White Power: Policing American Slavery by Gautham Rao
Published by University of North Carolina Press (2026)
White Power is not strictly about Reconstruction, in fact the title says it is about “Policing American Slavery,” so you may be wondering what the book may have to do with Reconstruction at all. The book is a lot more expansive than its title. It begins before the United States was even recognized as a country, going back to the 1600s. It shows the development of laws to keep Black people in slavery, and, it demonstrates that after slavery was ended methods developed to imprison slaves were adapted to the changed conditions under Reconstruction and Redemption. The book is also highly localized. The laws around slavery were not developed until after the first slaves arrived in what became the United States. Neither the King of England or the English Parliament had laws waiting on the dock for the first slaves imported into Jamestown, Virginia in 1619.
Author Gautham Rao quotes a Louisiana attorney in 1850 who said that “each” white person “is made a police officer,” and every African American “a criminal.” To get to the two universals of white police officer and Black criminal in two centuries required laws that developed empowering whites to exercise the police power without ever having been sworn in as law enforcement agents. And, for Black people, certain protections accorded to slaves during the first century of slavery had to be withdrawn to make the arrest, torture, and re-enslavement of African Americans legal and predictable. By the 1850s everyone knew that if a Black was not on his home plantation or factory he could be captured by whites without any protections against kidnapping. How did we get to that compromised legal situation?
In the South, 40% of the population was Black and 60% were white. While that might seem like an overwhelming advantage in white over Black, the majority of white people were not slave owners and the professional slave catchers were fairly few. There were organizations like the “slave patrols” in which white men rode around to capture escaped slaves, but these patrols were staffed by men who made their living in other occupations. Patrollers were like modern day Auxiliary Police. They were helpful in keeping slaves down, but many times there was no presence of the patrols at all.
According to Rao, “Enslavers’ solution was to transform their whiteness into police power and to make themselves the police. When a white person appeared in public, their white skin was like an officer’s badge. It made them deputies to the state with a duty to be vigilant over enslaved people, to question and investigate those who struck them as potential threats. Whiteness also came with the power of arrest—to seize or incarcerate. Most importantly, it gave white people the right to violence. They could seize or assault an enslaved person who didn’t comply with their order. They could form armed posses and attack suspicious people of color. Sometimes this right to violence gave them the right to kill.”
Turning almost all the white people of a region into informal slave police seems to conflict with American values as stated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Those documents provide for due process of law, designated officers of government, the prohibition on warrantless searches, seizures, and arrests, the right to trial by jury, etc. Yet in the South a white man could question any Black man or woman about their status and could, without probable cause, take the Black person into custody. This would ordinarily be considered kidnapping, but under the laws of the Southern states this behavior was legally recognized.
The enslavers, whose wealth was tied up in slavery, pushed an ideology of race-based permission for ordinary white people to enforce the law regarding white supremacy.
Enslavers had the largest amount of capital in the United States. The value of slaves was greater than all of the factories of the North. Slaves running away was a direct threat against their wealth and control. When slaves ran away, it disrupted their households which relied on enslaved African Americans to perform daily work in the enslaver’s home. It also caused very problematic disturbances in the plantations and factories where slaves provided an overwhelming portion of the labor. This threatened not only the enslaver, but the merchants and white laborers who relied on those plantations and factories for their own occupations. Enslavers held up the threat that Blacks held to the white community if they ran away. Gao writes that “Revolt. Mutiny. Uprising. Insurgency. Rebellion. Insurrection” were the consequences if the Black race was not controlled. Over the next two centuries the enslaver-dominated governments in the South used common English policing structures to criminalize escaped slaves. As slavery went into decline in the West Indies and French and English “slave-owners” moved their slaves to America, the Southern states started to adopt policies from Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti. The states also developed their own strategies to suppress African American freedom seekers and spread those strategies throughout the South.
Because the American concept of “slave policing” was so widespread and involved many who were not slave owners, it lasted long after slavery was declared illegal under the 13th Amendment. Gao says that “The racism that powered slave policing for centuries was so deeply embedded in American life that parts of slave policing survived slave emancipation and cast dark shadows that stretched well into the twentieth century.” The evolution and persistence of white attitudes and institutions is one of the subjects of this book.
While slavery was introduced into Virginia in 1619, Blacks held in bondage were not called “slaves” until thirty years later. Only a few dozen Blacks were held as slaves in 1620, but by 1670 there were 2,000 enslaved Africans in that colony. By 1700, there were 25,000 slaves in Virginia and slavery played a major part in the economy.
