I think all of that, especially the level of cruelty, was imported from Europe with its endless wars and religious inquisitions. A lot of historians like to separate what happened here from what happened there in some futile attempt to preserve European dignity, but they are the fathers of cruelty.
I don’t know whether you’d be interested, but my Substack, “Mixed Feelings,” presents various issues from the perspective of a mixed-race person. If you read it and like it, please restack and subscribe.
Rebecca, thanks for this. You’re absolutely right to about this, and I agree it’s a point that often gets dodged rather than argued. There’s a long habit in the history writing of treating American slavery as something radically new or uniquely American, as if extreme cruelty somehow appeared only after Europeans crossed the Atlantic. That move protects a comforting story about Europe. Historically, it doesn’t really work. The violence of chattel slavery didn’t come out of thin air. It was built out of older European traditions of hierarchy, coercion, and sanctioned punishment that had already been practiced for centuries.
Feudal Europe was awash in systems that normalized domination through law and ritual. Serfdom, vagrancy laws, corporal punishment, religious persecution, inquisitions, public spectacle punishment. These all trained people to accept the idea that some lives could be governed through pain, surveillance, and exclusion. Those habits didn’t disappear with modernity. They traveled. What the New World added was scale, racialization, and permanence. Race allowed familiar tools of domination to be made more total and harder to challenge.
Historians like David Brion Davis have long argued that American slavery grew directly out of European legal, theological, and economic traditions rather than standing apart from them. And Edmund S. Morgan showed how ideas of freedom and unfreedom were never opposites in European thought. They were produced together. Liberty for some depended on coercion for others.
What gest resisted, as you say, is the implication. If slavery in the Americas is continuous with European feudal and religious violence, then cruelty isn’t a colonial aberration or a New World corruption. It’s part of the European inheritance itself. That’s uncomfortable for narratives that want to celebrate Europe as the birthplace of enlightenment without reckoning with the coercive systems that made that enlightenment possible.
Your framing of feudal traditions as a precursor is absolutely right. Chattel slavery wasn’t feudalism reborn, but it was feudal domination reorganized through race, property, and Atlantic capitalism. Seeing that continuity doesn’t erase differences. It clarifies responsibility. And it helps explain why so much effort has gone into denying it.
This is so good! Thank you for your scholarship and insight. You have a much more accurate take on Southern Whites than Northern Whites do. Unless we grapple with the peer pressure aspect of white supremacy, we will never break its back. It is not as many presume a mere character flaw in individuals, it is an enforced way of life. For those who fear expulsion from the in-group, it is a powerful force for iniquity. I think Trump glommed onto this culture and manipulated it to his advantage. When you don't define yourself for yourself and allow your identity to be whatever your peer group says it is, you risk someone like Trump manipulating you.
When someone comes at me with their definition of "my" identity claiming I must conform to it, I know I am fixing to be manipulated and/or coerced. That kind of thing has to be slapped down immediately or it will metastasize. White people will do this to each other all the time. It is a fact, especially in the South.
Thank you, Cynthia. You’re putting your finger on something genuinely central, and you’re right to frame it as enforcement rather than attitude.
One of the persistent mistakes, especially in Northern or postwar narratives, is to treat white supremacy as a collection of personal prejudices or moral failures. Historically, that misses how it actually functioned. In the antebellum South, whiteness wasn’t simply an identity one held. It was an identity one had to perform and continually prove. Peer pressure wasn’t incidental to the system. It was the system’s daily operating mechanism.
What made white supremacy durable was precisely the fear you describe: fear of expulsion, loss of standing, or social disappearance. That fear disciplined behavior long before the state ever intervened. Men policed one another’s speech, labor habits, loyalties, and sympathies. Deviation didn’t have to be radical to be punished. It only had to signal unreliability. Violence, both formal and informal, backstopped that pressure, but most of the work was done socially through shame, ostracism, and constant evaluation by peers.
That’s why reducing racism to “bad individuals” has always been analytically weak. Historically, conformity mattered more than belief. You didn’t need to feel superior. You needed to act loyal. And that logic doesn’t disappear when formal systems change. It mutates.
