Monkeyfist.com: Patrols and Privilege

Mar. 11, 2002 11:38 am

Here's a piece I didn't get finished by the end of Black History Month. Which is just as well since one month isn't enough anyway.

Kendall Clark



                                Monkeyfist.com
                                       
                             Patrols and Privilege
                                       
   by [1]Kendall CLARK
   
   Friday, 08 March 2002
   
   .....
   
     I, [patroller's name], do swear, that I will as searcher for guns,
     swords, and other weapons among the slaves in my district,
     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 historical record of slave patrols, stretching from the mid-16th
   century to the post-Reconstruction night terrors of the Ku Klux Klan,
   is wide and deep and, until now, largely unrecounted. [2]Sally E.
   Hadden's new book, [3]Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and
   the Carolinas (Harvard University Press, 2001), the first detailed
   treatment of American slave patrols, exposes yet another ugly facet in
   American history of racial oppression.
   
   It traces the evolution of slave patrols, within a conscious,
   systematic tradition of brutal social control, as the first line of
   community-organized oppression of African slaves, and as one of the
   principal social institutions which constituted American racial
   oppression from the colonial period to Reconstruction. In six chapters
   Hadden examines the colonial experiments which were the background of
   fully-developed slave patrols; the mode of patrol supervision in both
   urban and rural areas; the changing social identity of patrollers
   themselves; how patrols functioned, in both everyday and crisis
   situations; and the terroristic social forces -- principally the KKK
   -- which, in the postbellum period, inherited and modified the
   patrol's work.
   
   Slave patrols existed wherever there were slave economies, especially
   in the colonial and antebellum American South. "Only a very few
   counties," Hadden writes, "never had any type of functional patrol
   prior to the Civil War" (p. 69). And, while there was some variation
   in the social structure of patrols, the point of establishing them was
   constant: to maintain white supremacy and privilege. "Patrollers'
   night-to-night enforcement of slave control laws," Hadden says,
   "undergirded the entire structure of slavery", which, in a slave
   economy, meant undergirding the entire structure of society per se (p.
   72).
   
   In the colonial period, white settlers, especially in coastal areas,
   feared both widespread slave insurrection, perhaps the first mass,
   apocalyptic terror of American culture, and invasion or attack by
   competing colonial powers. The militia system could not respond to
   both threats simultaneously. Slave patrols were developed as a kind of
   supplementary force. African slaves were thus the first in a series of
   social groups suspected of "fifth columnist" activity -- the first
   moment in a long American tradition of paranoia and demonization, one
   that's active today in the detainment of hundreds if not thousands of
   persons, held without trial, since the 11 September attacks.
   
   Of course white settlers had reasons to [4]fear insurrection, reasons
   which were embedded in a context of systematic injustice. Slaves were
   justified in trying to overturn oppression, despite white claims about
   Africans being a race of natural slaves. And, as Hadden points out,
   three insurrections demonstrated the resolve and determination of
   slaves: the [5]Stono Rebellion (1739) and the insurrections of
   [6]Denmark Vesey (1822) and [7]Nat Turner (1831).
   
   Slaves not only planned insurrection secretly, at meetings and
   gatherings which patrols were expected to break up, their freed
   fellows pleaded for it publicly. One of the most notable public
   pleadings was David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the
   World (1829), a jeremiad of such vehement, ferocious righteousness
   that [8]William Lloyd Garrison , a staunch white abolitionist who
   consistently eschewed moderate rhetoric, could not support it without
   reservations. In his Appeal Walker wrote that,
   
     The whites want slaves, and want us for their slaves, but some of
     them will curse the day they ever saw us. As true as the sun ever
     shone in its meridian splendor, my colour will root some of them
     out of the very face of the earth. They shall have enough of making
     slaves of, and butchering, and murdering us in the manner which
     they have.
     
