than the slaveowners, and the Indians had infinitely more to fear than the settlers. Even to diagnose and investigate white fear in this period seems an injustice: the fear that should matter to us is the fear of the man who has been murdered, the fear felt by his family and kin and friends and the millions of African Americans across the South who lived through decades of systematic terrorism with essentially no protection from the state. When we think of fear and the lynch mob, we should of course think of the victim, not of the crowd.
