White Concerns Over Racial Differences

Wealthy southern landowners of the 1800s were making a goodly deal of money, and many whites wanted to keep their dear sweet departing racism around as a social practice. They clung fervently to the generalized fears of being associated with dark-skinned people, who were still tinged with the bitter taste of having been someone else's cattle.
Most of the descendants of the black slaves were beginning to form a significant and long-lasting underclass, one which rich southerners couldn't tolerate unless they could keep away from them. Ignorance about racial differences was worldwide, being extremely hard to avoid. There was concern, for example, that the "interbreeding" of the races would cause racial inferiority, as many white scientists and anthropologists of that time thought.
Measurements were taken of various people's head sizes and the "slopes" of their foreheads to demonstrate this "inferiority" of the brown-skinned races. None of these studies has since borne out to be true, but in those times, as brown people seemed to live more primitively than whites, some people thought they were real science, and expected racial inferiority from the darker races of the world.
Nowadays, it's assumed that more "primitive" lifestyles were due largely to differing timelines of human development and climactic conditions, not inferiority or superiority. But in the years between 1600 and 1900, those earlier attitudes were widespread, and slavery had both its northern and southern defenders. Over time, perhaps mainly due to the lack of black people living in the North, the South became noted for violent acts of racism, said to "keep them in line."
Also, southern colonies during the 1600s were largely devoted to the production of tobacco, which was highly labor intensive, and so by the end of the 17th century they had a much higher number of slaves than in the North. But due to its use in agriculture, slavery was used in many northern agricultural areas. And from about the 1640s until 1865, people of African descent were legally enslaved, being held predominantly by whites, but also by some few Native Americans and free black people. Laws were written establishing it, but American slavery was finally found to be unconstitutional in 1865.
Five years earlier, the 1860 U.S. Census Bureau had stated that nearly 4 million slaves existed, a total population of over 12 million such people in the 15 states where slavery was still legal. A little less than one fourth of the families in the slave states owned slaves, about 8% of American families at the time, but most households owned only a few slaves. The largest concentration of slaves was on the plantations, owned by planters, who held 20 or more slaves. As 95% of black people were eventually living in the South, they were finally one third of the population there, as opposed to 1% of the population of the North, in 1860.
This is the sterling fact that caused groups such as the Klan to inflame white people and others into worrying about black violent insurgency, and possible coalition-building between African-Americans and Native Americans. Although back in those days it may have made sense, as these were all enemy peoples against each other who often fought to the death, it didn't make much sense for tactics such as those the Klan used to be brought to force in our times.
It is estimated that some 12 million black people were shipped to the Americas from the 17th to the 19th century, but of these, only 5.4% were actually brought to the United States. As I said, slavery was nearly worldwide. But the slavery population in the U.S had grown from the roughly 700,000 blacks brought into our country this way to over 4 million people, with many of them now of mixed heritage through intermarriage with whites, Mexican and Native Americans, by the time of the 1860 Census.
Many of these people were in later times considered to be "colored" and no longer truly black or "Negro." These terms was later to figure "both kinds" of black people in as the named key participants and "players" in the American Civil Rights Movement of the second half of the 20th century. But all these people, if they were any degree of brown whatsoever, were seen as "colored people" by whites, as if they had all once been white - and later corrupted. They would face deeply enforced policies and unwritten illegal laws of hostile racial segregation, which attempted to keep to "whites only" and "colored only" sections of all southern public facilities, to keep people from "racially mixing."
Read the next article in this series, "Keeping the Black Man Down" and the other articles in this long article series about why racism was and is so prevalent in the American South.
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