Repression of Enslaved Americans' Protest: A Model of Escape in the Antebellum South

Trellace Marie Lawrimore

Journal of Historical Political Economy, 2023, vol. 3, issue 2, 211-236

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Slavery; protest; repression; coercion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/115.00000051 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jnlhpe:115.00000051

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Historical Political Economy from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().