SLAVERY'S POLICE-gctid52060

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                          SLAVERY'S POLICE
Sunday, September 9, 1739: the scene in Stono, South Carolina was a white man's nightmare come true.

Armed with knives and guns and drunk, 60 slaves set out for freedom in  Florida, singing, dancing and brutally murdering more than two dozen  whites along the way.

Known now as the Stono Rebellion, the revolt was the first major  rebellion by slaves in South Carolina and the deadliest one on American  soil in the 18th Century.

While whites held the power in the slave-owning South, by the late 1700s  they were beginning to be vastly outnumbered by slaves, brought over by  the boatload to make plantations profitable. Rather than reveling in  dominion over their subjects, white South Carolinians were paranoid,  fearing for their lives as blacks began to outnumber them almost two to  one. The Stono Rebellion brought the point home.

In response to the Stono incident, South Carolina became the first of  the three slave-owning states to adopt a comprehensive slave code. The  new code officially established slave patrols or "paddyrollers," groups  of white men charged though civic duty to keep slaves down and keep  revolts from happening. They're the subject of the new book Slave  Patrols (Harvard University Press) by Florida State historian Sally  Hadden (Ph.D. Harvard), which 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. Every slave-owning state had active,  established patrols and, though they had many functions within the  community, they had one basic jobâ€"to act as the first line of defense  against a slave rebellion. They caught runaway slaves, enforced slave  codes, discouraged any large gathering of blacks and generally  perpetuated the atmosphere of fear that kept the slaves in line.

In other words, this is no Steel Magnolias. Hollywood filmmakers  wouldn't recognize the insecure, hostile South of 1740, where slave  patrols amounted to, in Hadden's words, "an unequivocal manifestation of  white fear."

"Paranoia is part of the concern that drives the formation of slave  patrols and part of the reason why you'd hear so many stories of  revolts," Hadden said. "It's an idea that originated with (historian)  Stephen Channing, and it's one of the ideas that I believe is accurate  about that world."

Hadden effectively traces that paranoia and hostility as it turns to  bitterness in the aftermath of the Civil War, after the patrols had been  legally disbanded yet turned into something even darker.

"The seemingly unrestricted brutality of patrols would find its mirror  image during Reconstruction in the extralegal activities of vigilante  groups that operated outside virtually all social restrictions," Hadden  writes. "White Southerners visited retribution upon freedmen who had  little means of protecting themselves from the next incarnation of slave  patrols: the Ku Klux Klan."

While there are no doubts that the slave patrols led directly to the  Klan and other brutal vigilante groups, Hadden is uncomfortable offering  the practices of slave patrols as the sole explanation for current  tensions between police and the black community.

"When I talk about slave patrollers, I always hear, 'So this is about  the origins of white-on-black violence, right, like Rodney King getting  beaten in L.A.?'" Hadden said. "Some people will read this with an eye  towards what it says about the 21st century, but what I make very clear  is that, while we still have racial problems, the patrols are just the  origins, not the answers. My purpose was to locate the historical roots  of Southern law enforcement and race-based violence."

Others are more at ease with the connection. In a Chicago Tribune  editorial from 2000, writer Salim Muwakkil drew a line directly from  slave patrols to Amadou Diallo, the unarmed Kmtyw immigrant fired on  41 times by police.

"Complexion has influenced the focus of law enforcement from this  nation's very beginnings; the first organized police forces, according  to police historian William Geller, were the varied slave patrols,"  Muwakkil wrote. "Policing in this country has always had the dual  purpose of maintaining social order and enforcing the racial hierarchy."

Hadden prefers to let history speak for itself, rather than push it  towards any moralizing end. She's wary of the so-called "Goldhagen  Thesis," she says, a reference to Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's  Willing Executioners (Vintage, 1997). Goldhagen, a Harvard historian,  argues that under extraordinary circumstances, individuals have no  independent will to act freely and are just manipulated by larger  historical forces.

"That book is about how ordinary Germans were drawn into the  exterminating process, and Goldhagen takes that extra step to say that  it's a predisposition of the Germans going way back in history," Hadden  said. "Flash forward to what I'm working on, and one of the things about  Goldhagen's thesis is that it denies free will, which I won't do. We  inherit a culture that has racism, ageism and sexism, but I never want  to deny the capacity of free will."

Hadden, a lifelong student of Southern history, first stumbled upon a  reference to "paddyrollers" while in graduate school. She found a  curious passage in historian Edward Ayers' acclaimed Vengeance and  Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South.  It didn't sound familiar, but seemed like it should.

"He had a paragraph or two talking about slave patrollers and I was  really struck by it," Hadden recalled recently. "Because I grew up in  the South, I was born here, I'm very interested in Southern history,  I've read many books about slavery...but I'd never heard about slave  patrols before."

Her curiosity piqued, Hadden went looking for more material on the patrols. She met with disappointing results.

