On Thursday, April 16, 2026, I was honored to join a group of incredible scholars for a roundtable panel on “Race, Fear, and Politics in American History” at the Organization of American Historians (OAH) annual conference in Philadelphia. Although Kathleen Belew was unable to join the group, I was still completely blown away by my amazing co-panelists: Kevin Kruse of Princeton, Kellie Carter-Jackson of Wellesley, and Jefferson Cowie of Vanderbilt. It was a fascinating discussion for a group of folks coming at a similar topic from very different vantage points: Jeff was thinking through the history of Barbour County, Alabama, which he of course explored so magnificently in his Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2023); Kellie brought wide-ranging insights but was also referencing her recent, truly remarkable book, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (2024).
My contributions to the discussion came mainly from my forthcoming book, White Power: Policing American Slavery (available for pre-order with delivery in mid-May!). Since my comments were part of a roundtable, it doesn’t exactly fit as a summary. But here’s the gist!
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My approach to the linked history of fear and race stems from my book, which is basically the story of the system of public law that enslavers built between colonial times through the nineteenth century to respond to their fears of enslaved people’s survival, resistance, and rebellion. Or as the enslavers called it, “insurrection.” That term is important because it connotes something more than armed resistance. Here I think of Vincent Brown’s recent book Tacky’s Revolt, where Brown reconceptualizes slave rebellions as warfare—a continuous military struggle over space and time. For enslavers, this meant that the stakes of the struggle were increasingly apocalyptic: the fear not only of Black rebellion but of Black rule. Julia Gaffield’s spectacular new biography of Jean-Jacques Dessalines is a great case-in-point: Dessalines the republican has been recast as Dessalines the barbarian, as enslavers discourse from centuries ago has persisted and been reshaped into popular memory and historiography.
In the American story, enslavers responded to the threat of Black mobility, self-determination and “insurrection” by turning to the law, and specifically to public law. What we might call the enslavers’ state featured three interlocking features: a legal demand for white vigilance; a legal dependence on white violence; and the legal development of central governmental institutions of white military and police authority. At the heart of this enslavers state was the idea of the posse comitatus, or the compulsory, temporarily deputized power of the county to assist law enforcement.
So, one of the moves I want to make is to move from the idea of the enslaver’s violence being enclosed on plantations and homes, and to rethink what it meant for enslaver violence to have been practiced in public—really to define what public space meant. In River of Dark Dreams Walter Johnson develops the idea of the “carceral landscape” but I want to add the institutions and people that animated the enslavers’ state. Once in public, a purportedly enslaved person could constitute an emergency, and eventually that emergency came to be a permanent anxiety or permanent emergency. To meet the permanent emergency, white enslavers needed a legal system that was simultaneously responsive to emergency and also permanent. What if they deputized themselves?
Thinking through “fear” a bit in the project, I see it operating on a few key registers. First is the obvious fear, discussed already, of enslavers targeting Black mobility and “insurrection.” Second, and consequently, was white fear of the collapse of their rule of law—this would be the ultimate outcome of “insurrection.” Zooming out a little bit, if we think about the post-emancipation context for a moment, ex-Confederates repackage the fear of Black “insurrection” as the fear of “Negro rule,” by which they mean the simple existence of Black free Americans holding political office and acting as peace officers. This, for them, was an inversion of the rule of law—their rule of law.
Finally, white enslavers also feared themselves. Their legal concept of white vigilance depended on the deputization of whiteness itself. Think about those infamous pass laws where every white person had the legal authority to question the presence of a person with dark skin in public space. It was an awesome police power, yes, but its use depended on the discretion of the white person. More often than not, white people did not use this authority, however, and when escapes, maroons, and rebels materialized, enslavers always blamed themselves, quite rightly, for their faltering vigilance. Put simply, white deputization could not work because enslavers could not depend on one another.
Part of that fear hinged on the fragility of white masculinity. For if white masculinity was built on patriarchal control of dependents, the very existence of this public law regime was evidence of the brittle, faltering state of white masculinity. Ableism was also at play, for in a statutory sense, white enslavers made “able bodied white men” the legal standard for who must be deputized, vigilant, and violent. That definition of “able bodied” would become a major issue, especially during the Civil War, when Confederate conscription policy was a struggle between harnessing the ideal type of enslaver-soldier, and the desperate reality of dependence on broken bodies, youth and the elderly.
Another move I’m trying to make in the book is to rethink the dominance of the model of rights-based liberalism in American legal and constitutional history. The reality of public law of slavery in seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century of colonial American and United States history is that the idea of rights-based legal order coexisted with the understanding of the rule of law as the rule of force; where white majorities muscular control of police power was the dominant, driving factor in legal development. Alison LaCroix’ brilliant book, The Interbellum Constitution is a brilliant example of this in the nineteenth century.
With regard to contemporary politics and law, the book asks the question that resonates today: who has the right to violence? As we have seen in Chicago, the Twin Cities, and elsewhere, Trump’s ICE enforcement initiative utilizes terror in a way that is reminiscent of post-emancipation white terror groups. It also draws on the deputization principle in several ways, ranging from agreements with sheriffs and local law enforcement as well as the use of military forces as posse comitatus. But I’d also point to the growing prevalence of “stand your ground laws,” which for me are a rearticulation of the “castle doctrine” in ways reminiscent of the old enslavers state since it is a racialized concept of fear that has seemed so significant.
A final point about the concept of the state. The easy move has been to look at enslavers antistatist rhetoric and to declare them to have been antistatist. But the reality, and their legal practices, were very different. It would not be the first time that the rhetoric of antistatism masked an aggrandizement of violent state authority. I’d return to my initial point about the way we tell the story of legal and constitutional history. It is certainly good that in the present our expectation is for rights-based liberalism to be the heart of the rule of law. But it wasn’t always so, and I think nineteenth-century historians have been there first—not for the first or last time—in identifying the coexistence of liberalism with illiberalism.