Keynote Address for the meeting of the Southern Intellectual History Colloquium
University of Miami, March 3, 2023, Drew Gilpin Faust
It is a great pleasure to be here with you, and I want to thank my former colleague, President Julio Frenk for his generous hospitality, and my former student, Michael Bernath for inviting me to return to the Southern Intellectual History Circle—now officially the Southern Intellectual History Colloquium, but still popularly known as SIHC. I want especially to express my appreciation to Mike, who devoted an enormous amount of effort to putting this conference together – – only to have to cancel it because of Covid and then do the work all over again. Mike – -We are all in your debt.
I stand before you as an artifact, a historical datum, an original member of the very first gathering of SIHC, which took place at a different Miami–Miami University of Ohio – – in 1988. I think I am the only person here who was present at SIHC’s creation—the only “original cast member” as Mike put it to me. I realize I haven’t been at a SIHC meeting for 16 long years. You might say life intervened. But I was a regular attendee for more than a decade, delivering comments, papers and even once a keynote. There was a kind of Same Time Next Year aspect to the gathering. Most of us rarely saw one another apart from those meetings, but every February we would find ourselves together, usually in a wonderfully warm southern locale, a welcome respite for those of us residing in Yankee-land, immersing ourselves for two or three days in extraordinarily intense intellectual exchanges. There was a definite generational aspect to all this, with the younger scholars – – of which I was then one – – in awe and even fear of our seniors. We were spending weekends, eating meals, drinking bourbon, walking on the beach, debating and arguing with the Great Men of our field. And they were almost exclusively men and overwhelmingly white.
What has become of the ideas we argued about? Clearly SIHC itself lives on, for here we all are. And over the past quarter century, southern intellectual history has been transformed from what was long seen as an oxymoron into a vibrant field, in no small part because of the work of members of this group, especially the late Michael O’Brien, who invented SIHC in the first place. In 1907, Henry Adams had famously observed that the southerner – – by which he meant the white southerner – – had “no mind” and “could not analyze an idea.” A century later, such an assertion would no longer have been possible.
But what remains of the debates we undertook in those early days, in what were not infrequently if you can believe it, smoke filled rooms? Where did the discourse of the Southern Intellectual History Circle come from? And where has it gone? How much of it still matters? How has it contributed to our understanding of not just the region but the nation, our understanding of both the American past and the American present and future?
Many of the scholars pursuing southern history in 1988, both the most senior academic stars and the more recent arrivals like me – – were inspired by the Civil Rights movement and by the changing attitudes toward race and justice it expressed and embodied. Assumptions of racial equality required new approaches to the meaning of America’s past as well as new interpretations of the role of the South in our national history. Southern history had mostly been the province of the region’s natives; it had long rested in the hands of the good old boys. At its worst during the first half of the 20th century, it celebrated a racial order we now find abhorrent. Georgia native Ulrich B. Phillips for example, who ended up as a professor at Wisconsin, Michigan and Yale, characterized slavery as a benevolent “school” for uncivilized Africans. But even at its best, southern history long tended to take for granted assumptions that changing racial circumstances would overturn in the years after World War II and Brown v Board.
As the political, social and moral drama of Civil Rights played out across the country, southern history became a “hot field”, one that attracted multitudes of graduate students and scholars seeking in the past a deeper context for understanding the urgent issues of the present. And within southern history, perhaps the hottest topic of all was slavery. A flood of works appeared beginning in the late 1950s. Each book seemed to provide fodder for the next, as historians mounted arguments that revolved in considerable part around the question of whether slaves had been victimized and robbed of culture and identity by the institution’s cruelties or whether they had salvaged culture and agency despite their oppression. Answering these questions required historians to use new sources—the family reconstruction tools of anthropologists, the quantitative methods of social scientists, the skills of folklorists and archaeologists. By the time I was in graduate school in the early 1970s, the debates had extended well beyond the academy: by 1974 the historical controversies over slavery had become a Today Show topic and a Time magazine cover story.
I was swept up by these questions and by the arguments surrounding them; they were the stuff of my best graduate seminars. But my particular interest was a bit orthogonal—I often worried marginal – – to the core of this body of work. I wanted to know how white southerners had come to terms with such a system. How did they live with themselves, particularly by the nineteenth century when they had also committed themselves to building a nation allegedly dedicated to liberty and equality. This question was no doubt on some level a reflection of a more personal and immediate one: how had the people I had grown up with in segregationist Virginia of the 1950s – – my family and friends – – accepted and justified that era’s version of white supremacy? What might we learn about the nature and foundations of our own rationalizations and blindnesses by looking back at those of the past? These historical questions led me to broader methodological ones: how can we study what has variously been termed Zeitgeist, mentalite or world view?
