Americans have always had robbery with violence central in their society… what, after all, was slavery but that.
February 19, 2019 § Leave a comment
What we know from histories like Stan Harrold’s study, about a couple of years on the border, and also from earlier studies on mobbing, almost all of the lethal violence, not murder which is interpersonal violence, but almost all of the social violence, or public violence of the antebellum period, is around slavery.
So, my sense is that antebellum Americans knew that slavery is a catalyzing agent that is unique in the way in which it draws people into stronger and stronger conflict that can escalate to the point of death.
The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War
Tom Barber tbarbe6@lsu.edu
Wednesday in the Age of Reason-Munchausen (1988) 
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