The following is adapted from my book,
White Power: Policing American Slavery (Hodding Carter III Books/University of North Carolina Press, 2026):
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.
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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.
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