Your point about Donald Trump fits here. What he tapped into wasn’t a new ideology so much as a familiar structure: identity defined externally, enforced internally, and weaponized by someone who understands how in-group pressure works. When identity is something granted by the group rather than claimed by the individual, it becomes vulnerable to manipulation by anyone willing to define the boundaries loudly and punish dissent.
That’s also why your instinct to reject imposed definitions immediately is historically sound. These systems metastasize when they go unchallenged because they rely on silence and compliance more than persuasion. The lesson history keeps offering here, uncomfortably, is that white supremacy has survived less because people believed in it deeply than because too many were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t perform it convincingly enough. That fear, of isolation and of being cast out, isn’t incidental. It’s the engine.
This is an incredibly important point. I am in the process of writing a book in which I say the feudal traditions of Europe are a precursor to chattel slavery. It is a point that really is very obvious but that white historians go out of their way to find reasons that isn’t true. What you say puts that into perspective.
kleptomania is the status quo which permits oligarchs too diminish antiquity & therefore evade lexicon with their own decisions : thusly they manipulate records & then history.
in a realm that is democratic succession is pragmatic because it is not anonymous because lieu anonymity pragmatism is a default because of the intoleration towards the past. so inheritance becomes a kleptomania.
in a realm that is egalitarian, succession is anonymous : because creator over cosmism is secular; because it is a constitutional anarchism. so that inheritance is gnomonic & secular not kleptocratic & occult.
kleptocracy is a government where prosecution is inevitable & the rule is by assassinations.
kleptomania is where a person lies until they cannot say what is true.
if a thing is kleptocratic it is falsified by whatever is pragmatic because of repeated demonstrations rought by deception.
democratic is the opposite thing of patriotic.
Lexicologically.
because anarchism is the basis of patriotism & egalitarianism; anarchism cannot be espoused with a belief, it is only concerning what is self-evident. therefore it is mutually-exclusive towards a democracy or the intoleration towards the past which identifies what is democratic rather that what is egalitarian which views the past with successive & prosecutorial anonymity - that dispels kleptomania & kleptocracy.
I was born in 1970 in North Carolina to a woman who moved south from New Jersey. (Serbian/Jewish/Dutch ; 1st gen on her dad’s side) As a child I knew that I didn’t fit in; that my home was culturally distinct from the kids in my neighborhood, but I couldn’t have explained it, exactly.
When I read this, my eyes were opened… “Holy shit —it makes sense now!” So many of the cultural underpinnings of my childhood have been laid bare.
Thank you. I appreciate what you’ve said here. What I was trying to do here—and what your comment names exactly—is that antebellum Southern violence only makes historical sense when we stop treating it as something exceptional and start treating it as learned practice. Dueling, slave patrol duty, and mob action were not eruptions. They were ways of making hierarchy legible and enforceable in a society that otherwise lacked stability.
The patrol system is especially instructive here. As Sally E. Hadden shows in Slave Patrols, the power of patrols was not simply in the punishments they delivered but in the way participation itself disciplined white behavior. Patrol duty folded racial terror into civic obligation. Men were fined for failing to serve; records were kept; routes assigned. What looked, from a distance, like mob violence was, in fact, bureaucratized, routinized, and socially rewarded. Terror worked because it became the ordinary way of things.
That same logic governs dueling. The point was never ritual for ritual’s sake. As John Hope Franklin argued long ago, Southern militancy functioned as a stabilizing mechanism in an unstable order. The duel clarified standing when law and markets could not. Death was incidental. A man’s refusal to participate signaled social disappearance. Participation confirmed belonging. Risk was the price of recognition.
Once violence is understood this way—as pedagogy rather than breakdown—the continuity across forms becomes harder to ignore. Honor trained elites. Patrols trained ordinary whites. Mobs trained communities. Over time, authority stopped feeling imposed and started feeling embodied. It became muscle memory.
That’s why these systems proved so durable. They didn’t rely on constant ideological persuasion. They relied on repetition—on doing, over generations. And that habit of doing, once learned, didn’t disappear with secession. It just scaled.
