Did specific threats give rise to white supremacist groups?
Drew Gilpin Faust: What turns the world most decidedly upside down for white Southerners is to take a group of people who were forbidden to bear arms, who were defined as subservient, who were forced to be subordinate, and then to put them in a position of control and to give them arms. And I think there’s a certain sense of fear of retribution here, though it’s often not expressed. “What are they going to do to me, given what we have done to them?” This is never said in an overt way. And yet for a class of people that have beaten and whipped slaves into submission, to think, “Well, what happens when we give them the instruments of power?” Part of the logic of the social order of the old South was that white women are subordinate because white men protect them. What are they protecting them from? In one set of letters that I read, there was a reference to the “harrow of harrows.” I think there’s a certain sexual fear here, that white men are protecting white women in their purity from
