Pod Insights Throughline The lasting legacy of the slave patrols About this episode To this day, America continues to grapple with the legacy of slavery. On this week’s episode, we explore the creation of slave patrols, which were created to control the movement of enslaved Black people in the 1700s, and how those patrols shaped American society and modern policing. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.
See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from iXL, a learning platform for helping kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. One subscription covers math, science, and reading for all children in a household. Receive 20% off at ixl.com/NPR.
0:16 Rund Abdelfatah? Hey, it's Run. Before we get started, we want to give you a heads up that this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence and racism. This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from Throughline and NPR. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States of America that began 250 years ago this year. And today, we're bringing you the story of how those words, "life," "liberty," and "the pursuit of happiness," weren't exactly intended for everybody.
0:51 Speaker 02 The United States was born as one of the most egalitarian societies in the world.
0:58 Rund Abdelfatah? The Constitution was written by and for a very specific set of people: land-owning white men. Everybody else, women, Native Americans already living in what would become the United States, and Black Americans, whether free or enslaved, were not a part of that vision. And even though founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson, who, let's be real, owned enslaved Black people himself, fought to eliminate slavery in the Constitution, they failed. Slavery was just too divisive and too lucrative, a foundation of the colonial economy. And according to Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of African-American Studies and
1:39 Rund Abdelfatah? Public Affairs at Princeton University and author of "The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America," white supremacy was built into the nation's psyche long before the Declaration of Independence.
1:54 Speaker 02 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.
2:16 Rund Abdelfatah? This is the story of how the creation of white-led slave patrols to control the comings and goings of enslaved Black people laid the groundwork for America's racial hierarchies in ways that we continue to grapple with today. That's coming up after a quick break.
2:44 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from iXL, a learning platform for helping kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. One subscription covers math, science, and reading for all children in a household. Receive 20% off at ixl.com/npr. This message comes from EasyCater, the workplace food platform. EasyCater helps organizations order food from favorite restaurants, meet dietary needs, and stay on budget. With employee meal programs, flexible payment options, and 24/7 customer support, all on one platform. Learn more at easycater.com.
3:25 Speaker 00 This message comes from Abrams Books. Don't scramble for a knockout gift this holiday season. Give them the brand-new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, Fight or Flight, available wherever books are sold.
3:39 Rund Abdelfatah? Slave patrols, groups of white men empowered to control and monitor Black people, were first formed in South Carolina in the early 1700s. The premise was simple: police enslaved Black people to make sure they didn't plan uprisings or otherwise threaten the slave-dependent colonial economy. Slave patrols quickly spread across many of the colonies, enforcing what were called "slave codes," laws controlling almost every aspect of enslaved people's lives. By law, almost all white men had to serve on these patrols, making them a central part of colonial life.
4:18 Speaker 02 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 slaveholding 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,
5:03 Speaker 02 they could be fined anywhere from $5 to $10 in some of the slave colonies.
5:10 Rund Abdelfatah? Their duties were written into law, and they continued to be the law of the land well after the establishment of the United States of America. Take this slave patrol statue from Louisiana from 1835, more than half a century after the Declaration of Independence was penned. It declares that white slave patrols are to
5:30 Speaker 02 Arrest any slave or slaves, whether with or without a permit, who may be caught in the woods or forests 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.
6:12 Speaker 03 Punishments were swift, indiscriminate, and harsh.
6:17 Speaker 03 Solomon Northrop, 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.
6:28 Speaker 02 He writes in his memoir, This, About Slave Patrols. He says, "Patrollers, whose business it is to seize and whip any slave they may find wandering from the plantation, ride on horseback, headed by a captain, armed and accompanied by dogs. 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. But one of their dogs, a great ravenous hound, gripped him by the leg and held him fast. The patrollers whipped him severely.
7:07 Rund Abdelfatah? That's pretty horrifying.
7:10 Rund Abdelfatah? And as you're describing this sort of slave patrol system, it just, what's so striking about it is that it was, it seems to have really effectively mobilized, as you said, not just land-owning, you know, whites who owned slaves, but people who didn't themselves own slaves. It gave them a, both the men and presumably also, you know, the women in these societies, the white women in these societies, like a sense of superiority almost over this whole class of people that they were now in charge of patrolling.
7:48 Speaker 02 Absolutely, yes. So, the fact of chattel slavery, by the time of the founding of the United States, had already for 200 years served as a form of social insurance against the insurrection and dissent and potential political rebellion of the majority of landless white men who didn't have slaves and lived precarious lives. So, that they would serve in this capacity alongside major plantation owners was a
8:32 Speaker 02 kind of way to build community around the notion of protecting the white community from the enslaved black population.
8:45 Rund Abdelfatah? The slave patrols would continue predominantly in southern states for over 150 years, up until the end of the Civil War, when the Confederacy surrendered and ended its rebellion in 1865. While slavery was abolished with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that same year, it didn't mean the violent surveillance of newly freed black citizens would end. In fact, within months of the end of the Civil War, southern states began passing laws that would later be called "black codes." We'll talk more about the Civil War next week, but for now, you should know that these laws essentially allowed white people to continue to control many aspects of black people's lives.
