Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas
Department
History
Document Type
Book
Files
Description
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 seventeenth century through the end of the Civil War. Here we see how the patrols, formed by county courts and state militias, were the closest enforcers of codes governing slaves throughout the South.
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.
Call number in WMU's library
E443 .H33 2001
ISBN
978-0674012349
Publication Date
3-26-2001
Publisher
Harvard University Press
City
Cambridge
Disciplines
History
Citation for published book
Hadden, S. (2001). Slave patrols : Law and violence in Virginia and the Carolinas / Sally E. Hadden. (Harvard historical studies ; v. 138).
Recommended Citation
Hadden, Sally E., "Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas" (2001). All Books and Monographs by WMU Authors. 500.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/books/500