During the first years of slavery, a slaveowners recourse if a slave ran away was to pursue and capture him or her. By 1640, laws began to be passed in legislatures, that were dominated by slaveowners. to involve the state in the recapture of the runaway Blacks and also in the prosecution of anyone who helped them escape. In 1641, Maryland passed a law describing the runaway slave as a “fugitive,” placing the Black on the same level as an escaped convict. As slaves often ran to other colonies, the slaveholding colonies formed alliances where a Black who escaped Virginia for Maryland could be captured in that state and be brought back to Virginia.
As local sheriffs were often involved in arresting runaways, public funds were used to compensate them giving them a material interest in capturing Blacks and sustaining slavery.
In 1691, South Carolina passed the “Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves.” The new law was being advocated by slaveowners who moved from Barbados to South Carolina to pursue rice cultivation with slaves imported from their old plantations. The 1691 Act was modeled on the law of Barbados. The law allowed any white person to question any Black person, not under the immediate and direct supervision of a white person, about his status. If the white person was not satisfied with the proof that the Black person had permission to be about their business, the white inquirer had the power to arrest the Black. This essentially turned every white person into a racial police officer. The law immunized the arresting white person.
This legal control of slaves was not only restricted to the South. In 1702 New York passed the “Act for Regulateing [sic] of Slaves.” The law provided for a “whipper” to torture runaways. In 1712 the New York law was put to work executing captured slave rebels in Manhattan. Revolts were discovered in New Orleans in 1731. The Stono Rebellion took place in Charleston in 1739. By the second half of the 18th Century there were even more reports of slave rebellions. Whereas capturing runaway slaves was primarily to protect the “property” rights of white men, suppressing slave rebellions protected the white control of the colony where the rebellion occurred. According to Rao, “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.” Because many whites feared that enslaved Blacks would unite with an invading force from Spain or France, the slave patrols served a militia function. The slaves they captured could be executed as punishment for threatening white control.
The 1704 Slave Patrol Law in South Carolina commanded the militiamen in the slave patrol to bring a good horse and a pistol or gun and at least twelve cartridges. The patrol consisted of ten militia men, enough to give them a numerical and a firepower advantage over all but the most organized slave rebellions. The unit could ride into any plantation, question the inhabitants, capture any runaways, and suppress any form of rebellion. Even in my youth, I recall white people approaching Blacks on the streets and asking them why they were in our neighborhood, a leftover from the days of slave patrolling.
In 1740 a slave patrol law was passed in South Carolina which said, in part, that “Forasmuch as many late horrible and barbarous massacres have been actually committed, and many more designed, on the white inhabitants of this Province, by negro slaves, who are generally prone to such cruel practices, which makes it highly necessary that constant patrols should be established and kept in the several militia districts of this Province, for the better preventing any future insurrections or cabals of the said slaves.” This new law identified the threat of Black insurrection as always being present. Other states followed the South Carolina model.
The American Revolution presented a temporary crisis for slavery. The breakdown of public order as the Royal Governors were cast out and the mobilizing of men to fight the British meant that the means of control were evaporating. When the British offered freedom to Blacks who escaped to British lines, slave owners realized that the King’s Forces were an active army of abolitionists.
When the new Union was being constructed in the 1780s, Southern states insisted that police powers be reserved for the states. This meant that these states could resurrect the slave patrols and other means to control the Black population without interference from non-slaveholding states. Also, after the British courts had adopted the Somerset rule that a slave reaching a free territory was freed, the Constitutional Convention put in the Fugitive Slave Clause which gave slaveowners the right to pursue escaped slaves into free states. Over the next half-century as Northern states abolished slavery and their populations became increasingly critical of slavery, Southern states took increased actions against defiance shown by Blacks in their states.
The revolt against the French by Haitians after the passage of the U.S. Constitution and the American attack on Canada during the War of 1812 led to new fears that slaves would ally with Black rebels from Haiti or with British soldiers. Also, the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase meant that American slavery was right next to Mexico, a likely place of shelter for refugee American Blacks. Nat Turners 1831 revolt added the complication of Southern whites panicky response to what was described as a mad slaughter by Black people in Virginia. Of course the greater slaughter was of Blacks by whites in their suppression of the revolt. In response to the dread white people felt out of these three incidents, those few protections available to slaves were withdrawn and policing became more intense. Blacks were cut off from religious observances because the gathering of slaves was seen as having an insurrectionary potential. States also began passing laws requiring free Black people to leave their states to prevent non-enslaved Blacks from encouraging rebellions. Southern Congressman advocated a prohibition on abolitionist newspapers being circulated in the South by mail. Some states created laws blocking the freeing of slaves since the Freedmen were now seen as security threads.
