When they took him, he didn’t go quietly. He kicked and punched and screamed, “I’m in the hands of kidnappers!” The captors didn’t have uniforms. Bystanders saw a gang of white men descend on a defenseless Black man. Only the most well-informed among them would have known that the violent gang were cops. And they were doing their official duty to bundle away their victim, first to the courthouse, and then to be sent to a distant place.
This wasn’t in Minneapolis or LA. And the kidnappers weren’t ICE. The year was 1851 and the victim was a Black man named Thomas Sims, who was arrested for the crime of being a fugitive slave.
Thomas Sims—or Simms—freed himself from slavery on February 21, 1851 by stowing away on the M. & J.C. Gilmore, which regularly plied the waters between Savannah, Georgia, and Boston. Sims managed to hide away for most of the two-week voyage but was discovered and detained as the Gilmore approached Boston. Sims tried to con his way out of captivity but the captain wasn’t buying it. Just before the Gilmore landed in Boston, Sims escaped “his prison” cell on board and made it on shore. In Boston, Sims embraced his new freedom to the point of recklessness as his former owner, James Potter, caught wind of his whereabouts. Potter shipped a gang of slavecatchers up to Boston. Under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Potter could deputize these men and Boston Police officers to do his dirty work as a posse or posse comitatus. On April 12, 1851, Potter’s posse—which now included a phalanx of U.S. Marines, Boston Police, City Watch, and white volunteers—marched a wailing Sims on board a ship headed back to Savannah and a life of slavery.
For Black people like Thomas Sims, this was what the rule of law could look like in nineteenth-century America: racist, surveilling, and violent. That’s because Thomas Sims’ very existence was a threat to white society. He, and the others who sought nothing more than to live free, constituted a public emergency that required emergency powers like the posse comitatus and military force.
***
There’s no straight line between early America and today. But the roots of present-day illiberalism lie in the centuries old police state that slaveholders built to control their most valuable commodity.
What were enslavers so afraid of? After all, enslavers were the ones with the whips, guns, attack dogs, patrols, police powers, and militias. And yet, over time, enslavers became consumed with fears of slaves on the loose in public—where they might go, what they might do, and what they might become. But any slave who was not under the control of a master confounded enslavers—especially the runaway slave.
We’ll never know exactly how many enslaved people ran away, but Southern newspapers were full of ads from masters trying to track down runaways. Enslaved people ran for any number of reasons—to see a loved one, to protest harsh punishment, to steal some time away from brutal working conditions, for example. Some wanted to permanently escape and self-emancipate. Others were willing to remain in an enslaving community, living a precarious existence as “undocumented” migrant refugees in the shadows of Southern cities. Girls and women ran away aplenty, as did boys and men. Most runaways did not go very far or stay away for too long. Enslavers sometimes tortured those they caught by whipping, burning, branding, or mutilating them. But they kept running away. No matter how horrific the punishments and formidable the obstacles, they never stopped. The same was true for the enslaved revolutionaries who used violence—or wanted to—to destroy their captors and create their own society. They knew they faced impossible odds and barbaric reprisals. But they tried anyway. This persistence cut to the heart of enslavers fear because it exposed the lie of mastery and of slavery itself: it wasn’t possible to turn a human being into property
But it wasn’t just capitalism or manhood that inspired enslavers to turn to policing, it was enslavers’ fear that runaways could seek freedom or vengeance. Revolt. Mutiny. Uprising. Insurgency. Rebellion. Insurrection—enslavers used these terms interchangeably for moments when enslaved people disrupted public order, betrayed the trust of their captors, and waged war against enslavers’ mastery. They became obsessed with stories of rebellions that came to pass, such as St. John, Tacky’s Rebellion, Berbice, Tula, Demerara, and most importantly, the Haitian Revolution. These battles were evidence that when slaves became rebels they became “internal enemies” who were hell-bent on racial apocalypse. In the enslavers paranoid style, the very next ‘slave insurrection’ was always just around the corner. In this framework of fear, every unsupervised enslaved person in public, every missing slave, and every runaway was an emergency because any one of them could be a conspirator or potential revolutionary. It was as if enslavers were stuck in a permanent emergency
As a permanent emergency, a runaway and potentially rebellious enslaved person posed a unique threat to public safety. But the law offered enslavers hope. Enslavers, and early Americans more generally, were used to using the law to protect “the public good” against immoral or irresponsible people, environmental problems, public health crises, and other disruptions of public order. They drew on the idea of “police power,” in which government deployed its legal authority to preserve public order and the public good. Most often, police power was used to justify regulations about health, safety, and morality, but it also included security, and policing—including policing slaves.
