A fairly straightforward history, Slave Patrols begins with a look at the policing of slaves on Barbados, where the very first patrols were established in response to an aborted slave revolt in 1649. After that many Caribbean planters decamped to the Carolinas, bringing with them slaves and the political technology of slavery: curfews, passes, patrols and militias. Fundamentally, the patrols were a premodern system of surveillance and policing designed to restrict slave mobility--a crucial source of African-American social power.

Along with maintaining familial and romantic ties, black mobility produced a vast network of interpersonal connections--the circuitry of resistance--through which flowed news, plans, supplies, weapons and people. Mobility was also crucial to the sub rosa economy, of nighttime reexpropriations from the master's stores, fencing pilfered goods, trading produce for liquor with poor whites and practicing traditional medicine. And restricting mobility limited slave contact with Native Americans and the fugitive slaves who (at least in the colonial era) lived as social bandits on the edge of the plantation world. Containing and limiting this informal resistance and its enabling underground milieu helped prevent formal organized resistance like escapes and armed rebellion.

By 1680 Virginia had also instituted patrols and required both slaves and white indentured servants to carry passes when traveling, and over the next century the whole South became increasingly militarized. Hadden's account of this buildup shows a cyclical escalation in which slave revolts or plots led to white panic, ramped-up vigilance and a reinvigoration of patrols. Heightened security was usually followed by increased calm, declining vigilance and then more resistance.

The trend toward ever more organized control in the South accelerated after the Revolutionary War (during which more than 3,000 escaped slaves fought for the loyalist Lord Dunmore, who offered freedom in exchange for armed service). In 1777 Vermont had abolished slavery; Pennsylvania followed three years later. From then on the "peculiar institution" came under increased attack, as European powers outlawed the slave trade and more "free soil" and abolitionism emerged in the North. By the early antebellum period, the patrol system had fully evolved throughout Dixie.

A typical night on patrol involved three to six armed white men on horseback riding the country roads in search of black people, stopping at farms and plantations where they were authorized, regardless of the property holder's wishes, to search slave quarters for visitors, escapees or contraband like weapons, liquor, books and excessive provisions that might indicate plans to flee. Violation of local regulations led to on-the- spot whippings.

In some jurisdictions patrollers were paid from local taxes; in others they were paid with bounties for catching "truant" or runaway bondspeople. More often, the patrols were a form of corv?e labor, forced upon the whole white male population by the society's more affluent members.

Before Hadden's book, numerous histories of slavery and black resistance made passing mention of patrols, usually casting them as gangs of poor whites, motivated as much by their own pathology as by legal structures. This fits comfortably with America's official mock-up of the proverbial racist: a blinkered, lowbrow hick. But Hadden takes that myth apart. For example, in Norfolk County, Virginia, where in 1750 half the white population owned no slaves, the bulk of patrollers were men of the solid middle. Plantation plutocrats with twenty or more slaves frequently bought their way out of service while poor whites tended to do as little patrolling as possible. So, the bulk of patrollers were small-town burghers like doctors, lawyers, printers and merchants, or they were prosperous working farmers owning between one and five slaves. It is no coincidence that this same class later formed the base of the Ku Klux Klan during its first incarnation just after the Civil War, and even more so during its infamous second rise just after World War I and into the 1920s.

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