Rao says that after 1831 “an established system of slave policing had been developing [in the South] for decades or even centuries, depending on where one was standing. There, enslavers had the legal authority to use force and violence to capture runaways. When they traveled north of the line, however, enslavers had only the letter of their constitutionally protected rights to arrest and rendition fugitive slaves. What they didn’t have was enough force or violence to use their rights. The Fugitive Slave Clause and Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, which Southern states had trumpeted as victories for their way of life and for the legitimacy of slavery, now looked like nothing more than paper guarantees.” In the 1850s, the Southern states tried to Federalize the authority to recapture escaped slaves. While these same states would say in the 1860s that they were dedicated to preserving “state’s rights,” in the 1850s they passed legislation and fought court cases that wiped out Northern states’ ability to keep slavery out of their boundaries.
Chief Justice Taney explained, according to Rao, that “Enslavers had their constitutional authority to pursue and reclaim their property, but if they needed it, they should be able to “call” state officials like sheriffs and constables to their “aid.” It was as though the enslaver were the law enforcer, and the state officials composed the posse comitatus. Taney explained that his ideal version already existed in his home state of Maryland and the rest of the South. There, “officers are, by law, required to arrest” and incarcerate runaways until “the master has an opportunity” to claim them. For Taney, then, the solution was simple: Just export the Southern states’ slave policing laws to the North.”
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 brought the legal situation to a head. Southern men could pursue escaped slaves into Northern states and arrest them and return them to slavery in spite of opposition by the Northern states. By the end of the decade, the Dred Scott Decision further set the country on the road to Civil War.
Many Southern leaders believed that the majority of Northern whites wanted Blacks kept out of their states and that most Northerners hated the Abolitionists. They did not see their activities as driving a wedge between them and white Northern voters, but as the slaveowners arrogated more power to themselves Northern resentment grew. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 said that “all good citizens are hereby commanded to aid and assist . . . whenever their services may be required.” Every white man in the North was now subject to being jailed if he did not care to arrest a slave. Those whites who were arrested risked being charged with treason. Abolition was growing, but even more was the development of anti-slavery politics which birthed the Republican Party.
The Civil War, which was started to defend slavery, was the end of policing for slavery. In the 1850s, about 3,000 slaves ran away each year for the North. After 1862, hundreds of thousands ran away to Union lines, thereby making themselves free. Once they were free, they joined an armed attempt to end slavery with tens of thousands joining the United States Colored Troops. Nat Turner’s Rebellion seemed to have had a massive 1860s revival.
When slavery ended, Southern whites asked themselves this question according to Rao; “Could slave policing laws exist without slavery? In the war’s waning days, ex-Confederates launched a revanchist counterrevolution to salvage what they could of the old slave policing laws, especially the white right to violence, deputization, and racist policing institutions. Now those things were technically illegal. No matter. On the plantations, county roads, town squares, and cityscapes where only a few years before, pass laws, slave patrols, vigilance committees, and militias had once targeted runaways, outlaws, and insurrectionists, white supremacists now used deadly violence to reestablish a social order that closely resembled their earlier maintenance of public order during slavery. As war gave way to peace, this white supremacist “climate of terror” kept alive the spirit of the old slave policing laws.”
Former Confederate leaders tried to reestablish the slave patrols to keep Blacks tied to their old plantations, keep them from moving away with threats of physical punishment, discipline the labor of Blacks, and keep them out of the professions. And, of course, keep Blacks from organizing politically. Gao writes that “Most ex-Confederates acknowledged the end of slavery, but some nonetheless began to reconstruct what they could of their prewar vigilance, violence, and public control—now to be exercised over emancipated people. In these efforts to ensure Black subordination to white supremacy, terroristic violence filled the void left by slave policing—though it often appeared to be very similar. But this resurgence of white power was technically not the law. After emancipation, whiteness no longer included with the legal right to violence and duty to racial vigilance. Nonetheless, in the aftermath of war, the distinction between bygone slave policing laws and white terroristic violence was blurry.”
While Confederate veterans could not make the laws after 1867, they could still use brute force to “police” the Black population. The lessons learned over the last two hundred years and the white consciousness that had developed since Nat Turner’s Rebellion were still operable. The slave patrols were replaced by armed paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the numerous Conservative Gun Clubs which brought deadly violence to Black communities. By 1877 this sub rosa violence led to white supremacists taking back control of all the Southern states, including those with Black majorities.
As Reconstruction retreated, former Confederates like General Wade Hampton and former Vice-President Alexander Stevens were elected as mayors, governors, and senators after Blacks were denied the right to vote fairly. This political class empowered the paramilitaries to carry out their reign of terror with the backing of the state.
I have done quite a bit of reading about slave patrols and post-war armed white supremacist organizations, but White Power expands what I have read before. It traces the predecessors back to the founding of the slave system, looks at the spread of a white supremacist ideology to create popular backing for violently opposing Black freedom, as well as the persistent example of what the solutions before the war had on Reconstruction white supremacism. This is a great book. It is engagingly written (and it is short).
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