Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 10: The martial South and the slave patrols

John Hope Franklin pointed out the effect of the everyday life of the slavery system in creating an authoritarian and martial atmosphere among planters and throughout white Southern society in Slavery and the Martial South Journal of Negro History 37:1 (Jan 1952):

The planter was forced to regard arms as a necessary adjunct to the machinery of control. The lash might be used generously or sparingly, depending on the temperament of the master and the tractability of the slave. There was always the possibility, moreover, of resorting to more deadly weapons. If the slave resisted the "mild" discipline of the lash or undertook to return blow for blow, how else could the master maintain his complete authority except through the use of, or the threat to use, the weapons whose possession was forever denied the slave?

Going about armed with knives and guns became the daily habit of many masters and overseers. And if the armed conquerors, in moments of anger, sometimes turned their weapons against each other, it was no more than was to be expected among an aggregation of armed men. The rule of tyranny by which they lived naturally fostered an independence and self-sufficiency-one is tempted to call it an individual sovereignty-that would, on occasion, burst out in all its fury in their quarrels with each other.

If the relationship between master and slave was that of a superior and a subordinate, a despot or tyrant and a powerless subject, or an armed victor and a vanquished foe, it can almost be described as a state of war. At least it is possible to recognize the martial spirit that pervaded the entire plantation atmosphere. The conduct of the master toward the slave was determined by rules and considerations not unlike those that characterized a military situation. [my emphasis]

Speculations about collective "character" are always dubious, at best.

But Franklin here is not making such an argument. He is pointing out specific patterns of behavior in Southern society that contributed to the practical consequences that ensued. And the periodic outbursts of panic over slave revolts interacted in a poisonous way with this martial state of mind:

The slave was never so completely subjugated as to allay all fears that he would make a desperate, bloody attempt to destroy the institution to which he was bound. Fear and apprehension were relative matters in the ante bellum South; but they were always present. If the slaves seemed satisfied and did not appear to be up to some deviltry, such as running away or revolting, the fears, while still present, were not easily discernible. But if there was even the slightest rumor of an uprising, the entire countryside was not only terrified, but the alarm was sounded. All whites - loyal Negroes, too - were expected to do their share to prevent death and destruction from stalking through the land and to restore the natural foe to his natural condition. [my enphasis]

Franklin connects this phenomenon directly to the formation of the slave patrols, which were a key tool for giving the nonslaveowning whites a psychological stake in the slave system:

Despite the fact that the plantation sought to be self-sufficient and succeeded in many respects, the maintenance of a stable institution of slavery was so important that owners early sought the cooperation of the entire community. This cooperation took the form of the patrol, which became an established institution in most areas of the South at an early date. There were many variations in the size and organization of the patrol. Rather typical was the South Carolina patrol that was established by law in 1690. The law set up patrol detachments of ten men under the captain of a militia company. All white men were eligible for patrol service. In 1819 all white males over eighteen were made liable for patrol duty, the non-slaveholders being excused from duty upon reaching the age of forty-five.

This kind of militarization of Southern civil government and social life meant in practice that at the start of the Civil War, the South had an initial advantage in military preparedness because more Southern men had current military training of some sort.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown gives a couple of examples of how this violent and authoritarian mentality played out in daily practice:

It was a matter of personal reputation to prove oneself a master of events to one's family and household, as well as to the world at large. For instance, when Robert E. Lee of Arlington, Virginia, discovered that two young slaves bad run away to Pennsylvania, he had them sought after and returned. An anonymous critic informed the Northern public, through the New York Tribune, that Lee had personally supervised their flogging. Lee was responsible for some sixty-three slaves, not all of whom could be usefully employed at the Arlington plantation. He sent some to eastern Virginia, particularly the rebellious ones, who would have less opportunity there to flee northward. Perhaps, as Douglas Southall Freeman claims, that was the extent of his reaction to the runaways' offense. Wesley Norris, one of the pair, gave a grim account of the whipping, however. He said that Lee bad watched the proceedings with eyes black with fury and had ordered brine poured into the wounds. Whether this and like reports are to be believed, it must be remembered that even the gentlest masters-and Lee was reputedly one of them-found occasion when there seemed to them very little choice about the use of coercion. It would not do for any slave to take flagrant advantage of a master's delicacy of conscience. To push too hard against the institution or against an owner's sense of self-esteem was to threaten the social order as it was then understood. Failure to react appropriately could be misinterpreted, not only by the compliant slaves but by the white community, too. The moral problem was itself built into the Southern ethic. One simply could not be made to look inept, powerless, or squeamish. For these reasons, in a case about which there can be no doubts, the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones of Liberty County, Georgia, had a slave girl flogged until she revealed the name of the individual who had fathered a mulatto child she had given birth to. The gentleman in question had been the elderly clergyman's secretary, a member, temporarily, of the household. Jones was incensed at this breach of the rules regarding hospitality, and his torture of the mother to confirm his suspicions was the consequence.

This shows an integral side of what the title of Wyatt-Brown's book from which that quote is taken, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982).

The Second Amendment and militias

I want to expand a bit on the Second Amendment issues I mentioned in the previous post. Here with reference to Putting the Second Amendment Second by Akhil Reed Amar Slate 03/17/2016.

My first reaction to Amar's article was that it sounds like he may be up to some Tenther/states-rights mischief. (Why, yes, I do think I'm jaded about some things, why do you ask?)

He seems to be arguing straightforwardly for an NRA-friendly interpretation of the Second Amendment and gun regulations.

My understanding without doing an OCD web search is that the federal courts had few if any Second Amendment cases until the 1930s, because there weren't many federal gun regulations. One of the biggest federal mistakes in US history was to allow the soldiers in the disbanded Confederate Army to keep their weapons. It mattered a lot in the mid-1870s when just getting enough weapons for the legitimate state militias to defend democratic government against the pro-"Redemption" terrorist groups was itself a major problem. The "Redeemers'" violent overthrow of the democratic state governments in the South is the only real example of guns being used to defend against the "tyranny" of the federal government, the "tyranny" in that case being required to recognize the citizenship of black people.

Amar pretty much tires to stand that history on its head. Mississippi's last Reconstruction Governor Adelbert Ames could have given a graphic description of who was more desperately in need of weapons, the biracial official militia or the Klan groups of former Confederate soldiers. I don't need to re-parse that statute he cites to know that nobody in their right minds expected individual black people, much less black people organized into their own anti-Klan private militias, to be the main guarantors of democratic government. That's why the US kept an actual military occupation in place in the former Confederacy until 1877.

But from the 1930s until Heller in 2008, the federal courts including SCOTUS held the Second Amendment to apply only to state militias. That's partially because of the plain language of the Amendment, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 endorsed the personal-rights interpretation before SCOTUS issued their ruling. Bipartisanship!

The actual text of the Consitution matters as well as the legislative history. And the legislative history is also pretty straightforward. The Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights at the demand of slave states who wanted to be sure the federal government wouldn't ban slave patrols, the institution by which white non-slaveowners were required to patrol for escaped slaves. As I mentioned in the preceding post, it was an important institution in terrorizing slaves and free blacks, as well as giving nonslaveomwning whites the dubious satisfaction of getting to harass and brutalize black people just like their slaveowning betters. They were also a direct predecessor of the post-Civil War Klan-type terrorist groups.

In that last post, I also linked to Robert Bateman's article on the legal and historical meaning of "militia," Hey Oregon "Militia": Here's the History Lesson You Missed 01/07/2016. http://bit.ly/1Pl4s2P Short version: it has never meant some white guy sittin' at home with his own AR-15 waiting for a scary black kid to step on his property so he can finally git him the chance to exericse his Second Amendments rights to murder black people. (Did I mention I'm jaded about certain things?) Bateman writes: "There is no such thing as a 'locally organized' militia that is not subject to the authority of a State or the Federal Government. Indeed, such is almost explicitly prohibited, in no small part because the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent something like Shays' Rebellion [of 1786-7] from happening again."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 3: Slave patrols and ... "false consciousness"?

I've always been kind of fascinated about the notion of plagiarizing from oneself. I understand that there are some sensible reasons for such a thing to be regulated by law, such as when an author gives up the commercial rights to a written or musical composition. Others can be more of a gray area. Did a writer provide a "unique product"? Does a songwriter's song sound too much like an earlier song of hers to which someone else has the rights?

I notice Digby Parton is careful to cite her earlier posts as quotations, rather than just using the text in a new post.

I'm kind of split on it, myself, for this blog.

The reason I mention it is that one of the things I've discussed here in various posts is "slave patrols" in the slave states. And I want to write about it some more without completely repeating myself.

One post devoted completely to the slave patrols is Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 15: Slave patrols, the Ku Klux Klan and present-day white racism 04/15/2012. Another is Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 16: More on slave patrols 04/16/2012.

In Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 28: Convincing non-slaveowning whites to fight for the Slave Power 04/28/2013, I wrote about how the planter class used slave patrols as one key institution in a broader political strategy of giving whites generally a sense of having a stake in the slave system. That is an aspect of the slave patrols that is not only historically important but relates to the actual functioning of white racism in the US today.

Debates over gun proliferation in recent years have focused at times on the motivating impulse for the Second Amendment, the second half of which is currently idolized by the Republican Party. The first part about a "well regulted militia"? Not so much. And here I'm going to plagiarize myself a bit from things I've written earlier on this blog, not just in the posts linked above.

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution was placed there primarily at the insistence of Southern states that required white male citizens to participate in slave patrols, whose purpose was to catch runaway slaves and generally to terrorize the black population, both slave and free, to discourage revolts. And more generally to promote fear and subservience among African-Americans.

