In order to appreciate Mary Chesnut's response to black on white bloodshed in her own South Carolina, it is helpful to understand her somewhat idiosyncratic ideas about the institution of African American bondage. Like many elite white Southerners on the eve of the Civil War, Chesnut worried about the looming prospect of “another St. Domingo” or a “second John Brown.” Such terms constituted planters' shorthand for a number of apocalyptic racial fantasies: the slave caste rising up en masse against the masters and slaughtering them, eventually overturning the brutalities of the plantation...

In order to appreciate Mary Chesnut's response to black on white bloodshed in her own South Carolina, it is helpful to understand her somewhat idiosyncratic ideas about the institution of African American bondage. Like many elite white Southerners on the eve of the Civil War, Chesnut worried about the looming prospect of “another St. Domingo” or a “second John Brown.” Such terms constituted planters' shorthand for a number of apocalyptic racial fantasies: the slave caste rising up en masse against the masters and slaughtering them, eventually overturning the brutalities of the plantation system (as in Haiti) or an armed white visionary evangelizing enslaved blacks to end their subjugation through violent conflict (as had John Brown). Details from Chesnut's 1880s narrative suggest that, although she shared many of the racist attitudes of her social class, she had come to conclude that slavery was wrong as early as the 1830s.