The Prehistory of the Slave Patrol
Not long after American colonists began importing large numbers of enslaved people, they began to worry about slave rebellions. By the turn of the 18th century, white New Yorkers owned so many slaves that they — like their fellow colonists in Virginia and the Carolinas — passed a comprehensive slave code in 1702, the “Act for Regulateing [sic] of Slaves.” New York’s enslavers worried about enslaved people who worked on farms, in artisanal workshops, and on the waterfront “confederating together in running away or ill practices.” They hoped that a menacing new police official, the town “comon [sic] whipper” would deter runaways and other “ill practices.” But enslavers were still concerned about the possibility of a slave rebellion, so they pushed for what became the 1708 “Act for Preventing the Conspiracy of Slaves.”
Despite white New Yorkers’ vigilance, their fears of a slave rebellion came to fruition on April 6, 1712, when 20 or so African captives ran away and revolted. The freedom-seekers — most likely the Akan or “Coromantees” from present-day Ghana — torched Broadway to lure out a white enslaver “search party” and militiamen, as described by historian Max Speare. When the enslavers soon gained the upper hand in the ensuing battle, some of the rebels “took their own lives” while others hid from an “intense” manhunt. White men patrolled the streets and questioned any person “of African descent.” Some of the captured Africans were acquitted, but others were not so fortunate. New York Governor Robert Hunter delighted in “the most exemplary punishment inflicted” — burning people alive, hangings, and “one broke on the wheele,” referring to the horrific torture machine that slowly crushed bones. In the aftermath of the 1712 rebellion, New York continued to scrutinize its slave police laws and eventually came up with “Lantern Laws,” which required white New Yorkers to arrest any Black person caught out and about at night without a lantern. New York’s enslavers looked to law, violence, and vigilance to stamp out the ember of slave rebellions.
The lesson of the 1712 Coromantee uprising was that a slave rebellion somewhere was a slave rebellion everywhere. It was the beginning of an age of slave rebellions. In 1731, a West African named “Samba” was murdered for supposedly planning a revolt against French enslavers in New Orleans. The Stono Rebellion in Charleston occurred just a few years later. Another rumored insurrection engulfed New York in 1741. Two more rebellions broke out in French Louisiana in the 1790s. Richmond, Virginia, murdered over 20 suspected rebels in 1800 in what was known as Gabriel’s Rebellion.
In 1802 and 1805, North Carolina was shaken with fears of rebellions. Virginia convulsed similarly in 1805. In 1811, the massive German Coast Rebellion saw dozens of enslaved people rise up in Louisiana, and a year later a massive revolt hit Cuba. Then there was the suspected Christmas Day rebellion in Charleston in 1822, Nat Turner’s storied Southampton, Virginia, rebellion in 1831, and several others. Taken on their own, each of these was a rebellion. But taken together, they were battles in a “war” — a “race war” about the “relations between masters and their vassals,” as historian Vincent Brown put it in Tacky’s Revolt. For both sides the stakes were high. Enslaved people sought autonomy and independence. Enslavers fought both to preserve their system of economic exploitation and to stave off racial apocalypse.
For enslavers in the British colonies, the age of slave rebellions brought a renewed focus on slave policing. In decades past, enslavers had classified runaways as threats to public order, and they experimented with techniques to prevent, apprehend, and punish those who tried to escape bondage.
As slave rebellions captured enslavers’ imaginations, they embraced another type of policing — one in which government institutions would play a more important role than the deputized enslaver acting on their own.
It was a tacit admission that no single enslaver could handle things on their own. Rather, they acknowledged the need for the government — for public authority — to come to their aid. Enslavers hung their hopes on the slave patrol, the public policing institution that deployed force to sniff out and snuff out rebellions. There was no doubt that these slave patrols were emergency measures — meant to prevent the most feared of all emergencies. But if the emergency never receded, then it became the norm. So, too, did the slave patrol.
