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Although the U.S. Constitution formally instituted “militias” as state-controlled bodies that were subsequently deployed to wage wars against Native Americans, the voluntary militias described in the Second Amendment entitled settlers, as individuals and families, to the right to combat Native Americans on their own. However, savage war was also embedded in the U.S. Marines, established at independence, as well as the Special Forces of the Army and Navy, established in the mid-twentieth century. The Marine Corps was founded in 1775, a year after the thirteen colonies formed the Continental Congress and Army, a year before the Declaration of Independence, thirteen years before the U.S. Constitution was ratified forming the state, and twenty-three years before the U.S. Navy was founded. The following year, the Marines made their first landing, capturing an island in the Bahamas from the British, what in Marine Corps history is called “Fort Nassau.” In action throughout the Revolutionary War, the Marines were disbanded in 1783 and reorganized in 1794 as a branch of the United States Navy.
The character of a Marine is that of the colonial ranger, created for counterinsurgency outside U.S.-secured territory. The opening lyric of the eternal official hymn of the U.S. Marine Corps, composed and adopted in 1847, soon after the invasion of Mexico and during the occupation, is “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” Tripoli hearkens back nearly a half century to the “Barbary Wars” of 1801–15, when the Marines were dispatched to North Africa by President Thomas Jefferson to invade the Berber Nation, continuing this aggression, shelling the city, taking captives, and marauding for nearly four years, ending with the 1805 “Battle of Derna.” It was there they earned the nickname “leathernecks” for the high collars they wore as defense against the Berbers’ saber cuts. This was the “First Barbary War,” the ostensible goal of which was to persuade Tripoli to release U.S. sailors it held hostage and to end what the U.S. called “pirate” attacks on U.S. merchant ships. Actually, the Berbers were demanding that their sovereignty over their territorial waters be respected. The Berbers did not give up their demands, and the Marines were withdrawn, returning a decade later, in 1815–16, for the “Second Barbary War,” which ended when Pasha Yusuf Karamanli, ruler of Tripoli, agreed not to exact fees from U.S. ships entering their territorial waters. This was the first military victory of U.S. “gunboat diplomacy,” as it came to be called nearly a century later, when historians mark the beginning of U.S overseas imperialism. The Marines and military historians know better.
The Marine Corps’s second large engagement was the Second Seminole War, which raged from 1835 to 1842 in Florida, the longest war in U.S. history until Vietnam. The Second Seminole War during the Jackson administration has been identified with the extraordinary leader of the Seminole resistance, Osceola. It was all-out war with the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps involved. Although, they succeeded in killing Osceola, they lost the war as the Seminoles would not hand over the Africans who had escaped their slavers, which is what the United States demanded of them. The military did succeed in deporting captives, mostly women, children, and old men, to Indian Territory. Armed forces returned to try again in 1855, waging the Third Seminole War, but after four years of siege, lost again. Soon after, the Civil War and the abolition of slavery made further war against the Seminoles unnecessary.
Of course, the Marine Corps is associated with “the halls of Montezuma,” lyrics from their trademark hymn composed while they occupied Mexico City in 1847. While the U.S. Army invaded and occupied what is now California, Arizona, and New Mexico, the Marines invaded by sea and occupied Veracruz, using counterinsurgency tactics in their march to Mexico City, burning fields and villages, murdering and torturing civilian resisters. They occupied Mexico City, along with Army divisions, until the Mexican government, under brutal occupation, signed a dubious treaty transferring the northern half of Mexico to the United States. In Marine Corps annals, the 1847 “Battle of Chapultepec” is legion, a battle in which a handful of teenage Mexican cadets—the Chapultepec Castle was used as a military training school—with few weapons and little ammunition held off the Marines, killing most of them over two days of endless fighting in the castle, until the cadets themselves were dead and the remaining Marines raised the U.S. flag and wrote their hymn, tracing their genealogy to the invasion and occupation of Tripoli.
In a 2017 portrait of President Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, retired Marine Corps general James “Mad Dog” Mattis, journalist Dexter Filkins writes that Marines see themselves as a kind of warrior caste with “toughness under fire, and savagery in battle. Being much smaller than the Army, its budgets are skimpier and the equipment sometimes antiquated, while its fighters are often pitched into terrible conditions. But, the Marines take their scant resources as a source of pride. Where the Army scatters recruits across a vast institution that includes accountants and mechanics who have little contact with the harsher realities of military work, every Marine is trained as a rifleman, a combatant.”21
Later in the century, Marine actions, particularly the infamous war in the Philippines, and others up to the present, are well known, but they themselves take pride in their origins, which most U.S. Americans, including leftists, know little or nothing about. If they did, they would have to reconsider the overlooked violence in the nation’s founding narratives.
The United States is a militarized culture. We see it all around us and in the media. But, as military historian John Grenier notes, the cultural aspects of militarization are not new; they have deep historical roots, reaching into the nation’s racist settler past and continuing through unrelenting wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing over three centuries. Grenier writes, “Beyond its sheer military utility, Americans also found a use for the first way of war in the construction of an ‘American identity.’ … [T]he enduring appeal of the romanticized myth of the ‘settlement’ (not calling it conquest) of the frontier, either by ‘actual’ men such as Robert Rogers or Daniel Boone or fictitious ones like Nathaniel Bumppo of James Fenimore Cooper’s creation, points to what D.H. Lawrence called the ‘myth of the essential white American.’”22
The astronomical number of firearms owned by U.S. civilians, with the Second Amendment considered a sacred mandate, is also intricately related to militaristic culture and white nationalism. The militias referred to in the Second Amendment were intended as a means for white people to eliminate Indigenous communities in order to take their land, and for slave patrols to control Black people.
THREE
SLAVE PATROLS
Following the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles and the development of Cop Watch groups in cities around the United States, along with the widespread incarceration of Black men in the 1990s,1 what had long been known by scholars, but rarely acknowledged in media or history texts, became increasingly clear on a national level: The origins of policing in the United States were rooted in slave patrols.2
In a study of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas in 1700–1865, historian and law professor Sally E. Hadden writes: “People other than masters or overseers had legitimate rights, indeed, legal duties, to regulate slave behavior.”3 Black people escaping to freedom were hunted down to prevent labor loss to their white slavers, and also to send a message to those enslaved who might be strategizing to lose their chains through rebellion or insurrection.
Because chattel slavery was uncommon in the 1500s in England itself, the existing legal system that colonists brought to the early British colonies in North America did not suffice, so nearly all law related to slavery was forged in the colonies, borrowing from existing practices in Spanish, Portuguese, and English Caribbean plantation colonies, and specifically borrowing the use of slave patrols from the Caribbean and adapting them to local conditions on the continent.
The 1661 and 1688 slave codes in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados extended the task of controlling enslaved Africans from overseers and slavers to all white settlers, in effect shifting private responsibility to the public
. Any enslaved person outside the direct control of the slaver or overseer required passes and was subject to questioning by a slave patrol, as well as by any member of the European population; free Black men were denied such power. This collective racial policing was in addition to the traditional English constabulary that investigated and detained European residents for infractions of laws.
British slavers from Barbados moved in large numbers to the South Carolina colony after 1670, and brought the slave patrol practice with them.4 By 1704, the South Carolina colonial government had codified slave patrols and embedded them within the already existing volunteer militias, whose principal role was to repel Native Americans whose land they had appropriated. Members of slave patrols were drawn from militia rolls in every locale. The South Carolina structure of slave patrols was adopted in other colonies by the mid-eighteenth century and would remain relatively unchanged until the Civil War. Following U.S. independence, this structure and practice was applied to what became the Cotton Kingdom, following the U.S. wars against the Muskogee peoples that ended in their forced relocation to Indian Territory.5
Virginia was the first of the thirteen English settler colonies in North America, but there were fewer enslaved Africans there, and they were more widely dispersed than in South Carolina, as Virginia settlements were long surrounded by resistant Native communities. The Virginia militia was founded for one purpose: to kill Indians, take their land, drive them out, wipe them out. European settlers were required by law to own and carry firearms, and all adult male settlers were required to serve in the militia. Militias were also used to prevent indentured European servants from fleeing before their contracts expired, in which case they were designated “debtors.” Despite militia vigilance, many escaped on ships in ports.
During the 1660s and 1670s, Virginia settlers turned from indenturing Europeans to importing enslaved Africans, and by 1680, the enslaved were required to carry passes. Of course, slave uprisings increased, and in 1705, the Virginia colony enacted its first slave code and established slave patrols. Militia members, focused on attacking Indigenous towns and fields to expand the Virginia colony refused to participate in slave patrols, so the colonial authorities imposed harsh punishments to control the enslaved Africans, such as death for even mentioning rebellion. Colonists prohibited the enslaved Africans from holding meetings or learning how to read. In 1727, the Virginia colony enacted a law requiring militias to create slave patrols, imposing stiff fines on white people who refused to serve.6
After 1650, slavers in Virginia began expanding deeper into the territory of the Tuscarora Nation, and were the first English settlers in what became the North Carolina colony in 1729. During the first three decades of Virginia settler incursion, the colony’s militia was used solely to attack and burn down Tuscarora towns, incinerate their crops, and slaughter the families who resided there. By 1722, the embattled Tuscaroras joined the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) and migrated north for protection from settler terrorism, while some communities remained in severely deteriorating conditions.
In 1715, North Carolina’s slaver government began requiring passes for enslaved individuals who were in public spaces doing errands or rented out as craftsmen, as many were escaping from bondage to Spanish Florida or marooning in the swamps of Cape Fear. Militias were used for pursuing Africans escaping to freedom, but did not form specific slave patrols as a separate category. In 1753, fearing increasing slave rebellions, the North Carolina colony established what they called “searchers,” not drawn from the militias but authorized by courts; later they would be called “patrollers.” They were exempt from militia duty as well as from jury duty and taxation, and two decades later, actually were paid salaries.7
Public patrols of varying types were established in all the slave colonies, but, significantly, any individual, including free Blacks or Natives, could claim a reward for capturing a person escaping from slavery, a practice that continued until the end of the Civil War. If weapons were found with the captive, the catcher could collect compensation for the weapons or keep them.8
After Independence, rapid expansion of slavery into newly conquered Native territories brought a concurrent increase in slave patrols, but the basic structure remained. An 1860 judicial hornbook, The Practice at Law in North Carolina is an example:
The patrol shall visit the negro houses in their respective districts as often as may be necessary, and may inflict a punishment, not exceeding fifteen lashes, on all slaves they may find off their owner’s plantations, without a proper permit or pass, designating the place or places, to which the slaves have leave to go. The patrol shall also visit all suspected places, and suppress all unlawful collections of slaves; shall be diligent in apprehending all runaway negroes in their respective districts; shall be vigilant and endeavor to detect all thefts, and bring the perpetrators to justice, and also all persons guilty of trading with slaves; and if, upon taking up a slave and chastising him, as herein directed, he shall behave insolently, they may inflict further punishment for his misconduct, not exceeding thirty-nine lashes.9
In Slave Patrols, historian Hadden argues that the notion that slave patrols were made up of impoverished white men,10 as portrayed in Gone with the Wind and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is false. She cautions against conflating entrepreneurial individual “slave catchers” and slave patrollers. Whether rich or poor, all Euro American males were required to serve in militias and slave patrols, but the commanders of the patrols were property owners and slavers. Impoverished whites were not trusted and would be unable to compensate a slaver for the property loss entailed in a death or injury incurred during an attempted capture.11
Writing about slavery in the Cotton Kingdom during the decades before the Civil War, historian Walter Johnson points to the central role horses played in subjugating runaways. Horses were a symbol of power for slavers, not only for show and racing, but as a physical symbol of racial power. “The words ‘slave patrol’ summon to mind a vision of white men on horseback, an association so definitive that it elides the remarkable fact that the geographic pattern of county governance in the South emerged out of circuits ridden by eighteenth-century slave patrols.”12 It was not only the advantage of height and speed that a horse provided in pursuing a person on the run, but also the nature of the animal itself, its own power, the fear the huge, galloping animal could evoke, and the severe bodily harm it inflicted when it trampled a person or when the patroller tethered a bound captive to the horse.
