Playing Whoop and Hide

Sally E. Hadden. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xi + 340 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

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 well-researched 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.

In the first chapter, Hadden traces the introduction and development of systems of slave regulation in the colonial and revolutionary periods. She shows how English colonists in Virginia and the Carolinas borrowed slave laws and enforcement practices from neighboring colonies in the Caribbean and then adapted them to meet conditions in their own emerging slave societies. Hadden does an excellent job of explaining the mounting tensions associated with increasing numbers of slaves and a rising incidence of rebellious slave activity, and linking them with the elaboration of systems for regulating the behavior of slaves (not the same thing as "regulating slavery," the phrase used repeatedly throughout the text). Gradually, reliance on private regulation of slave behavior and voluntary enforcement of slave law gave way to increasing public responsibility for and authority over regulation and enforcement.

Initially somewhat similar, three distinctly different patrol systems had emerged in the three colonies by the end of the Revolution. One of the greatest differences among them lay in methods of recruiting and compensating patrollers. Hadden provides extensive, detailed information on the connections between slave patrols and state militias in each of the colonies and the differing obligations and incentives for white men—and women, by means of surrogates—to participate in them. While South Carolina offered only militia exemptions to reward participation in patrols (except for a brief, early experiment), Virginia provided numerous financial incentives as well, even allowing counties the option of paying patrollers directly. The North Carolina patrol system provided both exemptions and payment for patrol services.

Hadden finds ready explanations for some aspects of the evolution of the patrol systems and the differences among them but finds others more opaque, and one might wish for a bit less caution in the analysis. For example, one is tempted to speculate that South Carolina's abandonment of material...