Thread by @EpistemicHope

Reading about the history of slavery, one new realization is how terrified the South was of a slave uprising.

The masters lived in fear that one day the slaves would rise up and either 1) murder the whites in their beds or 2) turn the tables and enslave the whites.

That was a persistent background fear.

Most sources talk about the motivation for the civil war (and other stuf) as "protecting the Southern way of life" and that does seem like a real thing. But I think "the southern way of life" was wrapped up with a visceral fear for their lives.

When a Southerner thought about "abolition", he was not just thinking about the loss of his social system and the wealth he gained from it, but ALSO feeling some of that fear of retribution.

As Jefferson said of slavery: "We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."

monticello.org/site/research-…

I imagine this made many Southerners more defensive of slavery, and more apt to rationalize it, than they otherwise would have been.

If you're in a double bind where you have to choose between doing evil and having your whole family murdered, you'll find all sorts of ways to rationalize how the evil isn't actually evil at all, but rather the embodiment of god-given goodness.

I think a lot of the Southern response to events should keep that in mind.

Case in point: John Brown's rebellion was extremely threatening to the South.

John Brown's plan was to seize an armory and give guns to a small number of slaves to nucleate a "liberation army" that would spread throughout the South, adding liberated slaves to its ranks until it toppled the whole system.

thegreatcoursesdaily.com/the-shock-of-j…

That sort of situation was the worst nightmare of the South.

And while the North largely condemned John Brown, there were some Northerners who were ambivalent or sympathetic to his action.

That Northern reaction was extremely threatening.

As the article I liked above put it "Many white Southerners equated John Brown with abolitionists, abolitionists with Republicans, and Republicans with the whole North."

The popularity of succession shot up, after John Brown's insurrection.

This reads to me as a collective trigger response:

The south is terrified of a slave rebellion.

It projects that the North wants to incite one, killing or enslaving them all white southerners.

The south would rather succeed than have any chance of that.

I bet a few white southerners explicitly believed that the North wanted to empower the blacks to enslave the southern whites (it has just the right kind of conspiracy theory vibe).

But even though who didn't, probably felt an implicit sense of bodily threat about "abolition".

Lately, I've been boggling at the clearly-stated outright bigotry of the Dixiecrats.

In my innocence, I was shocked to hear politicians as late as the 60s recommend lynching blacks who try to vote, and specifically crafting policies to screw over Black people.

I couldn't wrap my mind around how a person could possibly be so forthrightly bigoted. Not implicitly racist, but explicitly, publicly, "isn't it great how we all collude to keep these people down. Ha ha"

Now I suspect that part of what motivated this abhorrent attitude is an intergenerational inheritance of the sense of threat associated with black people being free and empowered.

I suspect that the South has always known, in their heart of hearts, that their racism was evil. But admitting so and walking it back, opened them up to fearful retribution, so they were psychologically constrained to double down on what they were doing instead.

I speculate that the Dixiecrats had an implicit sense that if they didn't oppress the blacks, the tables would turn on them and THEY would be the ones who were being oppressed.

"Kill or be killed, there's not middle ground."

Which gives me some more context for how a person could be so literally, explicitly racist.

I posit that there may be still, to this day, a collective traumatic fear of a slave rebellion.

Probably it is pretty mangled. Nowadays, it feels more like "if the blacks were in charge [something bad and threatening would happen]", rather than any specific story.

And this is near the root of some modern racism.

(Or maybe not. Maybe it is simple out-group scapegoating, and nothing more complicated than that.)

But overall, the moral of the story seems to be that the evil of slavery was really bad, not only because of the (terrible) direct consequences, but because it committed the perpetrators to ever be in fear of retribution.

And ironically, this paranoia made them oppress the slaves even more harshly, because once you've hurt a person badly enough, you don't dare ever let them get up again.

And once that cycle starts, it is really hard to break.

In the same way that "if you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy"...

If you once do evil, the Good is ever your enemy.

@ben_r_hoffman This thread seems to weave in a number of your interests.

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