The slave patrol was one answer to a broader question that had vexed English-speaking colonists and their connections back home: How should government maintain law and order? Around the time when British colonizers were invading North America, overworked executioners in England’s cities and counties administered the death penalty to thousands. Legislators grew increasingly concerned about crimes such as treason and sedition. Historian Andy Wood described one 1549 official’s plan to crush threats to internal order: public executions, the decapitation of corpses, and the public display of the severed heads; troublesome clergy were to be hanged from their church’s spires and left to rot; warnings to servants and tenants of dire consequences if they stepped out of line; heightened “readiness” for “constables, bailiffs and mayors”; the appointment of a force of executioners. The key to this system was securing the buy-in of the local elites; for when the troubles came, the elites would be the eyes and ears of public vigilance as well as the physical force that would help the sheriffs and conduct executions. There was no “permanent apparatus on which to depend” — nothing like modern-day police departments, SWAT teams, or state police. Instead, when the government needed force, it mobilized citizens, especially the trusted, “better” sort who would have a vested stake in preserving the status quo.
This was the context of policing when English-speaking enslavers defined a new crime against public order that accompanied the mass importation of African enslaved people into the colonies in the late 1600s: the slave insurrection.
The term “insurrection” comes from the Latin verb insurgo, which means “to rise up from within.” Insurrection was not inherently connected to slavery, as we first see the term “insurrection” back in 1450, when a man named Jack Cade led a movement against elite corruption in Kent, England. The people elected Cade as the captain of their posse comitatus — or “the power of the county” — and battled the King’s army for about a month before collapsing.
The most important part of the crime of insurrection was that insurrectionists like Jack Cade wanted to replace the nobles’ government with one of their own making. This was scary enough for English nobles facing uprisings by angry, oppressed peons. But insurrection took on an added racial dimension when it was applied to slavery in the English plantation colony of Barbados in the late 1600s. Insurrections seemed to lurk everywhere, especially with “Runaway Negres” who had taken refuge in caves and forests and who plagued the planters with nighttime thefts before escaping “undiscern’d.” Historian Jason T. Sharples has studied the mindset of the Barbadian planters who first began applying the insurrection concept; he notes that when planters “turned English ears to African voices,” “they heard them imperfectly” through their own preconceived fears of the very people they were enslaving. Given the planters’ own horrific violence against the Africans they were trying to subjugate, they thought, why would the Africans not seek retribution? This idea — that slave rebellions would bring about a racial apocalypse and replace white dominion with Black rule — was the big reason why enslavers preferred to classify slave rebellions as “insurrections.” And it was why enslavers would become preoccupied with the problem of trying to police insurrections.
The Barbadian planters turned to the militia to address the emergency of slave rebellions. The colony’s 1660 law gave militia captains the authority to temporarily conscript up to 20 men to “pursue and apprehend” any groups of escaped slaves who were considered potential troublemakers. The militia was authorized to use as much force as necessary to capture “members of these bands ‘dead or alive.’ ” If a full-scale “insurrection” unfolded, the colony’s governor was directed “to declare martial law,” to include the summary execution of wrongdoers. Enslavers need not have worried about losing the value of the executed slaves because Barbados would compensate them “from the public treasury.” With nothing to lose financially, the colonial government hoped the planters would do their part and come forward with “the rebellious plans of their slaves.” Even with these measures in place, however, the Barbadian planters still confronted rumors of slave rebellions in 1675 and 1692. After the latter rebellion, a military court sentenced the putative rebels to be executed and decapitated and “their decapitated heads would be placed on a pole.” This brutal crackdown of a slave rebellion taught a lesson that would make an impression among at least a few who soon emigrated to the mainland.
Indeed, some Barbadian planters were moving to what they hoped were greener pastures in the Carolinas, and they brought with them their fears of slave rebellions. With the 1704 “an act to Settle a Patroll,” the South Carolinian enslavers and planters who ran the colony’s General Assembly identified a new and terrifying threat: In the event that an “enemy” or foreign power attacked South Carolina, the white men would get pulled away to the front. So, who would watch over the slaves? And what if opportunistic slaves decided to join forces with the attacking foreign “enemy”? Sally Hadden, the leading historian of slave patrols, explains the South Carolinians logic as follows: “The colony needed two military forces,” one that served as “a militia to repel foreign enemies,” and another that kept guard over the enslaved people who were potential insurrectionists within the colony. This latter guard was the slave patrol, and its goal was, per the text of the law, “to prevent such insurrections and mischiefs as from the great number of slaves we have reason to suspect may happen” if the white men were away.