By thinking of enslaved people as a permanent emergency, white enslavers trapped themselves into the impossible need for permanent policing—unceasing vigilance, and violent force at the ready at all times, and in all places. Slave patrols may have resembled the sheriff’s posse comitatus to arrest a criminal, but they didn’t wait for a sheriff for a summons. Rather, if the threat of runaways was permanent, the slave patrol had to be permanent, too. Slave patrols kept records and answered to higher-ups. Since they were government officials using the state’s sovereign authority, they were largely immune from prosecution if they hurt or killed an enslaved person while on duty. The idea of deputizing whiteness for more routine, day-to-day policing was even more radical. Southern colonies and states didn’t like paying taxes, so they didn’t have the kind of money it would take to appoint enough sheriffs or constables to do the job. So they redistributed policing authority to ordinary white people to be vigilant over and violent toward enslaved people. They collapsed the distinction between the public officer and the private white citizen by appropriating the sheer violent power embodied by a master to serve the state. Enslavers had discretion to decide when they acted as the state. They gave themselves the right to use force, and equate their force with the law. They were the state.
***
Who has the right to violence? For much of American history, the answer was enslavers. In modern America, though, it is the police. And who are the police? Government officers entrusted to enforce laws and maintain public safety, with uniforms, those bulky vests, badges, batons, guns, tasers, and squad cars with flashing lights and blaring sirens. Police departments grew exponentially in the twentieth century. The invention of the automobile created new violations and crimes that needed policing. The Prohibition era from 1920 to 1933 required more officers to root out the scourge of alcohol. After World War II, moral panics fueled a national “war” with two fronts: crime and drugs. The prison-industrial complex became big business as courts funneled people into an ever-expanding network of public and private prisons. What historians call the “carceral state”—the theory and practice of incarceration as the solution to public policy crises—was taking shape.
Today, of course, there are passionate disagreements about policing, especially the question of when and why officers should use force. According to researchers, police kill several hundreds of people per year and injure several hundred-thousands more. Social justice activists argue that the police are too violent. Since many victims of police violence are Black men, critics such as the Black Lives Matter movement protest the disproportionate targeting of racial and ethnic minorities. Backed by big donors and media access, police departments and unions push back hard with movements like Back the Blue and Blue Lives Matter—the latter featuring American flag defaced by a “thin blue line” against a black background which “represents chaos and anarchy.” Police justify violence because they claim they are besieged by danger, and courts have agreed: If an officer “feared for [their] life,” their use of violence is often considered justified, so victims of police conduct have no recourse. Modern policing bestows police officers with virtually limitless authority to use violence.
But policing slavery gave this authority to almost every white person—it made every white person a deputy or a police officer. It was white power. So how did we go from white power policing to modern policing?
To build the modern policing leviathan, the state had to centralize policing authority and redistribute it to thousands of new officers. This, in turn, meant that the old system had to be dismantled. And that would happen through a white supremacist silencing of history. When that process was complete, centuries of racist and violent public law were all but disappeared beneath the pernicious myth of the omnipotent and benevolent enslaver.
America’s slave policing laws and practices all but disappeared from the historical record in the early twentieth century. For one thing, as the United States embraced bureaucracy and modernized policing, older institutions like the posse comitatus, slave patrol, and deputized white citizenry no longer even seemed like the work of government. But the ideological movement to hide the brutality of slavery behind the myth of the benevolent slaveholder was an even more important force in obscuring the history of slave policing. This was connected to the myth of the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, in which treasonous secessionists were recast as honorable patriots, and in which enslavers were repackaged as genteel and refined.
