Policing Rural Charleston, from Colonial Posse to County Sheriff

From the dawn of the Carolina Colony to the early twentieth century, residents of rural Charleston County enjoyed no police protection beyond their own vigilance. Ancient customs, imported from England and transformed by the institution of slavery, obliged free men to patrol their own neighborhoods on horseback, apprehend lawbreakers, and deliver them to justice. A paid, rural police force gradually emerged in the early 1900s, fostered by the proliferation of automobiles, and eventually led to the creation of the modern Sheriff’s Office in 1991.

The roots of all law enforcement agencies in South Carolina, and elsewhere in the former Anglo-American colonies, are firmly planted in a medieval law called the Statute of Winchester (13 Ed. I), which was ratified in October 1285 by King Edward I of England. Created more than two centuries after the Norman Conquest, this law represented a fusion of older Anglo-Saxon practices and newer Norman ideas about keeping the “king’s peace” throughout the land. The statute’s text, which you can read online, included three practical measures. First, as I discussed in Episode No. 66, the Statute of Winchester established a system of “watch and ward” in urban centers, performed by volunteer watchmen between sunset and sunrise, as a supplement to the duties performed by a pre-existing officer called a constable. Second, the statute of 1285 revived an Anglo-Saxon practice known as the “hue and cry,” which required citizens to assist in the broadcasting of information about criminal activity. Furthermore, all able-bodied free men responding to the hue and cry were required, if necessary, to participate in the posse comitatus—a Latin phase meaning “power of the county”—to pursue and apprehend fugitives of the law. The third measure was the “assize of arms,” which required every male between the ages of fifteen and sixty to possess and maintain arms, and to bear those arms for the public defense in times of emergency.[1]

From this quick summary of the Statute of Winchester, we can recognize the outline of our modern law enforcement services in Charleston and across the United States. The nocturnal watchmen of 1285 evolved into our municipal police departments that patrol urban and suburban areas. The Anglo-Saxon “hue and cry” and the posse comitatus formed the basis of both the sheriff’s department, which serves rural and unincorporated areas, and our modern highway patrol. The medieval duty to bear arms in case of emergency formed the cornerstone of both South Carolina’s robust colonial militia and the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Following the 1670 arrival of English settlers at what is now Charles Town Landing State Historic Site, the old traditions of hue and cry and posse comitatus constituted the only forms of law enforcement across the rural landscape of South Carolina. If you were a free white planter residing somewhere in the swampy Lowcountry, for example, and someone stole your horse, or your pig, or your enslaved servant, it was your responsibility to raise a hue and cry among your neighbors, to form an armed posse, and to pursue criminal suspects across the countryside. Similarly, if one of your neighbors raised a hue and cry, you were obliged to bear arms, join the posse, apprehend the suspect, and help deliver the prisoner to the proper authorities.

South Carolina’s earliest governors and their appointed executive councilors formed the entirety of the provincial judiciary during the late seventeenth century. To assist their judicial work, the governor evidently appointed sheriffs and “provost marshals” to maintain prisoners and execute sentences imposed by the executive court. The paucity of extant records from this early era frustrates our ability to identify these figures and their precise duties, especially because they deviated from English precedents. The sheriff in England was traditionally a significant judicial official, but the sheriffs of Proprietary-era South Carolina seem to have performed largely ceremonial functions, perhaps restricted to civil matters. The office of “provost marshal,” on the other hand, was essentially a colonial version of an English jailor. In English and later British history, the provost marshal was exclusively an officer of military discipline—a jailor accompanying the king’s soldiers on a campaign. Because the American colonies functioned as distant satellites of the king’s realm, the administrators of South Carolina and other settlements adopted the title of provost marshal to designate the master jailor of the province.

The first step towards the creation of a distinct judicial branch of government in South Carolina occurred in 1701. In March of that year, the provincial General Assembly ratified a law to inaugurate a regular calendar of criminal court sessions in Charleston that continued to the eve of the American Revolution. The same law included a formal description of the duties and liabilities of the provincial provost marshal, an officer identified in 1701 (in the original spelling) as the “general goal-keeper for all the several countys and settlements in South Carolina.”[2] More specifically, he was an adjunct to both the pre-existing Court of Common Pleas, which handled civil matters, and the newly-created Court of General Sessions, which tried criminal cases. The provost marshal’s jurisdiction encompassed the entire breadth of South Carolina, but did not extend beyond terra firma. The provincial Court of Vice Admiralty, another product of English colonialism, employed a separate marshal for the adjudication of civil and criminal cases pertaining to the sea.

