Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

Charleston formed a City Guard in 1783. It wore uniforms, carried muskets and swords, and maintained a substantial mounted division. Unlike the watchmen,t who walked their beats individually, the City Guard patrolled as a company. I I "Louis Tasistro, who traveled through Charleston in the 1840s, describedU42the patrol: "the city suddenly assumes the appearance of a great military garrison,and all the principal streets become forthwith alive with patrolling partiesof twenties and thirties, headed by fife and drum, conveying the idea of ageneral siege." I IH A few years later, in the early 1850s, J. Benwell, an Englishvisitor to Charleston, described the reaction of Black people to the mountingof the guard: "It was a stirring scene, when the drums beat at the Guardhouse in the public square ... to witness the negroes scouring the streets inall directions, to get to their places of abode, many of them in great trepidation,uttering ejaculations of terror as they ran."I I')Throughout the first part of the nineteenth century, similar urban patrolswere created in Savannah, Mobile, and Richmond. The Savannah guard carriedmuskets and wore uniforms as early as 1796. It was later equipped withhorses and pistols.l2O Richmond's Public Guard was formed in 1800, after thediscovery of a planned rebellion. It was assigned to protect public buildingsfrom insurrections, and was made responsible for punishing any slaves itfound out after curfew. 121The urban patrols, and the laws they enforced, were modeled on the systemdeveloped for the plantations. But cities with developing industries had differentneeds than did the surrounding rural areas, with their plantation economies.For one thing, the large numbers of Black people present in the city often livedin one part of town, away from their masters, making it impossible to maintainthe sort of intimate knowledge of the slave's comings and goings essential to theplantation system. Furthermore, rigid restrictions on daily travel were not evendesirable. proving inconw>nient for the budding industries. 1 n As burgeoningindustries sought out cheap sources of labor, the practice of "hiring out" slavesbecame increasingly common. Under this arrangement, slaves paid the master astipulated fee, and were then free to take other jobs at wages.12l The regulationson travel, then, had to be more flexible for slaves to do their work l24As the masters "capitalize [d] their slaves,"125 the bondsmen became, literally,wage slaves. Industrialization in Southern cities thus not only created new demandsfor social control, but threatened to alter the entire institution of slavery.The slavery system was based essentially on the agricultural regime andno other. Its system of control was fixed on the basis of the slave's foreverremaining a "field hand" or at best remaining attached to the plantation.But the city had other work for the slave to do which rendered the originalplan of regulation cumbersome and unsuitable.126Given the White population's preoccupation with controlling Black people, the practiceof hiring out slaves was quite controversial. As late as 1858 it was denounced ina grand jury ''Report of Colored Population." Spelling out the concerns of the Whitecommlll1ity, the report states:The evil lies in the breaking down of the relation between master andslave-the removal of the slave from the master's discipline and controland the assumption of freedom and independence on the part of the