I think all of that, especially the level of cruelty, was imported from Europe with its endless wars and religious inquisitions. A lot of historians like to separate what happened here from what happened there in some futile attempt to preserve European dignity, but they are the fathers of cruelty.
I don’t know whether you’d be interested, but my Substack, “Mixed Feelings,” presents various issues from the perspective of a mixed-race person. If you read it and like it, please restack and subscribe.
Rebecca, thanks for this. You’re absolutely right to about this, and I agree it’s a point that often gets dodged rather than argued. There’s a long habit in the history writing of treating American slavery as something radically new or uniquely American, as if extreme cruelty somehow appeared only after Europeans crossed the Atlantic. That move protects a comforting story about Europe. Historically, it doesn’t really work. The violence of chattel slavery didn’t come out of thin air. It was built out of older European traditions of hierarchy, coercion, and sanctioned punishment that had already been practiced for centuries.
Feudal Europe was awash in systems that normalized domination through law and ritual. Serfdom, vagrancy laws, corporal punishment, religious persecution, inquisitions, public spectacle punishment. These all trained people to accept the idea that some lives could be governed through pain, surveillance, and exclusion. Those habits didn’t disappear with modernity. They traveled. What the New World added was scale, racialization, and permanence. Race allowed familiar tools of domination to be made more total and harder to challenge.
Historians like David Brion Davis have long argued that American slavery grew directly out of European legal, theological, and economic traditions rather than standing apart from them. And Edmund S. Morgan showed how ideas of freedom and unfreedom were never opposites in European thought. They were produced together. Liberty for some depended on coercion for others.
What gest resisted, as you say, is the implication. If slavery in the Americas is continuous with European feudal and religious violence, then cruelty isn’t a colonial aberration or a New World corruption. It’s part of the European inheritance itself. That’s uncomfortable for narratives that want to celebrate Europe as the birthplace of enlightenment without reckoning with the coercive systems that made that enlightenment possible.
Your framing of feudal traditions as a precursor is absolutely right. Chattel slavery wasn’t feudalism reborn, but it was feudal domination reorganized through race, property, and Atlantic capitalism. Seeing that continuity doesn’t erase differences. It clarifies responsibility. And it helps explain why so much effort has gone into denying it.
This is so good! Thank you for your scholarship and insight. You have a much more accurate take on Southern Whites than Northern Whites do. Unless we grapple with the peer pressure aspect of white supremacy, we will never break its back. It is not as many presume a mere character flaw in individuals, it is an enforced way of life. For those who fear expulsion from the in-group, it is a powerful force for iniquity. I think Trump glommed onto this culture and manipulated it to his advantage. When you don't define yourself for yourself and allow your identity to be whatever your peer group says it is, you risk someone like Trump manipulating you.
When someone comes at me with their definition of "my" identity claiming I must conform to it, I know I am fixing to be manipulated and/or coerced. That kind of thing has to be slapped down immediately or it will metastasize. White people will do this to each other all the time. It is a fact, especially in the South.
Thank you, Cynthia. You’re putting your finger on something genuinely central, and you’re right to frame it as enforcement rather than attitude.
One of the persistent mistakes, especially in Northern or postwar narratives, is to treat white supremacy as a collection of personal prejudices or moral failures. Historically, that misses how it actually functioned. In the antebellum South, whiteness wasn’t simply an identity one held. It was an identity one had to perform and continually prove. Peer pressure wasn’t incidental to the system. It was the system’s daily operating mechanism.
What made white supremacy durable was precisely the fear you describe: fear of expulsion, loss of standing, or social disappearance. That fear disciplined behavior long before the state ever intervened. Men policed one another’s speech, labor habits, loyalties, and sympathies. Deviation didn’t have to be radical to be punished. It only had to signal unreliability. Violence, both formal and informal, backstopped that pressure, but most of the work was done socially through shame, ostracism, and constant evaluation by peers.
That’s why reducing racism to “bad individuals” has always been analytically weak. Historically, conformity mattered more than belief. You didn’t need to feel superior. You needed to act loyal. And that logic doesn’t disappear when formal systems change. It mutates.
