GOING IT ALONE: SLAVERY AND SOUTHERN NATIONALISM

• Published in: Modern intellectual history 2012-08, Vol.9 (2), p.423-434
• Main Author: STOWE, STEVEN M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African Americans; American Civil War; German; Nationalism; Paternalism; Slavery; Subjectivity; Whites
• ISSN: 1479-2443; 1479-2451
• DOI: 10.1017/S1479244312000108

Across the entire South, enough slaves kept pressure on masters, and fearful masters pressured each other--a "balance of terror," Ford calls it--in ways that show the utterly contingent, piecemeal shifts in white tactics that led to a well-articulated if always contested white racial dominance. 5 The specter of 1790s Saint Domingue (where Caribbean slaves won their bid for freedom); Louisiana's German Coast conspiracy of 1811; the 1816 Camden, SC plot; the foiled but deeply alarming Denmark Vesey scare of 1822 in Charleston, SC (which ended with the summary execution, which Ford calls a "massacre," of dozens of black suspects); freeman David Walker's well-distributed Appeal in 1829 calling upon African Americans to rise up against whites; and the deadly 1831 Virginia uprising of Nat Turner and his followers--these and many smaller scares fueled the engine that drove the planter class and drives Ford's story. [...]slave-owners went full-throttle for profit, but they never lost sight of the fact that, as one wealthy Mississippian said, "we will one day have our throats cut in this country." [...]he stayed on his family's Georgia plantation and became probably the best-known advocate of paternalistic reform. In muting questions of subjectivity and the role of gender, Ford leaves in the background the important tie between paternalism and the rise of antebellum humanitarian thought, and that between paternalism and the evangelical Protestant emphasis on an individual's accountability to God. 10 And so, despite the steady collapse of world slavery by the nineteenth century, and notwithstanding the growing number of Americans outside the South who were mobilized by the moral horror of human bondage, slavery oddly remains a local, southern "question" for Ford, seen through a glass darkly by southerners.