Racism in the Antebellum South (Pt. 8 of 9)

(Cont. from Part 7)

In Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) by escaped slaves Willaim and Ellen Craft, William desribes something of the power such slave patrols enjoyed in Georgia in his experience, even in routine times:

[T]he lowest villain in the country, should he be a white man, has the legal power to arrest, and question, in the most inquisitorial and insulting manner, any coloured person, male or female, that he may find at larege, particularly at night and on Sundays, without a written pass, signed by the master or some one in authority; or stamped free papers, certifying that the person is the rightful owner of himself.

If the coloured person refuses to answer questions put to him, he may be beaten, and his defending himself against this attack makes him an outlaw, and he be killed on the spot, the murderer will be exempted from all blame ...

Another escaped slave, Harriet Jacobs, in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) described what she witness in the panic following the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831:

It was a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority, and show their subserviency to the slaveholders; not reflecting that the power which trampled on the colored people also kept themselves in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation. ... At night, they formed themselves into patrol bands, and went wherever they chose among the colored people, acting out their brutal will. ...

The next day, the town patrols were commissioned to search colored people that lived out of the city; and the most shocking outrages were committed with perfect impunity. Every day for a fortnight, if I looked out, I saw horsemen with some poor panting negro tied to their saddles, and compelled by the lash to keep up with their speed, till they arrived at the jail yard. Those who had been whipped too unmercifully to walk were washed with brine, tossed into a cart, and carried to jail.

(Cont. in Part 9)