Booknotes: A Precarious Balance

New Arrival:

• A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865 by Antwain K. Hunter (UNC Press, 2025).

From the description: "Spanning the 1720s through the end of the Civil War," Antwain Hunter's A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865 "explores how free and enslaved Black North Carolinians accessed, possessed, and used firearms—both legal and otherwise—and how the state and white people responded. North Carolinians, whether free or enslaved, Black or white, had different stakes on the issue, all of which impacted the reality of Black people’s gun use."

The study begins in 1715 as that was the year the state assembly first passed laws regulating black firearm ownership/use. Hunter's book, which covers 150 years, "frames firearms as an instrumental part of Black North Carolinians' lives and labor from the late colonial era through to the Civil War" (pg. 16) in all its legal and social contexts and complications.

So the final chapter covers the Civil War years. It "highlights how Black and white North Carolinians and the state balanced the utility and threat of armed Black people" during the conflict. In that chapter, Hunter argues that armed black labor was "instrumental to wartime productivity at the local level," (including managing and protecting plantations against a variety of threats in ways that "both challenged and bolstered the Confederate nation") but that wartime necessity did not extend to white support for armed blacks when it came to military service (pp. 15-16).