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This chapter investigates how the ancien régime culture, with which officials and settlers came to French Louisiana and which made them highly sensitive to the issue of maintaining their rank in public, intersected with the process of racialization. As the urban milieu facilitated cross-racial encounters and exchanges of all kinds in public civic and religious ceremonies, drinking houses, and street encounters, most whites quickly became aware of the need to maintain some appearance of social superiority and to display and instill the socio-racial hierarchy by their exclusive and violent behaviour in the public space. Still, people of African descent never ceased to fight against their domination, invisibility, and segregation.

Chapter 3 moves from the field to the prison building to reveal how hierarchical prisoner labor arrangements structured an internal prison economy that bought and sold prisoner bodies and services as cell slavery. By narrating southern prisons’ shift from dormitories to cells, this chapter will show how the power and control of prisoner trustees was strengthened by the changes. Within the southern convict guard framework, prison rape is analyzed as a state-orchestrated design rather than as an individual act pf prisoner pathology. Through an analysis of sexual violence in male prisons as a social construct of the southern trustee system, this chapter joins in a historical turn toward placing sexual violence at the very center of racial oppression. Seeking to take prison rape seriously as evidence of evolving state control and orchestration, the chapter pushes against the criminological view that has cast prison rape as a timeless function of the prisoners’ own pathology. The chapter also considers how women prisoners experienced the southern trusty system and the state’s attempt to isolate and target women that the prison classified as the “aggressive female homosexual.”

Throughout the United States, early Boy Scout officials relied heavily on highly-structured camping and hiking experiences like the Pine Tree Patrol method, Nature Study and its scientific classification system, and natural resource conservation activities to teach boy members modern manhood’s values and skills necessary to manage an urban-industrial society and its expert-led government. Administrators insisted that the most important use of natural areas and resources was the “conservation of boyhood,” which entailed managed development of the nation’s key asset (its most capable adolescent boys). By characterizing women and minority and farm boys as too sentimental, selfish, careless, and ignorant to conserve natural resources and interact with nature in other modern and scientific ways, early Boy Scout outdoor programming and imagery helped reinforce a masculine and racial hierarchy of character and citizenship.

The chapter begins by stating that a widely circulated picture of a white soldier and a Black Confederate soldier is actually a photograph of Andrew Chandler and his family slave, Silas. Slaves were sometimes allowed to purchase military uniforms or were provided them by their masters, which explains why there are photographs of Black men in Confederate uniforms. At the onset of the war, Confederates believed they could offset the disadvantage of having a smaller population and less war-making power than the Union by utilizing slave labor. The government impressed enslaved people to work on earthworks, railroads, and weapon production. They also performed various jobs in camps such as cooking, performing music, and assisting in hospitals. White soldiers often brought slaves from home to act as personal servants. At times, the presence of personal slaves created class tensions within camps. Enslaved people often took on various tasks in camps for payment. While the shared experience of war likely brought the enslaved and their enslavers closer together, the racial hierarchy was strictly, and often violently enforced by the enslavers. Enslavers’ belief that their slaves were loyal to them and the Confederate cause sometimes caused emotional distress when a slave would run away or defect to the Union.