   Walker's Appeal was taken so seriously that Georgia's state
   legislature offered, to anyone who would forcibly return him to the
   South, $10,000. And in North Carolina it prompted the legislature to
   authorize county patrol committees, the three members of which, chosen
   by the county court from the local elite, were entrusted with the
   supervision of county patrol operations. The Appeal left North
   Carolina's governor, John Owen, in a frenzy. Hadden quotes a letter of
   his to state senators in which he wrote: "'I beg you will lay this
   matter before the police of your town and invite their prompt
   attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation [of Walker's
   Appeal]; I would suggest the necessity of the most vigilant execution
   of your police laws and the laws of the State'" (p. 48).
   [hadden-slave-patrols.jpg]
   
   As Hadden shows, the ordinary tasks of the patrol, carried out at
   night on the patrol's "beat", were less dramatic than thwarting
   insurrections but more routinely repressive. They included breaking up
   slave gatherings; enforcing the pass and badge system, which evolved
   to control slave movement (and which were used to control whites in
   cities like Richmond and Charleston as Union forces approached during
   the War); searching locally for and returning runaway slaves;
   searching slave quarters for weapons or contraband; and preventing
   slaves from engaging in independent economic activity, known as
   "huckstering". Patrollers routinely punished transgressions by
   lashing. They were obligated, however, to respect the human property
   and property rights of whites when punishing slaves. During the
   colonial and antebellum periods, if a patroller administered a beating
   that lowered the economic value of a slave, the slave's owner could
   take legal recourse. Since non-voluntary patrollers acted as
   authorized state agents, the state reimbursed an owner if a patroller
   beating resulted in a slave's death, severe crippling, or economic
   diminishment. Volunteer patrollers, however, could be held personally
   liable, despite the fact that it was generally thought to be the
   responsibility of the entire white community to regulate slave
   behavior.
   
   After the repeal of slave patrol laws during Reconstruction, the "work
   of controlling 'marginal' members of Southern society...shifted from
   slave patrollers to Klansmen and policemen", Hadden says, work that
   was often aimed at an explicitly political end, such as preventing
   African Americans from voting for Republican candidates or from
   holding appointed or elective office themselves (p. 220). And in the
   absence of master-slave property relations, KKK terrorists observed no
   limits to the kind of violence they dispensed. The instensification of
   white violence against individual African Americans, while de jure
   prohibited, was a de facto sanctioned component of the lynching
   phenomenon, which was endemic to the South in the late 1880s and 1890s
   and which lasted until mid-century. In this regard, Slave Patrols
   forms a fitting prologue to Philip Dray's At the Hands of Persons
   Unknown: The Lynching of Black America or C. Vann Woodward's classic
   The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
   
   One stubbornly persistent myth about slavery, perpetuated by white
   "lost cause" historians since Reconstruction, claims that slave owners
   composed a small part of Southern society, a claim that's been widely
   refuted. The political import of the myth was to cast the South as a
   victim, both of elite planter avarice and of misguided Northern zeal.
   The slave patrol analogue of this myth is that only poor whites were
   involved in patrolling, the political implication of which is to
   mitigate blame and to misconstrue the nature of slavery. Otherwise
   fine historians, including Eugene Genovese in Roll, Jordan, Roll, as
   well as, Hadden notes, scholars in other fields, have claimed that
   slave patrols were made up principally of poor whites.
   
   Hadden shows, however, that -- while there was provision for paid
   stand-ins, an elite privilege obtaining to both sides during the Civil
   War -- patroller duty was widely shared across class lines; that the
   most common patroller eligibility criterion was state law establishing
   militia eligibility; that most adult white men -- and at times white
   women, too -- were obligated to patrol; and that ruling class whites
   routinely served as captains of the patrol. "[A]lmost all patrol
   captains in the colonial and antebellum periods," Hadden notes, "owned
   slaves, usually in significant numbers" (p. 88). Hadden also shows
   that fines for failing to patrol could be substantial, sometimes
   levied as a percentage of yearly taxes, a progressive structure set in
   place to compel patrolling by the planter elite, the class which owned
   the most slaves and had the most to gain by an active, vigilant
   patrol, especially absentee planters.
   
   Maintaining patrols required a significant investment of a local
   communities' resources. Counties often tried to socialize patrol costs
   by appealing, not always successfully, to state legislatures for
   assistance in paying them. Given the relatively uneven disbursement of
   slaves in North Carolina, for example, that legislatures were willing
   to pay for local patrols with state-wide public funds suggests that it
   was in the best interests of all whites, slave-owning or not, to
   maintain vigilant patrols. Which casts further doubt upon the South's
   traditional insistence that state's rights and local autonomy were the
   real issues, not slavery and slave economies. Despite the fact that
   fines were levied for failure to patrol, participation could mean a
   significant financial windfall. Patrollers were exempted from taxation
   for the duration of service and exempted other forms of community
   service like road work, jury duty, and local militia muster.
   Patrolling was in many ways the most valued form of community service
   one could perform.
   