9:29 Rund Abdelfatah? And the way they accomplished this was to take advantage of a loophole in the 13th Amendment.
9:35 Speaker 02 One of the really powerful expressions of how important policing and punishment were in the conception of the end of slavery was that the 13th Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for crime. So, in some ways, the genius of the former Confederate states was to say, "Oh, well, if all we need to do is make them criminals and they can be put back in slavery, well then that's what we'll do." And that's exactly what the black codes set out to do.
10:17 Speaker 02 The black codes, for all intents and purposes, criminalized every form of African-American freedom and mobility, political power, economic power, except the one thing it didn't criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man's terms.
10:38 Rund Abdelfatah? So after emancipation, the slave patrols are morphing into something new. But their mission essentially stayed the same.
10:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, so this system of essentially tracking black people's movements to control them needed a similar kind of armed and/or empowered law enforcement constituency. So on one hand, you do have the growth of a formal bureaucratic nuts-and-boats police system that emerges by the late 1860s, 1870s. Prisons are being remodeled or expanded and built. Prison farms are beginning to open.
11:28 Speaker 02 I say all that to say because the South had a very anemic infrastructure when it came to criminal justice, by a very stark contrast to northern states. And one of the things that it doesn't really have is it doesn't have a formal professional police force, certainly like big cities from Boston to New York, Philadelphia, the old colonial cities, now essentially industrial, thriving, modern places by the 1870s and 1880s. And so what does the South do? Well, southern leaders empower vigilante groups to do a lot of the day-to-day surveillance and policing of black people.
12:09 Speaker 02 And out of that, particularly in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan is born in Pulaski, Tennessee.
12:21 Speaker 02 A lot of historians have pointed out that the Klan represented the same kind of hybrid constituency, broad cross-section of the community that represented property owners, small business owners, some political elites, either directly involved or most certainly aware of and complicit in their attacks. And these folks took about the business of terrorizing, policing, surveilling, and controlling black people.
12:55 Rund Abdelfatah? The brutality unleashed by the Ku Klux Klan was so bad that the federal government ended up occupying former Confederate states to help guarantee the safety of Black people. Congress passed amendments to ensure equal rights and voting for Black citizens. But even with those measures, the Southern states created what are known as Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow, along with the KKK, pushed millions of Black citizens to flee the South to northern cities, places such as New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia in what would become known as the Great Migration.
13:32 Speaker 02 Well, Black people are less than 5% of the populations of these big cities until the second and third decade of the 20th century, until the Great Migration period, which begins during World War I in the 1910. And so you begin to see populations doubling from 2% to 4% to 8%.
13:53 Rund Abdelfatah? When Black Southerners made it to northern cities, they encountered a new and more professional form of policing. The police forces in the North, modeled after Europe, emphasized three things: crime prevention and control of communities, particularly immigrant communities, strong visibility in everyday life by patrolling the streets, and militaristic structure, with things like uniforms, rank designations, and a code of command and discipline.
14:23 Speaker 02 Police officers receive African-American migrants in the same way that their white neighbors and community peers did, which is with contempt and hostility.
14:38 Rund Abdelfatah? For some Black people, their experiences at the hands of police in northern progressive cities would rival the terror they experienced in the South.
14:48 Speaker 02 And part of the context for early modern policing by the late 1840s was that the immigrant population of Europeans, particularly the Irish, were generating in their own way a similar kind of social anxiety, xenophobic, nativist, racist reaction to what African Americans certainly were used to in the South with slave patrols and what antebellum black folks had been used to, who were free in northern cities in terms of being surveilled and controlled. The populations that made up early police officers were, unlike the slave patrols,
15:31 Speaker 02 made up of lower-class men, often men who were first-generation Americans. There was a early emphasis on people whose status was just a tiny notch better than the folks who they were focused on policing. And so the Anglo-Saxons are policing the Irish, or the Germans are policing the Irish, the Irish are policing the Poles. Black people are there, they're getting policed by everyone, but their numbers are fewer. And so this dynamic that's playing out is that police officers are a critical feature of establishing a racial hierarchy, even among white people.
16:20 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit from NPR and Throughline. If you want to hear the full-length Throughline episode about the history of policing, check out Policing America. And make sure to join us next Tuesday when we go to the center of the US Civil War, not to the battlefields, but to the often-forgotten presidential election that defined the war and its outcome.
16:46 Speaker 05 On the one side, you've got the Democratic opposition, considering Lincoln and the administration and the federal army to be a tyrannical force. On the other hand, you've got Lincoln and the National Union Party. They're offering a vision of a reunified nation no longer stained by slavery, true to the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence.
17:12 Rund Abdelfatah? That's next week. Don't miss it.
17:17 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music as always by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Naguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. We're your hosts, Rande Abdur-Fattah.
17:36 Speaker 06 And Ramtin Arablouei. Thank you for listening.
17:49 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
Previous How Bad Bunny took Puerto Rican independence mainstream Next Who profits from migrant detention? Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated