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1. What Is in the Wind?
- Louisiana State University Press
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Chapter One WHAT IS IN THE WIND? Although slave insurrections were rare in the antebellum South, slave insurrection panics were not. Indeed, periodic scares over possible uprisings were about as familiar to most white southerners as grits and redeye gravy. Virtually from slavery’s inception in North America there were frequent reports of rebellious bondsmen committing individual acts of violence against their owners. More frightening for whites were recurring rumors that cadres of slaves were plotting together to win their freedom by force. According to one historian of slavery, these reports “kept Southerners apprehensive throughout the colonial period.”1 This sense of foreboding continued to weigh on southerners in the early national and antebellum periods, and the anxiety level rose significantly in 83, . Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 956), 34. Winthrop D. Jordan discussed fears of insurrection in colonial America in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 550–82 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 968), 0–5; see also Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in America (New York, 974), 62–64. Ulrich B. Phillips provided a brief survey of insurrectionist scares in American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York, 98), 463–488. A comprehensive discussion of slave revolts and panics in the South from colonial times to the Civil War may be found in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 943). Aptheker lists scores of alleged insurrections. Although the validity of his work as history is compromised by an all-too-evident readiness to accept unsubstantiated reports from suspect sources, he nevertheless provides a valuable survey of the numerous panics that from time to time swept over various regions of the antebellum South. For other useful , but uncritical, accounts of alleged slave insurrections, see Joseph C. Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 800–865 (Boston, 938), and Harvey Wish, “American Slave Insurrections before 86,” Journal of Negro History 22 (July 937): 299–320. 2 texas terror when Nat Turner led an insurrection in Virginia that left nearly sixty whites dead.2 Although confined to one obscure county in Tidewater Virginia, Turner ’s rebellion reminded white southerners of what might happen to their own families and communities if they failed to maintain strict control of their slaves. Turner’s rebellion was limited in its scope and unsuccessful in its outcome; nevertheless, in its aftermath many slave states passed laws designed to tighten controls on their slaves, thereby preventing future uprisings. These measures, however, failed to cause a reduction in the frightful reports of slave unrest. According to historian Kenneth M. Stampp, after Turner’s rebellion, “Hardly a year passed without some kind of alarming disturbance somewhere in the South.”3 Although the Southampton rebellion undeniably had an important impact on the South, pro-slavery editors, writers, and politicians looked beyond Turner’s poorly executed uprising for a more frightening illustration of what could happen if the South should let down its defenses. They found their example in the Santo Domingo revolution of the 790s.4 In that great slave rebellion—the only successful one ever staged in either the West Indies or North America—rampaging blacks burned hundreds of plantations, murdering the whites who inhabited them and committing unspeakable atrocities in the process.5 The blood of southerners ran cold whenever they contemplated such a scenario for the South, and the possibility was never far from their minds. One historian has written: “The violence and other excesses of the slave rebellion on 2. For more on Nat Turner and his insurrection, see Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York, 975). 3. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, 36. See also Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin, 979), 4–36. Communities did not live in a constant state of alarm, of course, but just beneath the surface there was always present an apprehension that could escalate into panic under stressful conditions. At the end of his third, and final, journey through the South in the summer of 854, Frederick Law Olmsted observed that he had seen only a few “districts” in which the people were constantly apprehensive of slave insurrections. “Yet,” he added, “there is no part of the South where the slave population is felt to be quite safe from a...