Question 1

What does “patterollers” mean?

Accepted Answer

the slave patrols — armed white men who policed Black movement — as named in the mouths of the enslaved

Question 2

Where does “patterollers” come from?

Accepted Answer

Southern, from within slavery. Slave patrols were established by colonial law — South Carolina's dates to the early 1700s — and lasted until 1865, and enslaved people reshaped the official word 'patrollers' into their own: patterollers, paterollers, paddyrollers. The word is preserved exactly as spoken in the WPA Federal Writers' Project ex-slave narratives of 1936–1938, where formerly enslaved people across the South recall the patterollers by that name, and in the folk song 'Run, Nigger, Run,' documented as early as 1851, which turned the terror of the patrols into a coded warning and a defiant dance tune within the quarters. The term matters because it is testimony: the police power of slavery, named by the people it policed. Historians draw a direct line from the patrols to later Southern policing, which makes this piece of vocabulary a piece of evidence.