth-century South continue to shape discussions of Southern development. The discussion emerges regularly in the diverse and often distinguished essays which make up the Woodward festschrift and die Webb Memorial Lectures. In the Woodward festschrift, Charles B. Dew's fascinating and painstaking recreation of the life and labor of an industrial slave provides a useful point ofdeparture. Dew's portrait ofSam Williams and his family offers a number ofsurprises: trained in the craft of ironmaking by his father, Williams earned substantial amounts ofcash and credit as a forgeman in western Virginia. These incentive payments came to Williams for "overwork," that is, for production beyond a standard quota representing his labor as a slave. As Dew demonstrates, Williams also exercised a good deal ofcontrol over the rate ofproduction at Buffalo Forge and over the conditions under which he labored. Williams's story is a complex and engaging one. It also raises questions basic to the wider discussion of Southern distinctiveness which animates the essays written in Woodward 's honor. If the industrial activities at Buffalo Forge depended upon an insular slave system, Williams's status in the workplace and his ability to accumulate personal property and cash savings (at one point he held a bank account with a balance of approximately $200) can be understood as a curious sidelight in an otherwise patriarchal and plantation-centered culture . Dew is careful to remind the reader diat the control which Williams exercised over his life never altered his status as a slave. Bound to die ironmaster at Buffalo Forge as no free laborer could be, Williams experienced (at some personal distance, it is true, but with great clarity all the same) the mechanisms of slave discipline—the whip, slave catchers, slave patrols, and the threat ofsale...