How do elites preserve power in the face of threats from non-elites? I answer this question in the case of the antebellum U.S. South; I identify the strategies elites used to repress enslaved Americans and to co-opt non-slaveholding whites. Using a combination of formal theory and novel historical data, I demonstrate how enslavers manipulated public institutions to secure their wealth when private means of repression and coercion were insufficient. The book emerging from my dissertation speaks to longstanding questions of strategic racial alliance and autocratic stability.
Below are article-length works that produced some of the research for the book.
How did Southern elites maintain a system that violently extracted labor out of unwilling participants? Resistance by enslaved Americans was common, and it threatened the wealth, power, and lives of elites. So, enslavers employed a litany of individual and collective strategies to reduce the threat of resistance. I study how the South repressed one particular type of resistance: escape. While existing work has considered various repressive strategies in isolation, I model two ways to discourage escape - ex ante positive incentives and ex post pursuit - and contextualize them within the broader repressive environment. Results indicate that higher rewards do not always decrease escape attempts, and that, under certain conditions, higher rewards are associated with more pursuit and the same amount of running. Furthermore, enslavers do not always expend more on pursuit when the exogenous likelihood of escape is higher. The model speaks to enslavers' demands for slave patrols, and it suggests when pursuit, particularly in the form of runaway slave ads, is an appropriate proxy for escape attempts.
[paper] [journal link] [online appendix]
Elites in the antebellum U.S. South faced persistent protest by enslaved Americans. Elites sought to quell that threat through policing, but success relied on the participation of non-slaveholding Whites. I hypothesize that elites encouraged non-slaveholders’ compliance by offering policy concessions, specifically, school funding. Novel data from North Carolina show that the state distributed more school funds to counties where more enslaved people lived, and that elites in those counties raised more school taxes. I then proxy for slave escape with the location of escape routes and find that elites also raised more taxes in densely enslaved counties containing escape routes. Alternative explanations rooted in electoral incentives or education preferences cannot account for the funding patterns, and data from the 1850 U.S. census suggest that the theory may extend to the rest of the South. The paper illustrates how elites can leverage public funds to preserve power in ethnically diverse settings.
[paper] [journal link] [replication materials]
Newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves are the greatest surviving record of enslavers' investments in repressing enslaved Americans. In order to analyze the repression of enslaved Americans, I propose to build the first exhaustive database of extant runaway slave ads from the antebellum South. I combine traditional OCR software with new AI technology to identify and extract runaway slave ads from antebellum newspapers. I initially test the pipeline on a sample of newspapers from North Carolina in 1851, and it demonstrates 100% recall (89.7%, 100.0%) and 97.6% precision (87.4%, 99.9%). Furthermore, it identifies 12 new ads (19.4% increase) that the comparison dataset does not contain. These encouraging results provide a proof-of-concept for the broader project, which will proceed by expanding the search to more years and other states. The project endeavors to improve on existing methods and datasets by not only collecting more ads, but also offering error estimates of the ads omitted, ads miscategorized, and ads no longer in existence.
[working paper]
Escape was enslaved Americans' most potent form of resistance in the antebellum South, and enslavers had two strategies for repressing that escape. They offered incentives to laborers who stayed and produced on the plantation, and they pursued those who ran. Were these strategies effective in suppressing resistance? Using a game theoretic model, I show that enslavers' expenditures on plantation incentives and pursuing runaways do not strictly deter protest and sometimes coincide with more protest. I contextualize the results within critical changes in cotton technology and discuss the conditions under which enslaved laborers may have been able to reverse the benefits of this technology to enslavers and under which the dampening effect of protest may have amplified technological gains for enslavers. The model affirms the power of enslaved laborers to affect economic outcomes on antebellum plantations, and it offers general insights into the dynamics of coercion, repression, and protest.
[working paper]