Once assembled, a force of ten patrollers would “ride from plantation to plantation, and into any plantation” in their jurisdiction, to arrest any enslaved people who did not belong there or who did not have a pass. That patrollers had legal authority to enter private property reflects just how seriously South Carolinians took the threat of insurrection. White enslavers, whose own eyes and ears were trusted to surveil their own slaves, nonetheless believed that their police power needed to be robust enough to invade private property in times of crisis.
This provision, though, was also a pragmatic concession to the reality that South Carolinian enslavers were committed to a system of enslavement that required enslaved people to be mobile — moving between enslaver properties and within them. The slave patrol was an attempt to police enslaved people’s insurrectionary potential within this context.
South Carolinian enslavers’ fears that enslaved people would rebel while the white population was distracted with a foreign adversary only continued to grow during the lengthy war from 1702 to 1713 between Britain and Spain that spilled over into North America. British minders in South Carolina tried to use the Yamassees’ and Creeks’ formidable firepower against Spanish Florida. But the Yamassees and Creeks had other ideas and instead targeted rival Indian villages. In the 1711 Tuscarora War, a rash Swiss colonist named Baron Christophe von Graffenreid provoked a Tuscarora raid that killed more than one hundred settlers, including the imprudent Baron himself. In January 1711, South Carolina dispatched a force to attack the Tuscaroras, who had hunkered down in a formidable fort, which seemed eerily like something the English would have built. According to John Barnwell, who led the campaign against the Tuscaroras, the fort had “port holes” that could be opened from which to fire and stakes lining the ground around the fort “to run into people’s legs.” Apparently, the Tuscarora warriors learned these techniques from Harry, “a runaway negro.” In what we might call Harry’s Insurrection, the Tuscaroras held out for months before being defeated.
The Tuscarora War as well as the Yamasee War two years later — in which South Carolinians retreated toward Charleston until Cherokees came to their aid — would likely have triggered the slave patrol alarm. Manpower was already desperately low, and reports from the front lines noted that the South Carolinians could not muster enough men to confidently confront the Tuscaroras. And those men who did arrive and prove willing to fight were “badly clad and equipped.” One can imagine that the situation back home was little better. Or perhaps it was the case that the shortages at the front were the result of white men exploiting a “loophole” that shielded slave patrollers from service on the front lines? As white South Carolinians pondered new ways to guarantee their safety from both enslaved people and nearby Natives, they began to ask hard questions about those who were shirking their duty to the public. These militia dodgers tended to be “the choicest and best men, who screen themselves” from combat roles.
The solution was to give the colony the power to decide which white men would do what duties. A 1721 militia reform law let the militia commanding officers decide who would fight and who would patrol. At least for the time being, military necessity trumped the rampant fears of slave insurrection. Thus began a pattern. South Carolina would repeatedly have to choose between defending the colony from enemies, foreign and domestic. The white rulers of South Carolina would relax their fears of slave insurrections as the most recent insurrection — or suspected insurrection — faded from memory. And as they did so, they also relaxed their slave patrol laws. This was also the inevitable result of the changing nature of slavery during these years as enslavers began to use a “task system” that gave enslaved people “free time” after the completion of a task, as historian Justene Hill Edwards explains. Enslaved people often used this “free time” to buy and sell things in the local informal economic marketplace. Here enslaved people’s agency powered their mobility in and outside of markets.
By 1734, in the face of enslaved people’s expanding mobility and economic agency, a backlash was brewing. The legislature conceded that the patrol system wasn’t “keeping all slaves in due order.”
In late 1739 famed evangelist George Whitefield was heading south from Philadelphia to do the Lord’s work at Calvinist visionary John Wesley’s Christ’s Church in Savannah in the colony of Georgia. Whitefield believed he had been called to tend to Georgia’s Black population, and he built the “Bethesda” orphanage that still stands today on the grounds of a private school. Whitefield was no abolitionist, and he would join a movement to legalize slavery in Georgia — where it had been prohibited since 1735 — and come to own his own plantation. But he did believe white enslavers in the colonies needed to be gentler to their charges.