The colonial Provost Marshal of South Carolina received no fixed salary, but collected numerous small fees for performing a long list of legal services. From that lucrative stream of income, he employed deputies at will and paid them out of his own pocket. Such deputies served writs, warrants, summonses, and subpoenas to individuals spread across the colony’s broad landscape. They were not specifically required to participate in the occasional hue and cry or posse comitatus, but the marshal and his hired men were obliged to receive and maintain all prisoners delivered into their custody in Charleston. As officers of the judicial branch, they were responsible for transporting prisoners to and from court, seizing real and personal property (including enslaved people) in compliance with court orders, and conducting sales of such confiscated property at public outcry (i.e., vendue, or auction). They also executed all court-ordered sentences of corporal punishment on the bodies of convicted criminals, including public whipping, branding with a hot iron, maiming, hanging, gibbeting, and, on rare occasions, burning enslaved people at the stake.[3]

The formalization of South Carolina’s criminal justice system at the turn of the eighteenth century coincided with a significant moment in the colony’s demographic history. Founded largely by English investors intent on replicating the economic success of Barbados, South Carolina’s early white settlers embraced that island’s reliance on forced labor. The importation of African captives through the port of Charleston commenced in the early 1670s and increased exponentially in subsequent decades. A contemporary trade in Native American slaves, though technically illegal, helped to increase the colony’s enslaved population to a majority status within thirty-odd years. To address the dangers inherent in this growing, largely rural mass of unfree people, who occasionally used violence to resist their subjugation, South Carolina’s provincial government enacted its first law to control the movements of enslaved people in 1691. A dozen years and several statutory revisions later, the legislature adopted a more proactive remedy to allay their fears.[4]

The preamble to “An Act to Settle a Patroll,” ratified in November 1704, explained that the government sought “to prevent such insurrections and mischiefs[,] as from the great number of slaves[,] we have reason to suspect may happen.” This landmark law, which was revised and sustained until the 1860s, required groups of armed white men, within every beat company in the colony’s mandatory militia service, to assemble periodically, usually at night, and ride through their respective neighborhoods in search of enslaved people traversing the landscape without a written note from their masters authorizing such movement. These slave patrols, as they were known, became a familiar and routine part of country life in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and largely, but not completely, succeeded in suppressing the unauthorized movements of many thousands of rural residents for more than a century and a half.[5]

Thanks to the mounted patrols and other legal restrictions, the enslaved people forming the majority of early South Carolina were essentially prisoners confined to the bounds of their respective habitations. Yes, an enslaved individual might occasionally leave his or her plantation with the owner’s written permission, but if they did not return within a prescribed timeframe, the owner would advertise a reward for their forced return. If an enslaved person fled his or her plantation without permission, that person automatically became a fugitive of the law, navigating an unfriendly rural landscape populated by wild beasts of prey, the “hue and cry,” posse comitatus, and roving slave patrols.

The next milestone in the development of rural law enforcement in South Carolina occurred in 1768, when the provincial government grappled with an outbreak of vigilante violence along the colony’s northern frontier. A number of rural settlers, frustrated by the lack of sufficient access to means of legal redress, decided to take the law into their own hands. South Carolina’s sole courtroom was in urban Charleston, they complained, and the only jail—maintained by the sole provost marshal of colony—was also in the Lowcountry capital. To address these issues, the provincial General Assembly ratified a law in April 1768 that abolished the colony’s four original counties and divided all of South Carolina into seven “districts,” each with its own court house, jail, and sheriff, in Charleston, Beaufort, Orangeburg, Georgetown, Camden, Cheraw, and Ninety-Six. The British Government rejected and cancelled that 1768 law, but approved a revised version ratified in Charleston in July 1769. Following the construction of several new courthouses, South Carolina’s first circuit-court system became functional in June 1772, at which time the provincial government abolished the singular office of provost marshal and replaced it with seven sheriffs, one in each of the new districts.[6]