Your point about Donald Trump fits here. What he tapped into wasn’t a new ideology so much as a familiar structure: identity defined externally, enforced internally, and weaponized by someone who understands how in-group pressure works. When identity is something granted by the group rather than claimed by the individual, it becomes vulnerable to manipulation by anyone willing to define the boundaries loudly and punish dissent.
That’s also why your instinct to reject imposed definitions immediately is historically sound. These systems metastasize when they go unchallenged because they rely on silence and compliance more than persuasion. The lesson history keeps offering here, uncomfortably, is that white supremacy has survived less because people believed in it deeply than because too many were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t perform it convincingly enough. That fear, of isolation and of being cast out, isn’t incidental. It’s the engine.
This is an incredibly important point. I am in the process of writing a book in which I say the feudal traditions of Europe are a precursor to chattel slavery. It is a point that really is very obvious but that white historians go out of their way to find reasons that isn’t true. What you say puts that into perspective.
its 100% THE SAME GUYS!! 👏👏👏👏
kleptomania is the status quo which permits oligarchs too diminish antiquity & therefore evade lexicon with their own decisions : thusly they manipulate records & then history.
klepto-mania (a status-quo)
👏👏👏
in a realm that is democratic succession is pragmatic because it is not anonymous because lieu anonymity pragmatism is a default because of the intoleration towards the past. so inheritance becomes a kleptomania.
in a realm that is egalitarian, succession is anonymous : because creator over cosmism is secular; because it is a constitutional anarchism. so that inheritance is gnomonic & secular not kleptocratic & occult.
kleptocracy is a government where prosecution is inevitable & the rule is by assassinations.
kleptomania is where a person lies until they cannot say what is true.
if a thing is kleptocratic it is falsified by whatever is pragmatic because of repeated demonstrations rought by deception.
democratic is the opposite thing of patriotic.
Lexicologically.
because anarchism is the basis of patriotism & egalitarianism; anarchism cannot be espoused with a belief, it is only concerning what is self-evident. therefore it is mutually-exclusive towards a democracy or the intoleration towards the past which identifies what is democratic rather that what is egalitarian which views the past with successive & prosecutorial anonymity - that dispels kleptomania & kleptocracy.
I was born in 1970 in North Carolina to a woman who moved south from New Jersey. (Serbian/Jewish/Dutch ; 1st gen on her dad’s side) As a child I knew that I didn’t fit in; that my home was culturally distinct from the kids in my neighborhood, but I couldn’t have explained it, exactly.
When I read this, my eyes were opened… “Holy shit —it makes sense now!” So many of the cultural underpinnings of my childhood have been laid bare.
Thank you.
Thank you. I appreciate what you’ve said here. What I was trying to do here—and what your comment names exactly—is that antebellum Southern violence only makes historical sense when we stop treating it as something exceptional and start treating it as learned practice. Dueling, slave patrol duty, and mob action were not eruptions. They were ways of making hierarchy legible and enforceable in a society that otherwise lacked stability.
The patrol system is especially instructive here. As Sally E. Hadden shows in Slave Patrols, the power of patrols was not simply in the punishments they delivered but in the way participation itself disciplined white behavior. Patrol duty folded racial terror into civic obligation. Men were fined for failing to serve; records were kept; routes assigned. What looked, from a distance, like mob violence was, in fact, bureaucratized, routinized, and socially rewarded. Terror worked because it became the ordinary way of things.
That same logic governs dueling. The point was never ritual for ritual’s sake. As John Hope Franklin argued long ago, Southern militancy functioned as a stabilizing mechanism in an unstable order. The duel clarified standing when law and markets could not. Death was incidental. A man’s refusal to participate signaled social disappearance. Participation confirmed belonging. Risk was the price of recognition.
Once violence is understood this way—as pedagogy rather than breakdown—the continuity across forms becomes harder to ignore. Honor trained elites. Patrols trained ordinary whites. Mobs trained communities. Over time, authority stopped feeling imposed and started feeling embodied. It became muscle memory.
That’s why these systems proved so durable. They didn’t rely on constant ideological persuasion. They relied on repetition—on doing, over generations. And that habit of doing, once learned, didn’t disappear with secession. It just scaled.