Underlying Reasons of the Civil War Attitudes of superiority were used to control the slave population. Some historians paint a picture of a slave population made submissive by the conditions that existed as the slaves had their African heritage destroyed and were made into helpless dependents in the New World. Historians more recently have found a different picture. Considering the harsh punishments meted out to slaves attempting to escape, the vast number that did try and even succeeded shows rebelliousness at odds with the picture of a submissive population.
Fear of slave revolts was a permanent part of plantation life, and there was an intricate and powerful system in place to control the slaves. The slave owners used this system to maintain their labor supply and their way of life. The system was both subtle and crude and involved every device that social orders use to keep power and wealth in their own hands. The system was both physical and psychological. Slaves were taught discipline and were also impressed over and over with the idea of their own inferiority and to "know their place." They were taught to see blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by the power of the master, to merge their interests with those of the master, and to ignore their own individual needs. Among the means for effecting this were the discipline of hard labor, the breakup of the slave family, the lulling effects of religion, the creation of disunity among the slaves by separating them into field slaves and the more privileged house slaves, and the power of the law and threats of death (Zinn 34-35).

The very idea of arming slaves raised fears and had for some time. Abolitionists had charged that slavery was economically unsound because the workers could not be expected to be efficient and because there was such a waste of physical and human resources in the plantation