No one did more to obscure the history of slave policing than historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who taught at the University of Wisconsin, Tulane, the University of Michigan, and finally at Yale. He had earned his PhD at Columbia University under the tutelage of William A. Dunning, a white supremacist whose commitment to whitewashing the bloody history of Reconstruction was passed down to his prolific students—“The Dunning School,” they would come to be called. Arguably, Phillips’s most important book was his 1918 American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor, as Determined by the Plantation Regime. After spending several hundred pages establishing just how rosy life was for everyone—including enslaved people—on the antebellum plantation, Phillips finally gets to the history of slave policing. It was true, Phillips explained, that in the old days, “all white persons . . were permitted, and in some regards required, to exercise police power over the slaves.” In fact, he conceded, the “laws for securing slave property and the police of the colored population were as thorough and stringent as their framers could make them.” But it was all for show, according to Phillips. Southern white men, after all, were so “individualistic” that they were “incapable” of enforcing laws. White men “were too fond of their liberties to serve willingly as martinets in the routine administration of their own laws.” Slave patrols and militias were “futile and farcical.” Officers “tended toward a similar slackness.” Slaveowners were “easy-going” but refused to stand for “any abuse of their slaves, whether by private persons or public functionaries.” The truth was that enslavers had beaten, killed and disappeared tens of thousands of Black people. But just like that, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips disappeared the history of slave policing.
Phillips was lying. And he knew better; so, too, did his contemporaries, who spread the lie that benevolent masters and happy slaves had no need for policing. Phillips’s papers are now housed in Yale University’s Archives and Manuscripts collection in the beautiful Sterling Memorial Library. His papers include his elaborate notes from old newspapers and diaries that he transcribed on small pieces of paper and notecards, including voluminous mentions of runaways, slave insurrections, and other events that required the Southern colonies and states to exert their public system of policing enslaved people. But these facts couldn’t be squared with the image of the kind and gentle enslaver or with the romantic version of slavery that Phillips was desperate to sell. Most critics bought it, hook, line and sinker. It fell, of course, to the Black intelligentsia to point out how pervasively Phillips’s bias resulted in a quasi-fictional history of slavery. Why there were so many slave insurrections if slaves were as “contented” as Phillips claimed? This question was pointedly asked by Carter Woodson, who is widely considered to be one of the modern founders of African American history. W. E. B. Du Bois pulled no punches: The book was “a defense of American slavery—a defense of an institution which was at best a mistake and at worst a crime.” Despite Woodson’s and Du Bois’s warnings, Phillips’s book would have staying power and remained the leading history of American slavery until the 1950s. Even when historians, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, began to follow the lead of Du Bois and others and explore the history of enslavement, slave policing remained obscure for most.
But not for all. Woodson popularized an approach to Black history for Black students—usually in segregated schools—that recovered and valorized the very stories of enslaved people’s disruptive acts of running away, fugitivity, and rebellion that professional historians had whitewashed from the historical record. As historian Jarvis R. Givens explains, Black school-teachers’ textbooks and syllabi as well as Woodson’s own work was a radical, subversive historiography that emphasized the “historical achievements of Afro-diasporic peoples in service of and as models for larger political goals of racial advancement.” Another Black historian, John Hope Franklin, would level a devastating blow against the Dunning School’s dominance. Franklin was a historian of immense renown who would go on to chair the History Department at the University of Chicago. In fact, I got the idea for this book while I was in the department’s John Hope Franklin room. Franklin’s 1956 book The Militant South, 1800–1861 rightly argued that the South was awash in violence by white enslavers, though Franklin saw this as private behavior that “discouraged the growth of strong law enforcement agencies.” It wasn’t until Sally Hadden published her remarkable Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas in 2003—a book to which this book is also deeply indebted—that we began to see just how drastically Ulrich Bonnell Phillips had silenced this enormous chapter of the American past. Hadden revealed how the slave patrols were but one part of “the public regulation of slavery.” This was an entire system of law and policing. It was the enslavers’ government at work.
Perhaps the most telling sign about the enormity and importance of the enslavers’ old slave policing system is the fact that even as it faded into obscurity beneath the weight of modern policing and white supremacist ideology, it never quite died. Instead, it reappeared frequently, almost exclusively as a tool for white supremacists, who occasionally tried to claim that their whiteness gave them the right to violence and the authority to be deputies to the state. And it is back today.
