Is there evidence unmentioned in the bitter debates that engulfed Congress in the 1830s and 1840s that demonstrates how seriously Southerners took the danger of slave insurrections—the reason they gave for their angry determination to suppress petitions calling for the emancipation of their slaves?
Probably the best answer to that question is a civic duty performed by thousands of southern men. Every night, in almost every county in the South, armed riders patrolled the roads, challenging every black man they encountered, demanding to know his name, where he was going, and why. If the man did not have a letter from his master justifying his journey, he was given fifteen strokes of the lash. If he was defiant or tried to run away, the number was raised to thirty-nine.
If these midnight riders saw a group of blacks meeting in a field or woods off the road, they immediately dispersed them and detained a half dozen for questioning. They often searched slave cabins for weapons or stolen goods. They had the power to question whites too, and enter their homes without a warrant. The riders were drawn from the local militia in each county and were paid for their time.1
This was the world of the South’s slave patrols. A visitor to Charleston in the 1850s was astonished by the way patrols “pass through the city at all hours.” When he inquired about them, he was told that Charleston had many criminals who needed watching. But the visitor soon concluded that the real reason for the patrols was “the slave population.” One letter writer to a South Carolina newspaper remarked that “in this country at least, no arguments will be necessary to prove the necessity of such a police.”
Slave insurrections, real or rumored, were not the only reason slave patrols were vigilant. In the 1830s, an incendiary book written by an ex-slave, David Walker, triggered widespread anxiety throughout the South. The North Carolina legislature created a new committee, whose only duty was the supervision of slave patrols. Three men in each county were given semi-judicial authority to dismiss inept or unreliable patrollers and hear complaints about them.
In some places where slaves outnumbered whites by large ratios, private patrols were also organized. Planters in St. Matthew’s Parish, South Carolina, created a Vigilant Society with about twenty members. Their chief worry was not an insurrection but the steep rise in theft from their plantations. Slaves stole jewelry, clothing—anything portable—and headed for the local railroad station. Blacks working for the railroad gave them money and sold the stolen goods somewhere up the line.
On Edisto Island, an auxiliary association also recruited members to supplement the regular slave patrollers. The residents of the island had a special reason to be worried. Blacks outnumbered whites fifteen to one. Too often “the midnight incendiary has escaped with impunity and the assassin has perfected his schemes of horror,” one jittery white resident said. The auxiliary association asked the state to give them the same legal authority as the official patrollers. Sometimes these spontaneous associations agreed that they would whip only their own slaves. If a patroller whipped a slave so violently that he was unable to work, his owner could sue the patroller.
If several years passed without a serious disturbance, the discipline of the patrols tended to deteriorate. The newspapers carried frequent complaints about the carelessness and inefficiency of some patrols. But these cries of alarm only underscored the intensity of the South’s anxiety about slave insurrections. People who refused an order to serve in a patrol could be fined and even jailed.
Joining a slave patrol was serious business in other ways. The new arrival had to go before a justice of the peace and take a solemn oath:
I [patroller’s name] do solemnly swear that I will search for guns, swords and other weapons among the slaves of my district, and as faithfully and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power. So help me God.
The specificity of the patroller’s task leaves little room for doubt about the reason for his promise to serve. The word “privately” also reduced the possibility that a patroller might talk to a newspaper.2
Slave patrols were sometimes good at tracking down runaway slaves before they left their district. In this respect, they often competed with professional slave catchers, who searched for runaways expecting suitable compensation for their time and trouble. Some patrollers became so adept that they made slave-catching a full-time job. One man moved to New York and advertised in southern papers about his ability to seize runaways in that city.
Most of the time patrolling was tedious work, not unlike contemporary policing. Some bored patrollers felt free to drink while on the job. Often, the captain of the patrol was expected to furnish the alcohol as well as food, such as an oyster supper, paying for these pleasures out of his own pocket.
In a crisis, state and county boundaries were ignored. The first militia to arrive after Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia came from North Carolina, only a few miles away. State governors and other officials corresponded frequently about rumors of insurrectionary plots.
When the news of the first large-scale rebellion on Saint-Domingue reached South Carolina, the state organized coastal patrols to make sure blacks from the rebellious island did not reach its shores. Slave patrols were expanded everywhere from militia reserves.
The patrols played a curious and paradoxical role in southern life. Their existence more or less admitted that the slaves were unhappy and often deeply resentful of their bondage and were a constant threat to white lives. Simultaneously the patrols assuaged these fears and enabled people to go about their daily routines with no more than passing qualms. Any attempt to use the patrols as an argument that slavery should be eliminated was dismissed with scorn. But in the hours of darkness, more than one Southerner, in the words of the best historian of the patrols, still “dreamed vivid racial nightmares.”3
Slave patrols are convincing evidence that Thomas Jefferson’s nightmare—the dread of a race war—had become a fixture in the southern public mind.