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Watchmen were organised groups of men, usually authorised by a state, government, city, or society, to deter criminal activity and provide law enforcement as well as traditionally perform the services of public safety, fire watch, crime prevention, crime detection, and recovery of stolen goods.
In 1631, Boston was a tiny Puritan settlement with approximately 175 residents. [2] A watch was established on April 14 to patrol Boston Neck after sunset. Settler John Winthrop wrote in his journal at the time, "We began a court of guard upon the neck between Roxbury and Boston, whereupon should be always resident an officer and six men."
However, the Southern Colonies were much more sparsely populated than the Northern ones, presenting difficulties for slave catchers. Although slavery existed in the Northern Colonies, the majority of the enslaved population in Colonial America lived in the South, leading to a disproportionate amount of slave catchers being active in the region.
Whipping was the most commonly used form of punishment, especially in the American South with slaves. Other frequently used punishments included branding, cutting off ears, and placing people in the pillory. These punishments were sometimes harsher, depending on the crimes committed. In Colonial America, executions were less common than in Europe.
Slave patrols first began in South Carolina in 1704 and spread throughout the thirteen colonies, lasting well beyond the American Revolution. As colonists enslaved more Africans and the population of enslaved people in South Carolina grew, especially with the invention of the cotton gin, so did the fear of slave uprisings. They developed slave ...
Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (Vintage, 2012) Warren M. Billings (Editor), The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) James Horn, A Land as God Made It (Perseus Books, 2005)
The team behind "Outlander" Season 6 explains what's truth and what's fiction in the series' depiction of the lead-up to the Revolutionary War.
From colonial times through the 1940s, town constables would work with two other town officials—the investigating grand juror and prosecuting grand juror—in the initial handling of criminal investigations, arrests, and the "binding over" of serious crimes from the town's justice court to a higher court.