An article about how the wealthy of the antebellum south used their media bubbles to shield their population from it's injustices and turbocharge their fears.
An article about how the wealthy of the antebellum south used their media bubbles to shield their population from it's injustices and turbocharge their fears.
In the months leading up to the Civil War, fear festered in southern living rooms and legislative chambers. Newspapers reported that the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, held a “hatred of the South and its institutions [that would] cause him to use all the power at hand to destroy our country” and that his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, was not only sympathetic to the plight of black Americans but was himself part black—“what we call,” the editor of one Charleston, South Carolina, paper stated, “a mulatto.”
These claims were not relegated to the fringes of southern society; they emanated from its center. The most powerful people and institutions in the region voiced and acted upon them as fact. But they were unfounded: conspiracy theories, born of white supremacy and the desire to justify and maintain slavery. Even as they helped shield the antebellum South against the rising abolitionism in the North and in other countries, these theories deepened sectional divisions and made the question of slavery all but impossible to settle peacefully. They helped fuel the deadliest war in the nation’s history. And their violent legacy has lingered across centuries.
In The Atlantic’s first abolitionist article, titled “Where Will It End?”, Edmund Quincy reflected on how that kind of racist and conspiratorial political culture fed on silence and misinformation. “The slaveholders, having the wealth, and nearly all the education that the South can boast of,” he wrote, “create the public sentiment and … control the public affairs of their region, so as best to secure their own supremacy. No word of dissent to the institutions under which they live, no syllable of dissatisfaction, even, with any of the excesses they stimulate, can be breathed in safety.”
The antebellum South stands as a cautionary tale about what can happen when conspiracy theories are projected from a state’s highest platforms: by the richest men, the highest-ranking officials, the most widely read publications. Their lies were pervasive, permeating the South through decades of speeches and articles and pamphlets. Contradictory voices were dismissed as less-than-human or demonized for inciting mass murder. The false narrative became the foundation for a real regime.
In his Atlantic piece, Quincy also anticipated that “a wide-spread spirit of discontent” would eventually provoke resistance from within the South. He thought that resistance would come from non-slaveholding white southerners; but in the end, it came from the slaves themselves. For years, they lived in the same echo chamber as their owners, hearing conspiracy theories about abolitionists who would fight for their freedom and a war that would end their bondage for good. When the Civil War began, many of them accepted the theories as truth, and acted on them.
They abandoned their plantations.
They lobbied to join the Union Army.
And finally, just as their former owners had feared, they took up arms against the South.
An article about how the wealthy of the antebellum south used their media bubbles to shield their population from it's injustices and turbocharge their fears.