North Carolina Establishes Colony-Wide Slave Patrol System

In 1753, North Carolina became the third English colony after South Carolina (1704) and Virginia (1727) to legislate a formal, colony-wide slave patrol system. North Carolina's patrol law required county militias to organize patrols empowered to stop any enslaved person off their enslaver's property without written authorization, to enter enslaved people's dwellings without a warrant, to break up any assembly of enslaved people, and to inflict summary corporal punishment. The spread of patrol legislation from colony to colony in the first half of the eighteenth century reflected the standardization of racial terror as state policy across the American South — each colony building on the previous, creating a model that would persist through the Civil War and whose institutional DNA shaped American policing well into the twentieth century.