Khalil Gibran Muhammad

The United States was born as one of the most inegalitarian societies in the world.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the way slave patrols functioned is that they were explicit in their design

to empower the entire white population, not just with police power, but with the duty to police the comings and goings and movements of Black people.

Essentially, men between the ages of 21 and 45 were targeted.

They could be at every level of society, particularly in the South, from large slave-holding plantation owners to men who were of the middling sort, farmers without enslaved populations, brick masons, other kinds.

They generally served for a period of time up to a year.

This was all hands on deck.

Everybody was meant to contribute.

The members who were formal in the slave patrol were paid 25 cents an hour in some cases and were fined if people shirked their duty.

If they chose not to show up for duty, they could be fined anywhere from $5 to $10 in some of the slave colonies.

arrest any slave or slaves, whether with or without a permit, who may be caught in the woods or forest with any fire or torch, which slave or slaves thus arrested shall be subjected to corporal punishment not exceeding 30 stripes.

So you can hear in that early legislation, part of the concern is an uprising, is arson, is the fear that slaves will burn things down.

And

the responsibility not of what we would later expect due process or what white property owners were entitled to in the Bill of Rights, but in fact, immediate corporal punishment.

Punishments were swift, indiscriminate, and harsh.

Solomon Northrup, whose story was told in the film 12 Years a Slave, lived as a free person in New York State before being abducted and sold into slavery in the South.

He writes in his memoir this about slave patrols.

He says,

Each company has a certain distance to ride up and down the bayou.

He then says that one slave had fled before one of these companies, thinking he could reach his cabin before they could overtake him.