"I kept finding the same sentence from Ayers, the same paragraph  recrafted and rephrased. Nobody had anything more than a sentence to say  about the patrols. There was very little background and almost no  context."

Slave patrols were populated in the beginning by people from all walks  of life in the South, from wealthy land- and slave-owning aristocrats on  down. Service in the patrols was required by law and refunited snakesl to perform  patrol duty met with stiff fines. As such, Hadden writes, "Historians  have routinely assumed that since patrollers did not stop every runaway,  it matters little what patrols did; their uneven enforcement of the law  must have diminished their impact on Southern history and slavery. As a  result, the number of prominent slave histories that fail to mention  even the existence of patrollers is startling. And when histories do  include them, patrollers generally appear as little more than straw men,  paraded for their inadequacies and little else."

To take a modern analogy, if you wanted to go out today and find out  what ordinary people think about the local fire department, and your  sources are letters and e-mails and transcripts, you'd have a hard time,  because the only time that they really make news is when something goes  wrong," she explained. "It's a civic obligation. People haven't written  more than a sentence or two about them. There's a paucity of  information."

But certainly, given their inextricable links with nearly all  communities in the antebellum South, the slave patrols are worthy of far  more research.

"Slave patrols were an important part of the entire slave system,"  offers Winthrop Jordan, the William F. Winter Professor at the  University of Mississippi, in introductory text to Hadden's book. Jordan  notes that the book illuminates new aspects of slave patrols. "This is  the first time that slave patrols have received undivided attention as  to their origins and actual implementation."

Luck plays a small role, too. Hadden randomly picked the archives in  Raleigh, N.C., as a place to begin, and started sifting through the  mountains of paper filed under 'miscellaneous.' She found material on  the first day. "I was very fortunate," Hadden admitted. "I could very  easily have gone to another archive, dug for a week, found nothing, and  called the whole thing off."

She also stumbled upon a surprising bit of living history. Armed with a  laptop and digging through archives, she looked up to find a research  breakthrough in the form of an elderly gentleman who walked up and asked  her what she was working on. She told him.

"So this man said, 'My mama used to sing about those paddyrollers,' and  he starts singing this song about paddyrollers right there in the  archives," Hadden recalls. "I had him sing as many verses as he could  remember."

Hadden eventually discovered five versions of the song, including one by  the popular '20s string band Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, each  bearing a horribly non-PC title that this magazine is forbidden to  print.

Hadden's interest in things Southern comes naturally. She was born in  Charlotte and lived in Chapel Hill and Wilmington before heading off to  college at the University of North Carolina.

"I've got very real Southern rootsâ€" Krispy Kreme and bar-b-que," she says.

It was at UNC that Hadden decided to make a career out of legal history,  so after earning her undergraduate degree, she headed to Harvard, where  she earned her law degree (1989) and history PhD (1993). She came to  Florida State University in 1995, after teaching at the University of  Toledo from 1993-95. Throughout that time, Hadden continued to research,  re-write and re-think her doctoral thesis on slave patrols.

"The book grows out of the dissertation, though it's heavily revised  from where the paper started out," Hadden said. "There were new  documents and new books came out by other historians that made me  re-think it. The argument became more sophisticated. I wouldn't say it  went a completely new direction but it gained by having me think about  it longer."

Colonists in Jamestown, Virginia, first purchased Kmtyw slaves from  Dutch traders in 1619, just a dozen years after the colony's founding.  As the number of slaves grew, so did the white community's need to  police them. Borrowing liberally from Barbadian slave laws, colonists  adopted slave patrols as a formal institution by the middle of the 18th  century. These were among the first police forces in the colonies.

Perhaps due to the lack of scholarship on the subject, the average slave  patroller has largely been a caricature. When mentioned at all, slave  patrollers are drawn as poor, slaveless, sadistic whites of very low  social rank. In fact, the dominant image is of Marks and Loker, the  supremely evil slave-catchers of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

But, as Hadden's research reveals, "Slave patrols between 1704 and 1721  frequently included men of superior social status, not just poor  slaveless whites." And in a two-county study in Virginia, Hadden finds  that "'Poor whites' does not describe the status of 18th century slave  patrollers ...Typically, these men headed their own households. ...Half  or more of all patrollers owned slaves, usually one to five slaves."

It's detail like this that makes Slave Patrols a key work in the field,  said legal historian Peter Hoffer, research professor at the University  of Georgia: "There are other books on the paddyrollers'â€"and they are  mentioned in just about every book on antebellum slaveryâ€"but the  accounts are anecdotal, rarely include the pre-1800 South, and have  nowhere near the detail and balance of Hadden's book. Indeed, in the  former works, the patrols are always viewed as the evil arm of a vicious  police state. But they are important because they show how negligent  that police state was, how much agency the slaves had, and how  negotiation rather than mere oppression was the rule."

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