This chapter focuses on the history of slave patrols and the implications of said slave patrols on Africans and Blacks. Slave patrols were created in response to fear and trying to keep slaves in check and were active for over 150 years. They were used in order to maintain slave labor and to prevent slave rebellions. Their beginnings can be linked to Spanish bands, which England then copied in Barbados, and this establishment and patrol continued in the United States. These patrols became the antecedent of the law in southern states as well as some northern ones and are the foundation of modern policing today that is expressed in law and in practice. Thereafter, solutions and recommendations will be briefly discussed.
“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, discharged the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power. So help me, God.”
-Slave Patroller’s Oath, North Carolina, 18281
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Slave patrols were an intricate fiber of the Old South (Hassett-Walker, 2021; Lepore, 2020; Potter, n.d.; Ralph, 2019; Spruill, 2016) in addition to countries like Cuba and Barbados, etc. (Hassett-Walker, 2021; Lepore, 2020; Swift, 2022). According to Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan, a Professor of History at New York University, unlike African slavery, Atlantic slavery viewed certain people as being “marked as enslavable” (The History Channel, 2017) and these individuals who had completed their slave initiation in the New World had to be controlled and patrolled. Many Southerners not only relied heavily and almost exclusively on slave labor, but they were also almost always terrified of slave rebellions (Hansen, 2019; Potter, n.d.). According to Ralph (2019), “slave patrols were critical to slaveowners, who had previously been forced to expend their own resources to capture these so-called fugitives” (p. 3) known as kidnapped and trafficked human beings. Thus, it was the White man who created the state in which he came to a place of being terrified. Moreover, his perception of being in danger was created by his need to own another human being who longed to be free. Without the establishment of slavery in and of itself, there would have been no need to be terrorized for the perceived terrorist would have never been created.