The Ku Klux Klan returned in the 1920s in response to increasingly vocal activism by the NAACP and others. The “second” Klan still tortured and murdered Black Americans—and also targeted Jews, Catholics, and others. But the new Klan was also legally incorporated, highly organized, boasted millions of members across the country, and was determined to capture local and state governments. In this more centralized and institutional approach, white vigilance looked very different. The Colorado Klan had such a stranglehold on local government that one critic worried that the so-called invisible empire was “now functioning as the visible government.” The Klan prioritized the capture of local law enforcement, either by infiltration or pressure—after all, gaining access to the inner workings of government was more efficient than deputization. The Klan encouraged each local chapters to create a “Law Enforcement Committee” to “advise the Klan and Klansmen as to how they may assist in a law enforcement program.” By controlling law enforcement, the Klan not only ensured its own protection but also owned the state’s eyes, ears, and batons. While the Klan’s approach was more sophisticated, vigilance remained its “stock in trade.” So-called Imperial Wizard Dr. H. W. Evans called the Klansmen’s vigilance “Klan Vision.” With law enforcement in their pocket, the Klan wanted the public to think it could see everything. The Kansas Klan sent notices to those they were watching: “We are here. See for yourselves. We mean business. Law violators, this is your warning to change your habits or we will call on you. Officers do your duty!” They were always watching, pledged a Kansas Klansman, to prevent “Lawlessness” and “Anarchy.”
The second Klan faded sharply by the end of the 1920s, but a third wave crashed down hard on the American South after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregation and the law of the color line. Now that racial equality was the formal law of the land, the Klan and other paramilitary groups became something closer to terrorists than self-defined deputies of the state. And its terrorism was on display for all to see, such as in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and in mass murders such as the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In the wake of such violence, explains historian Kathleen Belew, “public opinion” eventually forced “the Klan underground.” But the virulent racism quickly resurfaced during the explosion of white nationalism that followed the Vietnam War, when disgruntled white communities blamed the government for abandoning them while supposedly protecting ethnic and racial minorities. The Klan followed other extremist groups’ lead, identifying as being at “war” with the state. The government, the Klan argued, had betrayed them and destroyed the “white homeland.” So now, instead of seeing themselves as deputies to the state, the Klan and related groups wanted to “destabilize the federal government, and waged revolutionary race war.” Meanwhile, pro-segregationists channeled their legal energies into Citizen’s Councils. For the low cost of $3.00 per year, you, too, could join the fight in Mississippi “to preserve State’s Rights and racial integrity, as well as to combat the action of the NAACP and other radical left-wing groups”; or you could “tune in” to the Council’s weekly TV show.
For much of the late twentieth century, white supremacists continued to consciously style themselves as deputies to the state in one key context: immigration. This strand of nativist vigilance also has a long history that scholars have closely documented. Historian Erika Lee, for example, has explained how, in the early 1900s, federal immigration officials who were desperate to hire more officers to enforce the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act turned to “special agents, commonly known as ‘Chinese catchers,’” to seize and deport Chinese migrants. After the immigration influx of the 1960s, white supremacist groups began to bill themselves as deputies to the US border police forces. In 1977, the Klan’s national director (and future Republican candidate for president) David Duke created the Klan Border Watch to drive along California’s border with Mexico. If Klansmen spotted any border crossers, the Border Watch pledged to “use CB radios to relay the information to the border patrol.” Some years later, Glenn Spencer founded Voices of Citizens Together and the American Border Patrol (ABP) to scaremonger against immigrants. Spencer later relocated to Sierra Vista, Arizona, where his ABP conducted drone surveillance of border crossings to share with law enforcement. In Texas, a member of the Ranch Rescue group claimed to have made more than twelve thousand “citizen’s arrests” at the border.
Another twentieth-century strain of the pernicious mix of vigilance, violence, and vigilantism for which white people believe they have policing authority was the neighborhood crime watch. Convinced that criminals were coming for them, scared suburbanites took matters into their own hands. They put “this is a crime watch neighborhood” stickers on stop signs and styled themselves “as adjuncts to the local police department” in the belief that “they had the power to surveil and police and could avoid being regulated themselves.” Some communities hired private security officers to patrol their streets in marked cars. Someone was always watching.
***
Two decades into the twentieth-first century, terrifying strands of the white power approach to slave policing are again coming into view. Sectors of American society have already for some years gravitated toward the dangerous, highly racist view that white people—mostly men—need to take it upon themselves to guard the nation from threats, foreign and domestic. The National Rifle Association (NRA) is not the only source of this message, but as political scientist Alexandra Filindra shows, the NRA sold the image of its gun-toting membership “as defenders of public authority,” or as “police auxiliaries” determined “to protect the nation and public order.” Language and imagery from the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine left no doubt that these “police auxiliaries” were white, while “urbanites”—code for Black people and other minorities—were the troublemakers. For the NRA during the tumultuous urban crises of the 1960s, armed Americans who were “prepared for any threat that might appear at one’s doorstep” kept the peace and deterred racial apocalypse.