   Hadden's principal task in Slave Patrols is not to illuminate
   contemporary forms of racial injustice, though it would have been
   impossible to write this book adequately without it doing precisely
   that. Because the historical transition from slavery and Jim Crow to
   the modern civil rights period has been a transition from formal
   racial inequality to formal guarantees of equality but substantive
   inequality, there yet remain too many continuities between the social
   structures Hadden describes and contemporary American life.
   
   Hadden briefly remarks upon the continuity between urban slave patrols
   and the development of the institution of modern policing, which owes
   its historical genesis more to patrols than to militias. Slave Patrols
   is invaluable to people engaged in understanding and struggling for
   justice in the criminal justice and prison systems. It suggests, for
   example, that the idea that racism is ultimately reducible to class
   inequality is shortsighted. Hadden says that there is no evidence that
   any free blacks served on patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas. "Even
   the inclusion of lower-status individuals in patrol groups," Hadden
   says, "did not lead to the appointment of free blacks as
   patrollers..." (p. 103). Racial oppression has always been about
   securing and maintaining economic and class privilege, but it's not
   always only about class.
   
   But the history of patrolling highlights some discontinuities, too. It
   suggests that white Americans were willing to suspend ostensibly
   transcendent civil values in order to regulate slaves, protect slave
   economies, and maintain white privilege. Perhaps the most revealing
   part of Hadden's recounting is the degree to which whites were willing
   to mold or distort their property rights. Patrols were authorized to
   enter any plantation to perform their duties without any need of a
   warrant. White property owners could plead and threaten, but they were
   legally powerless to prevent patrols, as authorized state agents, from
   searching their property. While patrollers often sought permission,
   they did not need it, nor could a failure to secure it prevent them
   from performing their duty.
   
   This contortion of property rights -- in which patrollers were
   supposed to avoid damaging the human property of slave owners, but
   could roam, warrantless and at will, through the physical property of
   a white citizen -- is every bit as revealing as the gross violations
   of due process at the heart of lynching, especially when you recall
   that the very idea of African Americans possessing due process rights
   was disputed by many whites. Lynchings were the way white people
   enacted that dispute, directly on the bodies of African American men
   whom they slandered as, and no doubt believed to be, sexually
   monstrous. But precious few, if any citizens disputed white rights to
   property and legal search. The violations of property rights routinely
   undertaken by patrollers were violations of white rights. The freedom
   of patrols to conduct warrantless searches of white-owned property
   suggests the degree to which whites were willing to give up ostensibly
   transcendent, founding civic values in order to secure racialized
   communal goods.
   
   The novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany once said the problem of race
   in America isn't that we aren't color-blind, but that we are
   color-deaf. Delany meant that race isn't discussed often or
   intelligently enough. Gross historical ignorance can cause deafness,
   too, preventing us, especially white people, from hearing the
   reconstitution of oppressive patterns today. Sally E. Hadden's Slave
   Patrols, which contains riches unsounded here, is a powerful cure for
   color-deafness. It speaks in clear and honest tones about one facet of
   the history of racism and privilege in America, the slave patrol. Its
   voice echoes the past and sounds the present with a care and
   intelligence sufficient to unstop our ears, if we will attend to it.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   See also Monkeyfist Celebrates Black History Month
   <[9]http://monkeyfist.com/articles/810>
   This is Patrols and Privilege <[10]http://monkeyfist.com/articles/813>
   
   © Copyright 1999-2002 The Monkeyfist Collective

References

   1. mailto:kendall-4GNy1lrxftmrG/[email protected]?subject=Patrols%20and%20Privilege
   2. http://mailer.fsu.edu/~shadden/
   3. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HADSLA.html
   4. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h1519t.html
   5. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p284.html
   6. http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2001/22oct01/22sleuth.html
   7. http://monkeyfist.com/articles/813/plain
   8. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1561.html
   9. http://monkeyfist.com/articles/810
  10. http://monkeyfist.com/articles/813