The slave patrols were posses in which non-slaveowning whites were compelled to participate that searched for blacks who were not on plantations. Plantations had their own plantation patrols, as well. The slave patrols were often vehicles of arbitrary abuse. They were also a key social institution by which the slaveowners won the support of non-slaveholders for the Peculiar Institution. The slave patrols gave free whites who might be inclined to political and/or violent anger against wealthy slaveowners the opportunity to vent their anger on vulnerable blacks, slave and free. And that's a key reason that participation was mandatory.

The fear of slave revolts was widespread and ingrained into daily life in the South prior to the Civil War. It was accompanied by periodic panics over them, most of which existed only the in the fevered, guilty imaginations of white people. Though slave resistance and the occasional slave revolt really did occur, too. John Brown fanned those fears with his plan to set up a guerrilla army in the South to free slaves in the years immediately before the Civil War.

The slave patrols were instruments of state terror against slaves and any whites who might attempt to assist escaping slaves. They were also a direct precursor of Reconstruction-era terrorist organizations of which the Ku Klux Klan is the most infamous. (There is also an argument that the slave patrols were the direct predecessors of present-day police departments; I haven't looked at that argument carefully enough to have an informed opinion on it.)

The existence of the slave patrols also means that it's not the case that non-slaveowning Southern whites had no direct prewar connection to enforcing slavery, claim that neo-Confederates routinely make. The patrols had unchallenged authority to stop and abuse any black person free or slave they saw out in public, whether or not the victim was authorized to be there. And they often did so. It was an effective way to create an emotional bond to the slave system even among non-slaveowners. Betram Wyatt-Brown has a good description of the slave patrols in his Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982).

Conservative intellectuals like to sneer at Mean Libruls for supposedly talked down to Real Americans by accusing them of suffering from "false consciousness." White slaveowners in the antebellum South and the white non-slaveowners did make money off their black slaves. But whether we use the anathematized phrase or not, most white Southerners who supported the slave system were demonstratbly acting against their own interests. Because as Hinton Helper famously detailed at the time in ..., the slave system worked very much to the disadvantage of the Southern white common people, the big majority of whites. But the white non-slaveowners who were required to serve on slave patrols did get the sadistic satisfaction of pushing around unarmed blacks and the psychological satisfaction of feeling themselves part of a master race for doing so.

That attitude may have been self-defeatign. But it would be a mistake to dismiss it as entirely false. The psychological advantage they felt from white racism was real, then as it is today. Sigmund Freud's argument in The Future of An Illusion (1927) is very relevant to the psychological and social function of the slave patrols:

The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal is also among the forces which are successful in combating the hostility to culture within the cultural unit. This satisfaction can be shared in not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen, one has one's share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws. This identification of the suppressed classes with the class who rules and exploits them is, however, only part of a larger whole. For, on the other hand, the suppressed classes can be emotionally attached to their masters; in spite of their hostility to them they may see in them their ideals; unless such relations of a fundamentally satisfying kind subsisted, it would be impossible to understand how a number of civilizations have survived so long in spite of the justifiable hostility of large human masses. [my emphasis]

Historically, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to guarantee that critics of slavery would be unable to block the use of "slave patrols" in which white citizens were required to patrol for slaves who were somehow breaking the rules. It was a key institution in the slave South for gaining political and psychological commitment among nonslaveholders for the Peculiar Institution.

Thom Hartmann writes in The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery 01/16/2013:

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.

As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."

It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.

The slave patrols and their historical function shows us a way that the institution of slavery affects US politics and society in visible ways still.

See also:

Robert Bateman, Hey Oregon "Militia": Here's the History Lesson You Missed Esquire Politics Blog 01/17/2016

Digby Parton, What were the founders really afraid of? Hullabaloo 01/17/2013

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 16: More on slave patrols

John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr. give the following description of the slave patrols in their From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (8th edition, 2003):

One of the devices set up to enforce the Slave Codes and thereby maintain the institution of slavery was the patrol, which has been aptly described as an adaptation of the militia. Counties were usually divided into "beats," or areas of patrol, and free white men were called upon to serve for a stated period of time: one, three, or six months. These patrols were to apprehend slaves out of place and return them to their masters or commit them to jail, to visit slave quarters and search for various kinds of weapons that might be used in an uprising, and to visit assemblies of slaves where disorder might develop or where conspiracy might be planned. This system proved so inconvenient to some citizens that they regularly paid the fines that were imposed for dereliction of duty. A corrupted form of the patrols system was the vigilance committee, which came into existence during the emergencies created by uprisings or rumors of them. At such times it was not unusual for the committee to disregard all caution and prudence and kill any blacks whom they encountered in their search. Committees like these frequently ended up engaging in nothing except a lynching party.

They don't elaborate on the point, but obviously those whites less able to afford the fines were inconvenienced at least as much as those who could. While some no doubt turned their resentment toward the white slaveowners for the inconvenience, others were more likely to channel their frustration toward the black population whose existence they blamed for the disruption of their lives involved in the slave patrols. And some portion just liked the chance to lord it over somebody, vicariously taking the position of slaveowners who they otherwise envied.

The Franklin and Moss text reproduces a portion of this drawing from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 07/11/1863:

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, slave patrols, slavery, white racism