In the late hours of January 2, 1740, Whitefield and his traveling party were making their way through South Carolina, en route to Savannah. The men were tired and desperately lost. When they finally “saw a Light,” “two of my Friends went up to it, and saw a Hutt full of Negroes.” Whitefield’s friends were startled but nonetheless asked the slaves if they knew if their host lived nearby — they did not. When Whitefield’s friends returned to the main group and told their story, one of the others spoke up. He had heard that slaves had recently risen up in rebellion nearby. The friend “inferr’d, that these Negroes might be some of those who lately had made an Insurrection in the Province, and were run away from their Masters.” Panic suddenly set in. George Whitefield thought he had blundered his way into the middle of the Stono Rebellion.
The Stono Rebellion of 1739 was well over by the time George Whitefield found himself in South Carolina. But his fears were understandable. The rebellion would long live in the memory of enslaved people and white enslavers in South Carolina and beyond. For Black Americans — free and enslaved — the rebellion would become a poignant memory in the collective remembrance of resistance against enslavers — the remembrance of a war, in fact, that would survive all the way into the 20th century with a man named George Cato, reputed to have been related to the leader of the Black forces during Stono, Cato. “My granddaddy and my daddy tell me plenty ’bout it,” George Cato would recall. Cato was the “slave commander.” “Commander Cato” was remembered to have said, “We don’t lak slavery. We start to jine de Spanish Floriday.”
For white society, however, Cato was not a “commander” but an insurrectionist, and the Stono Rebellion was the Stono Insurrection. Angry and embarrassed that they had allowed Stono to happen on their watch, the enslaver elite in the General Assembly immediately went to work revitalizing slave policing, especially slave patrols. South Carolina’s 1740 slave code runs 20 pages long — most other laws of the time are much shorter. The law defined slaves to be “all negroes and Indians” other than those already free, and it made clear that in the future, society “presumed that every negro” was a slave. It legalized murdering slaves who fought back against white people trying to catch those without passes. Justices of the peace were authorized to invade plantations if they suspected that slaves were hiding guns. Those harmed chasing after runaways would be remunerated. The law explained how slaves would be tried for crimes, and it specified the death penalty for felonies and capital cases and “any corporal punishment” just short of murder for lesser crimes. Section 17 of the law made “insurrection” a specific category of capital crime. Realizing that these new provisions might make local officers very busy with the whippings and killings of slaves, the Assembly offered the following horrific remunerative calculations: 25 shillings for each act of “whipping or other corporal punishments not extending to life,” and £5 “for any punishment extending to life.” And to prevent delays in administering this torture, the Assembly allowed officers to seize other nearby slaves to do the terrible deeds on their behalf.
Free Black residents found guilty of hiding runaways faced stiff fines, and if they could not pay, they would be sold into slavery. The most important injunction thrown at white masters was that they, too, faced a fine unless they could ensure vigilance over their enslaved people by always having at least one “white person” on the property.
Together, the slave code and patrol law were meant to bring a brutal restoration of enslavers’ law and order to South Carolina and to turn the page, both on these years of sharpened resistance by enslaved people and on lax habits of white policing and vigilance. A curious provision in the slave code made this abundantly clear. Recalling that during the Stono insurrection “several negroes did lately rise in rebellion, and did commit many barbarous murders,” the law granted immunity to white people who summarily executed enslaved people “in suppressing the said rebels.” They did it “for their own security,” noted the South Carolina General Assembly. Even if they killed other people’s slaves, “all and every act, matter and thing” was now “declared lawful.” The Assembly analogized the summary executions to the acts of public officers. It was as if the “rebellious negroes had undergone a formal trial and condemnation” and were then executed. The white men who murdered slave insurrectionists — real or merely suspected — were judge, jury, and executioner.
From White Power: Policing American Slavery by Gautham Rao. Copyright © 2026 by Gautham Rao. Published in the W. Hodding Carter III Books imprint of the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
