Acknowledgments Introduction: Of Perpetrators and Police 1. Colonial Beginnings and Experiments 2. Supervising Patrollers in Town and Country 3. Patrol Personnel:"They Jes' Like Policemen, Only Worser" 4. In Times of Tranquility: Everyday Slave Patrols 5. In Times of Crisis: Patrols during Rebellions and Wars 6. Patrollers No More: The Civil War Era Epilogue: Black Freedom, White Violence: Patrols, Police, and the Klan Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index
No one has examined slave patrols in such detail, unearthed the whole world of racial control they represented, and linked them to post-Civil War vigilantes and the KKK. The details on the recruitment of the patrols, their procedures and effect, and their shifting roles in different circumstances of public safety and disturbance are very well done. This is a real contribution to the history of race relations in the United States, and helps explain developments long after the patrols had died out. -- Bernard Bailyn, author of Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Enlarged Edition (Harvard) The book is impressively researched and carefully written. Slave patrols did in fact constitute an important aspect of the history of slavery in the United States, but this is the first time that slave patrols have received undivided attention as to their origins and actual implementation. -- Winthrop D. Jordan, University of Mississippi
Sally E. Hadden is Associate Professor of History at Western Michigan University.
Sally Hadden…has written the first definitive book on slave
patrols… The book studies the roots, rules, procedures, progress,
disintegration and legacy of Southern slave patrols during the 18th
and 19th centuries. It is the most all-encompassing view of a long
overlooked chapter of Southern history.
*New York Voice*
Slave Patrols studies the roots, rules, procedures, progress,
disintegration and legacy of Southern slave patrols in Virginia and
the Carolinas in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is perhaps the
most all-encompassing view yet of a long overlooked chapter of
Southern history. The paucity of research done on slave patrols is
seemingly out of proportion to the large role they played in the
perpetuation of the slavery system in the South.
*Research in Review*
Hadden offers insights into a part of U.S. history that has been
little studied, despite the fact that it is an integral fact of
that history… [Slave] patrols became part of the violent force used
to react to slave revolts, the threat of such revolts, and
runaways. Despite the bravado attached to their image, slave
patrols were ‘an unequivocal manifestation of white fear.’
*Booklist*
Using a variety of sources [and] adding new details, [Hadden’s]
in-depth analysis provides an understanding of the daily
enforcement of slave laws and an awareness of how Southern police
forces were influenced by slavery and white dominance… This is
essential reading, with much to offer all scholars interested in
American history, slavery, and race relations.
*Library Journal*
In a study that explores the roots of what we know today as racial
profiling, [Hadden] focuses on the law-enforcement bands that
existed from about 1700 to 1865 and were charged with ensuring that
slaves did not escape their masters’ plantations… An incisive,
scholarly study.
*Publishers Weekly*
No one has examined slave patrols in such detail, unearthed the
whole world of racial control they represented, and linked them to
post–Civil War vigilantes and the KKK. The details on the
recruitment of the patrols, their procedures and effect, and their
shifting roles in different circumstances of public safety and
disturbance are very well done. This is a real contribution to the
history of race relations in the United States, and helps explain
developments long after the patrols had died out.
*Bernard Bailyn, author of The Ideological Origins of the
American Revolution: Enlarged Edition*
The book is impressively researched and carefully written. Slave
patrols did in fact constitute an important aspect of the history
of slavery in the United States, but this is the first time that
slave patrols have received undivided attention as to their origins
and actual implementation.
*Winthrop D. Jordan, University of Mississippi*
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