Slave Patrols and the Southern Slave System

In 1860, there were almost 4 million enslaved Africans in the slave states and the District of Columbia and a population of approximately 8.3 million whites. Only 384,884 whites were slave owners which meant that three-quarters of Southern whites had no direction connection to slavery as slaveholders or through family connections. Even among the 385,000 slaveholders, the majority owned fewer than five enslaved Africans. Historians have offered various interpretations of why poor white southerners supported the slave system including the hegemonic dominance of the slaveholding class and fear that defeat in the Civil War would bring the abolition of slavery and the end of a system where being white placed you in a privileged caste. Poorer white men were crucial for the operation of slave patrols and participation reinforced the racist attitudes of poorer whites in the antebellum South, integrating young non-slaveholding white men into the violence of the slave system. It helps explain non-slaveholding white support for the Confederacy during the Civil War and Klan activity during the post-war Reconstruction period. Descriptions of slave patrols and patrollers appear in slave narratives from two different eras. In the 1850s, abolitionists helped to publish and disseminate personal accounts from the formerly enslaved who had escaped to freedom. During the Great Depression of the 1930s two efforts were made to record the stories of elderly former slaves, one by Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in the south and the other by the Federal Writers Project as part of the Work Progress Administration. These accounts provide the best evidence of the operation of slave patrols and the role they played in the Southern Slave system.