(Cont. from Part 5) Continuing with the quotation from Dwight Lowell Dumond on white attitudes toward slavery in the South before the war:
Even a passive attitude toward slavery placed the aspiring young under suspicion, and less than commendation [of slavery] was a certain bar to public service, social approbation, or professional attainment. Hope of someday owning slaves, the patronizing attitude of slaveholders, satisfaction arising from one's ability to look down on others, and that undefinable something known as race prejudice caused those who owned no slaves to tolerate the system and indirectly to lend it their support.
There was also a specific institution by which non-slaveowning whites provided very direct support to slavery: the slave patrol. Whites were deputized to patrol for escaped slaves, or free blacks who didn't have the proper papers. Although legally their ability to physically injure human property was restricted, in practice they were granted wide latitude to bully and threaten both slaves and free blacks. During the many insurrections panics that swept the paranoid slaveholders from time to time, the role of the slave patrols became more prominent and more brutal. (Some of the insurrectionary panics were based in reality; as the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.)
Normally, the patrols were manned by non-slaveowning white men. Many of them resented the obligation to do this duty. But they were far more likely to vent their resentment on blacks who fell into their path than on slaveowners. Even for free whites who hated slavery, often at least in part because they considered it a threat to white labor, the slave patrols provided an opportunity for them to act out their hostility - on slaves or free blacks.
Slave patrols were an important way in which free whites learned to identify their interests with slavery. And in which they practiced violence in its defense.
(Cont. in Part 7)
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