Honor, Manhood, and the Mississippi Slave Insurrection Scare of 1835

In early July, 1835, rumors of a slave insurrection swept central Mississippi. Deviant white men, with bad characters and dishonorable motives, were—or so the residents of the small towns along the Big Black River in Madison County believed—plotting to incite the slaves to rebellion so that during the resulting panic they could rob the banks and plunder the cities. These rumors were entirely unfounded, but within a few weeks, groups of white citizens calling themselves ‘committees of safety’ had examined and tortured an unknown number of men (both white and black) whom they thought to be involved in the conspiracy, and by the end of July about a dozen white men and around twenty or thirty slaves had been put to death in Mississippi. As a moment during which white men not only articulated their notion of what it meant to be a ‘man,’ but also demonstrated and violently enforced it, the insurrection scare is an opening, a window, into the lives of men in the antebellum South. This paper will examine the role that Southern notions of manhood played in this insurrection scare, and will discuss the performative nature of Southern honour as it related to ideas about class and race in the antebellum period. Those targeted in the scare had failed to act in an honorable manner and were therefore excluded from the caste of Southern gentlemen. The scare can thus be interpreted as an attempt by the leading men of Madison County to reassert their authority as men of honor in the face of a perceived challenge to their manhood.