In the late twentieth century, the NRA sowed distrust of government, especially of the federal government, because gun control laws—in their version of things—threatened to leave the white “police auxiliaries” at the mercy of evildoers. Gun-ownership and white vigilance was needed now more than ever, not only to maintain order but to prevent government from victimizing white citizens. Thus arose the NRA’s mantra that the government “was coming to take your guns.” Historian Andrew R. McKevitt identifies how, in this “worldview of enemies everywhere and security only in endless vigilance,” the right to bear arms became endlessly intertwined with visions of white male commitment to protecting the “security” of self “and community.” The right-wing militia movement that captured national attention through events like Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing and organizations like Posse Comitatus had been brewing for some time, but it spawned a renewed alignment between “arming in defense of the Constitution and abstract notions of freedom.” In its infamous 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision, the US Supreme Court created an individual right to own a firearm based in part on similar logic and on a fictional rendering of American history: “When the able-bodied men of a nation are trained in arms and organized, they are better able to resist tyranny.” Apparently the highest court in the land believed such a time was now.
The US Supreme Court’s decision in Heller dovetailed with another legal development that evoked specters of the old slave policing regime, the so-called Stand Your Ground laws. At stake in these laws is nothing less than a fundamental reorganization of how we define public space and to whom we grant the legal authority to police it. In American law, you can defend yourself by using force without committing a crime, but only if you first at least try to retreat to avoid the confrontation. The big exception to this rule is if a person is defending themselves in their own home. A man’s home is his castle, and in what came to be known as the castle doctrine, a person can use force to defend themselves in their own home without first retreating. During the twentieth century, some state courts expanded this right to violence to include one’s yard or lot, not just the interior of the home. And what about if you are occupying your own property but you are in public space, such as if you are driving your car on a public road? Do you have to retreat first before using violence if you believe you are under threat and are defending yourself? Put differently, what matters more, the individual’s private right of self-defense without first trying to retreat or diffuse tension; or the public’s right to be safe? In more than half of the American states, the individual’s right outweighs the public’s. As Florida’s “stand your ground” provision puts it, an individual can use “deadly force” if “he or she reasonably believes that using or threatening to use such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony.” “Stand your ground” laws expand a person’s “castle” not only to self-defense in public but also to the protection of others and the prevention of other “forcible” crimes. Just like the slave policing laws from centuries past, “Stand your ground” laws deputize citizens and clothe them with policing powers by envisioning them as guardians of public safety. Jennifer Carlson, who has extensively researched gun violence in America, deems this phenomenon the invention of legions of “citizen-protectors.”
In a world free of racial prejudice and other inequalities, one might imagine that “stand your ground” laws would lead to similar fatality rates among all peoples and groups. But in the real world, the laws have had a very different effect. In the real world, a white man who is a community patroller can confront a Black teenager who happens to be walking and talking on the phone; and when the confrontation makes the patroller feel unsafe, he can murder the Black teenager. In this same world, a Black man out for a run who stops to look at a construction site is seen as a threat by nearby white men—one a former cop. “There’s a Black male running down the street.” That is enough for the suspicious white men to murder the Black jogger. They were just standing their ground.
***
Are we backsliding into a world in which government delegates policing to people who have armed themselves with social power, legal authority, and the right to violence? A world in which white vigilance justifies these citizens to act as deputies? In which masked men and women, armed to the hilt but without a warrant, can stop a person of color and demand to see their papers under threat of arrest and deportation? If so, and if in fact the rule of law is degenerating once again into the rule of force, in which law and power become one and the same, then the history of policing American slavery will provide centuries of legal practice and precedents. If this in fact is the case, restoring the rule of law becomes our imperative task. Our reconstruction begins by following activist Ida B. Wells’s advice: “Tell the world the facts” about “the alarming growth and extent of outlawry in our land,” and “some means will be found to stop it.”
[From White Power: Policing American Slavery by Gautham Rao. Copyright © 2026 by Gautham Rao. Published in the W. Hodding Carter III Books imprint of the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.]
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