White Slavery Anxieties Lie In The 19th Century

On the cusp of civil war, Southerners opposing abolitionism argued that the North, in the stead of black slavery, used slave labor of lower-class white people. As secessionist advocate Governor Joseph Brown suggested, abolition “would virtually enslave our whole people for generations to come.” This sentiment recurred throughout the 19th century, but the origins of “white slavery” anxieties lie in the 18th century in America. By establishing the similarities in conditions that black slaves and non-black servants faced, it becomes clear that out of these shared conditions arises the threat of coalition of the lower classes. An analysis of the responses by the white elites to their perceived threat of uprising points to the eventual solution
Blacks could not be “freemen”, and were not entitled to their rights, and American society was “democratic for the master race but tyrannical for the subordinate group,” meaning that the rights that poorer whites, including the Irish, had gained were commensurate to the rights lost by free blacks. The tacit knowledge between “non-blacks” extended into the courtroom, as the legal trials determined whiteness not by “science”, but rather by the “ineffable” feeling. Whites within juries had incentive to testify that defendants were, in fact, white, because these witnesses had lived among and confided in the defendant, and therefore if the defendant was determined by the jury to be black, the public denigrated the witness, and it would come into question whether the witness was himself truly white. Because citizens feared the degradation of their own status as a result of racial ambiguity, they had incentive to further propagate the distinctions between blacks and the rest of society. Thus, the fear that “people of African descent [were] lurking unknown in their midst” propagated the distinctions between blacks and the rest of society, and encouraged further separation to be enacted by the