Another tool was the widely distributed “wanted” flier that alerted the public to be on the lookout, which attracted Euro Americans from hundreds of miles away to hunt freedom-seekers for bounty. And of course, slavers used dogs. Resistant Africans marooned in the swamps, or if fleeing rested there, where horses could not travel and most settlers were afraid to enter. Bloodhounds were trained from pups to identify and hunt Black people. “‘Loyal’ to their masters (or those to whom their masters hired them) and able to travel more rapidly than any human being across even the most difficult ground, these weaponized dogs were implacable enemies, driven by a purpose beyond that of even their owners.”13
And above all, there were the guns. Historians Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette write:
Unlike England, Virginia was a gun culture. “Whereas in England, only men with estates valued at above one hundred pounds sterling were allowed to own guns,” writes Kathleen M. Brown, “English men in Virginia at all levels of property ownership were expected to own them… .” Guns and slavery were intimately associated with each other; all slave-raiding relied on guns, and all slaveholding relied on armed repression.14
By the early 1820s, slave-worked plantation agribusiness in Tidewater Virginia waned as the soils were degraded from mono-production and over-production, and investments moved to the Mississippi Valley. Nevertheless, slave patrols actually increased in Virginia, where the main commercial “crop” of the plantations was the enslaved person’s body, as farms turned into breeding fa
ctories to produce slaves to be sold in the Cotton Kingdom.15 Thomas Jefferson bragged to George Washington that the birth of Black children was increasing Virginia’s capital stock by 4 percent annually. It is estimated that in 1860 the total value of enslaved African bodies in the United States was $4 billion, far more than the gold and silver then circulating nationally ($228.3 million, “most of it in the North,” the authors add), total currency ($435.4 million), and even the value of the South’s total farmland ($1.92 billion).16
Like slave patrols in the Deep South, the Texas Rangers—formed primarily to kill Comanches, eliminate Native communities, and control colonized Mexicans to take their land—also hunted down enslaved Africans escaping to freedom. They began to operate in the 1820s, even before the population of slavers in the independent province of Texas had seceded from Mexico in 1836, when Mexico formally outlawed slavery. With the new border in place, enslaved Africans in Texas could escape into Mexico, often with the help of armed Seminoles and Kickapoos, who had fled to take refuge in Mexico rather than remain in Indian Territory, where they had been forced to migrate when the United States annexed their lands east of the Mississippi. They created a community west of Piedras Negras far inside Mexico, and a place for them to live freely. When the United States Army and Marines invaded and occupied Mexico, departing only when Mexico had ceded half its territory to the United States, these maroon communities were vulnerable. Slave hunting escalated, by the Rangers as well as by individual bounty hunters.17
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished legal chattel slavery, but the surveillance of Black people by patrols continued, as the occupying Union army took no concerted action against the patrols in most places (depending on the army commander), forcing formerly enslaved Africans to remain and work on plantations. Even with military vigilance, “patrolling” Black people continued as a form of organized terrorism, perpetrated especially by the Ku Klux Klan, which was founded for that very purpose nineteen months after the Civil War ended. The intensive military training and experience over four years of fighting in the Confederate Army produced a militaristic character to the formation of police forces and patrol techniques under Reconstruction; in addition, the Freedmen no longer even had the protection of being valued as property and collateral by former slavers, allowing for extreme forms of revenge violence against them.18