Francis Henderson

Among the most immediate dangers faced by runaways were the slave patrols that policed virtually every community, rural and urban, in the South. Patrollers could be either official agents of the state or volunteers from the white community, often drawn from the poorer, non-slaveholding classes. Many historians believe that the antebellum slave patrols were the forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan that emerged during the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War.

The duties of the slave patrols were multiple. They were charged not only with policing against slave insurrections and apprehending runaways, but also with enforcing the system of passes, without which a slave was not allowed off his or her owner's property, and with breaking up unauthorized, even informal meetings among bondsmen and women. Slave patrols functioned as a paramilitary vigilante force whose very presence was designed to...