Monday, January 19, 2004

Racism in the Antebellum South (Pt. 7 of 9)

(Cont. from Part 6) Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown in Southern Honor (1982) gives a good description of how the slave patrols, especially in the context of slave-insurrection scares, served to bind poor whites practically and psychologically to the slave system, even though it was emphatically not in their interests, as anti-slavery Southerners like Hinton Helper forcefully pointed out at the time. Wyatt Brown:

These periodic, seemingly irrational explosions [insurrectionary panics] enabled masters and their families, and nonslaveholders and theirs, to express and then master their dread. Moreover, the scares offered a cheap means of public enforcement, one designed for a rural people underpoliced and fearful of taxation. After such an exhibition of white power there was no need to mount expensive guards, constabularies, and standing armies. Policing, like the legal system as a whole, remained rooted in the community. Thus the panics were "fire-bells in the night," as Jefferson once said of antislavery agitation. They were drills to test the whites' mettle and dedication. At the height of the scare, everyone became civic-minded - or else. Patrol captains meticulously followed regulations. Militamen mustered without straggling. Even the county arsenal, for a while, was stocked with working muskets and shining sabers. It was all very reassuring and impressive to the unsophisticated. Once more the voice of inner terror was stilled.

We just can't understand the political situation in the South at the time of secession without realizing the extent to which slavery permeated daily life, even for whites who were not slaveowners, much less wealthy planters. And that community rituals like the insurrectionary scare were part of the life of ordinary people in the South.

(Cont. in Part 8)

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