Nowhere was property or person safe, and for a time many feared a Negro insurrection.

General Hardee said to his neighbors, "I advise you to get ready for what may come.

We are standing over a sleeping volcano." To cope with this situation ante-bellum patrols--the "patter-rollers" as the Negroes called them--were often secretly reorganized.

In each community for several months after the Civil War, and in many of them for months before the end of the war, there were informal vigilance committees.

Some of these had such names as the Black Cavalry and Men of Justice in Alabama, the Home Guards in many other places, while the anti Confederate societies of the war, the Heroes of America, the Red Strings, and the Peace Societies, transformed themselves in certain localities into regulatory bodies.