Besides the change of title and the reduced jurisdiction, the duties of the new district sheriffs differed little from those of the extinct provost marshal. The early Sheriff of Charleston District continued to act as the superintendent of the district jail, to transport prisoners to and from court, and to conduct sales of land and people seized by court order. Like the earlier marshal, the sheriff received no fixed salary, but collected fees for his various services, employed deputies at will, and submitted annual invoices to the provincial government for the costs of maintaining prisoners. His deputies served warrants and other court papers across the plantation landscape from Edisto Island to the Santee River, and continued to execute various forms of corporal punishment on the bodies of convicted criminals. Neither the antebellum Sheriff of Charleston District nor his deputies patrolled their jurisdiction on a regular basis, however. That duty belonged to the several parochial slave patrols spread across the rural district, whose mostly-nocturnal activities continued into the era of the American Civil War.

After 161 years of armed white riders patrolling the Lowcountry of South Carolina, the state law mandating such activity dissolved in 1865 along with the Confederate States and the institution of slavery. The citizens of Charleston and surrounding counties thereafter witnessed an unprecedented demographic disruption: Thousands of formerly-enslaved people began leaving their plantation prisons and migrating to urban centers like downtown Charleston and to new, largely segregated communities spread across the rural landscape, like Scanlonville, Rosemont, Lincolnville, Liberty Hill, and Maryville, just to name a few.

Such movements took place during a turbulent period of political strife called the era of Reconstruction—a period from 1865 to the late 1870s, in which citizens of African descent exercising the civil rights guaranteed to them by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution clashed with members of South Carolina’s white minority fighting to retain their traditional supremacy. As politically-divided and increasingly-segregated communities struggled to coexist in the decades after the Civil War, rural residents in this and other Southern States witnessed an increase in violent crimes. On the other hand, one of the notable achievements of that stormy era was the revised South Carolina Constitution of 1868, framed by a largely-Black convention that reorganized the state’s numerous districts into the present counties.

In rural Charleston County during the era of Reconstruction and beyond, which public officials responded to cries for help and reports of criminal violence? While state law empowered the local Justice of the Peace to issue arrest warrants to his constable or sheriff’s deputy, the law prescribed no proactive method of law enforcement. In the absence of statutory protection, common-law traditions imported from England continued the age-old practice of the hue and cry and the posse comitatus. The antebellum slave patrol was no longer the law of the land, but white men in the South Carolina Lowcountry and beyond occasionally revived the old custom of night riders patrolling the rural landscape. Outside of Charleston County, that nostalgic form of nocturnal intimidation morphed into the notorious Ku Klux Klan of the late nineteenth century, which was firmly rooted in the not-so-distant past.

The rise of a paid, professional police force patrolling the rural countryside beyond urban Charleston commenced in 1906. An act of the state legislature that February authorized the employment of two men on horseback, who were obliged to provide their own mounts, uniforms, and firearms, to serve as roving deputies of the county sheriff. Their assigned geographic range was limited, however, to the Neck of the Charleston Peninsula between the rivers Ashley and Cooper, extending from the city’s northern boundary (then Mount Pleasant Street) to the northern limit of the Parish of St. Philip (around modern Cosgrove Avenue in North Charleston).[7]

That limited rural service expanded in 1908 with the creation of the Charleston County Police Commission, comprised of the county sheriff and two white men recommended by local legislators and appointed by the governor. As the sole full-time commissioner, the sheriff directed the activities of four mounted policemen working ten-hour shifts—two on Charleston Neck and two west of the Ashley River in the Parish of St. Andrew.[8]

In January 1911, citizens representing various rural communities in Charleston County petitioned their state legislators for “rural police protection in future,” asserting that their respective neighborhoods “needed police protection very badly.” The General Assembly ratified an act that February to expand the scope of the Charleston County Police Commission, still under the jurisdiction of the county sheriff. By the end of 1911, the county police force included ten horse-mounted officers—two on the Neck and two west of the Ashley (as previous enacted), plus one mounted patrolman each for Edisto Island, Wadmalaw Island, John’s Island, James Island, Christ Church Parish (Mount Pleasant), and the northern parish of St. James, Santee.[9]

The expansion of the county police in the early decades of the twentieth century mirrored the proliferation of automobiles and the advent of paved roads beyond of urban streets of downtown Charleston. Those innovations facilitated both a gradual demographic shift from the city to the country and a contemporary increase in patrolling range. Members of the rural police force traded their horses for motor vehicles during the late 1910s and early 1920s, but the county did not yet own a fleet of dedicated patrol cars. A statutory revision of the Charleston County Police Commission in the spring of 1924, for example, required each rural patrolman to supply his own automobile, “billey” club, and firearm, for which expenses the county provided each officer with a monthly allowance of $25.[10]

