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 project emerging from my dissertation speaks to longstanding questions of strategic racial alliance and autocratic stability.
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.
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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 secured 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.
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