Slavery was the system that only 5% of the southerners managed to preserve at the height of its existence. In order to maintain it and gain advantage from the labor of Black slaves, plantation owners, who were powerful in their influence, promoted the ideas of oppressing minorities to the poor white population.1. The strategy of pacification was especially prevalent during that time because wealthy slaveowners wanted to keep possible protests under control and prevent the rest of the white population from supporting the abolition of slavery in the South. To do so, the white elite established a color-line that made the discrimination against Blacks even larger by increasing the role of poor whites in the created social hierarchy2.
Thus, fear was the main tool that helped wealthy southerners maintain the oppressive system and ensure that the rest of the population remained compliant with the status quo. The rest of the population did not use their numbers to impose another system because there were not as powerful as wealthy slaveowners and were afraid of losing what they had. Fear was perpetrated through the killings of runaway slaves or cruel treatments of anyone who tried to oppose the will of the powerful slaveowners.3.
Usually, families of slaves were broken up to show the power of slaveowners; they were banned from practicing skills such as writing or reading as well as anything else that could be helpful in planning the escape. Women were brutally beaten and mistreated. If to compare the system to the power brokers that operated in the North, there is a glaring similarity between them and slaveowners. All of them had to gain the support of poor whites to preserve the established regime. Thus, power brokers appealed to the ideas of nationalism and stroking of the ego of some groups. For example, they said that American-born Protestants stood higher in the hierarchy than foreign-born Catholics or other representatives of national groups.4.
Bibliography
“David Walker, A Black Abolitionist Speaks Out.” Media Pearsoncmg. Web.
Ogbar, Jeffrey. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Sweet, Harvey. Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule. Palm Coast: Backintyme, 2005.
“The Back to Africa Movement: From the American Colonization Society to Marcus Garvey.” Library MTSU. Web.
Footnotes
- “The Back to Africa Movement: From the American Colonization Society to Marcus Garvey,” Library MTSU. Web.
- Harvey Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule (Palm Coast: Backintyme, 2005), 158.
- “David Walker, A Black Abolitionist Speaks Out,” Media Pearsoncmg. Web.
- Jeffrey Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 187.