The same 1924 statute expanded and reorganized the Charleston County Police as a force of fourteen men, one of whom held the title of “chief.” Despite the addition of a designated chief, all of the rural patrolmen continued to report to the county sheriff and remained under his direct supervision.[11] Another revision adopted in 1925 clarified the political process of appointing men to the county police commission and, to curb expenses, reduced the number of motorized officers from fourteen to ten.[12]

Twelve years later, in April 1937, the state legislature ratified a more significant and lasting change to the rural police. The reorganized and enlarged Charleston County Police Department included five appointed commissioners, one of whom was designated chief of police, as in the 1924 law. The most significant feature of the 1937 statute, however, was the removal of the county sheriff from the rural force, for political reasons specific to that moment in time. Members of the county police were still obliged to assist the sheriff and his deputies when requested, but, starting in July 1937, the sheriff exercised no control over rural police activities.[13]

The size and patrolling range of the Charleston County police force grew steadily from its inception in 1906 to the post-war boom of the 1950s and beyond. The primary factor fueling this twentieth-century expansion was the growing population of Charleston County, which nearly doubled during those same decades. A secondary and more curious factor was the significant shift from urban areas to unincorporated, formerly-rural parts of the county, combined with the “Great Migration” of African-Americans searching for better lives in the Northern States. In the United States Census of 1900, for example, there were just over 88,000 people living in Charleston County, of whom nearly seventy percent (70%) were people of African descent. Of those 88,000 county residents, sixty-three percent (63%) lived within the urban boundaries of the City of Charleston. In other words, the county’s rural population at the turn of the twentieth century was pretty sparse, and largely Black. Contrast those figures with the Census of 1950, which reported nearly 165,000 people living in Charleston County, of whom nearly sixty percent (60%) identified as a white or Caucasian. Of those 165,000 county residents, nearly sixty percent (60%) lived outside the City of Charleston. Those demographic trends have continued into the twenty-first century as new residential developments populate the subdivided landscapes of former plantations.

To serve and protect this growing and increasingly Caucasian rural population, the Charleston County Police Department deployed a segregated, white-only police force from its inception in 1906 to the end of 1961. In December of that year, the county hired Harold B. Jackson and James Lamar Mikell Jr., the first two of what would eventually become a significant number of African-American officers on the force.[14]

Following the 1937 reorganization of the Charleston County Police Department, its officers patrolled an expanding network of paved rural roads from Edisto Island to McClellanville. Meanwhile, the county sheriff served a more traditional role resembling that of his colonial-era predecessors. This state of affairs continued until 1990, when the recently-elected Sheriff of Charleston County, Al Cannon, lobbied County Council to dissolve the old county police commission and return the rural force to the office of the sheriff. Some members of Council and the community embraced Cannon’s plan, while others dismissed the proposed reorganization as an unnecessary waste of public funds. County Council let voters decide in a referendum on the ballot in November 1990, asking citizens “Shall the Charleston County Police Department be abolished and the duties and powers thereof devolved upon the Charleston County Sheriff?” Fifty-three percent (53%) of the public voted in favor of the change.[15] County Council thereafter adopted an ordinance to merge the county police force with the existing Sheriff’s Department, and the change went into effect on 1 January 1991.

Here in the twenty-first century, the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office sustains an honorable mission of community service that is steeped in centuries of history. Similarly, state law still requires citizens to participate in the ancient posse comitatus when requested by any sheriff, deputy sheriff, or constable.[16] Like other law enforcement agencies in South Carolina and beyond, the modern Sheriff’s Office rejects the discriminatory practices of the distant past and celebrates the diversity found within its ranks and within the communities they serve. All of us in residing in Charleston County inhabit a beautiful landscape tainted by the legacies of past injustice, but, by acknowledging that dark history in a frank and factual manner, I believe we plant the seeds of a more harmonious future.

NEXT: Newmarket: Charleston’s Suburban Racecourse and Slave Auction Site
PREVIOUSLY: Charleston's Forgotten First Orphan House, 1790–94
See more from Charleston Time Machine