I embarked on a dissertation about a group of antebellum white southerners who saw themselves as intellectuals, with an eye to understanding how they found a place for the life of the mind in a society so famously hostile to such a role. And I sought to show how that effort made them avid defenders of slavery. They wrote tracts in defense of human bondage not so much because they owned slaves – – which they all did – – but because their polemics offered them a centrality and a social purpose that would have otherwise been unavailable to them within their culture. This work, as well my subsequent explorations of the ideas of this group of men, who frequently discussed these issues in their letters to one another, earned me my ticket to the first meeting of SIHC. But it also made me much more of a social and cultural historian than many of the others in the group – – especially Michael O’Brien – – who hewed more closely to what we might call “purer” intellectual history: the focus on philosophical ideas and influences often distanced from their social context rather than embedded in more broadly shared world views. [i]
Social history was enjoying a heyday in the last quarter of the 20th century, and I would not be the only participant to influence SIHC to reach beyond a more narrow and classic view of intellectual history. Although I think Michael may have originally intended and hoped for something else, the very notion of “southern” necessarily drew us to focus on the distinctive features of the society in which the ideas that interested us were located; it almost inevitably led us to want to connect southern thought to the questions of race and slavery. The older generation of “Great Men” among us reinforced that tendency in their own approach to the place of ideas in southern society, culture and history.
The most prominent among these scholars – – and by far the most forceful presence at our meetings – – was Eugene Genovese. Born in Brooklyn in 1930, Gene was the son of an immigrant dockworker. When he entered graduate school at Columbia in the 1950s, he was far from your usual sort of southern historian, most of whom, with a very few exceptions, tended in that era to be genteel products of the region – -white, male, Anglo Saxon Protestants. There prevailed something of the notion captured by Quentin in Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! who declared to his Harvard roommate: “You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.”[ii] Genovese had not been born there. During his defense of his dissertation on the political economy of slavery and southern agriculture, he was challenged by the eminent historian and native Mississippian David Donald: “Mr. Genovese. Have you ever seen a mule?”
As a young man, Genovese joined and then was expelled from the Communist Party, and as a junior faculty member at Rutgers in 1965 he caused a political uproar in New Jersey by declaring he would welcome the victory of the Viet Cong. He approached the study of history through a Marxist lens, and set the terms of debate in southern history for at least two decades, perhaps cresting with the magisterial Roll Jordan Roll in 1974, hailed by many at the time as the best of the era’s wave of studies of the antebellum slave institution. A review in the New York Review of Books in 1995 proclaimed him “the most influential and imaginative” historian of the antebellum South; another in 2006 declared he had “dominated” the field of slavery studies for “nearly half a century;” he was, “responsible for a historiographical revolution” overturning the “entire’ [existing] intellectual edifice.”[iii] At SIHC, he terrified us with his reputation for making enemies even of devoted friends and acolytes. But his encyclopedic knowledge and his often deliciously-barbed insights had us almost hanging on his every word, as he and his wife, and frequent co-author, Betsey Fox Genovese smoked their cigarillos and displayed their erudition.
I am not sure who reads Genovese any more. Roll Jordan Roll may be on some lists for graduate oral exams, but I would guess many young historians would not be able to name more than one or two of his books if indeed they had heard of him at all. He is rarely cited and certainly not today regarded as a scholar defining historical discourse – – or influencing a wide public. Part of this marginalization – – maybe disappearance is a better word – – arises from the path he and his work took in the last two decades of his life. In the years leading up to Betsey’s death in 2007 and his own five years later, Genovese and Fox-Genovese became increasingly conservative – – politically and socially – -declaring their opposition to abortion, feminism, multiculturalism, “political correctness” and what they regarded as lax intellectual standards. They converted to Catholicism and remarried in the church. Congenitally provocative, Genovese did not shrink from promulgating his new views, often lashing out at those who looked at his transformation with dismay. A trilogy of works on the mind of the master class produced over these years attracted diminishing attention. The books came to be seen by many as embodying an embarrassing infatuation with the South’s slaveholding class, even as Genovese endeavored to distinguish the white South’s dedication to slavery, which he did vigorously condemn, from the aspects of their lives and thought which he professed to admire: he celebrated their doubts about the society of liberal bourgeois individualism that had emerged in the North. He had once attacked liberalism from the left; now he assailed it from the right. When the Village Voice labelled Genovese “a sort of Public Enemy no 1,” it probably overstated his shrinking significance, but not the nature of his tarnished reputation. Some observers noted that what seemed a startling transformation from Communist to right-wing Catholic was undergirded by a deep consistency: Genovese was an authoritarian, captivated by power. This had led him first to Stalin and then to the Pope. And we could add, to the South’s ruling class. [iv]
I do not wish today to exhume the life and work of Eugene Genovese, and certainly do not intend to rehabilitate him, although I do think his evaporation from the historical canon is fascinating and worthy of some attention. My purpose, rather, is to explore the dimension of his scholarship that was designed to help us understand the question I posed a few minutes ago: can his work in any way explain how white southerners of the antebellum era justified a cruel and unjust institution? What worldview, mentalite, habit of mind enabled them to not just to accept but to defend the enslavement of other human beings and the daily violence and inhumanity its perpetuation required? How did they live with themselves?
At the heart of his response to this question lay his notion of what he called “paternalism.” This concept rested at the core of Roll Jordan Roll, and it became a term central to the study of slavery well into our new century, as scholars embraced it, rejected it, quarreled over it and sought to refine and redefine it – – even as they were hard pressed to turn away from addressing it. It is a concept that no longer has much currency, now identified with the Genoveses’ very troubling infatuation with the master class. But I think its unspoken presence still lingers over a new Genovese-free historiography of slavery. What was “paternalism”? And how did a Marxist scholar, by definition committed to a materialist view of history, come to make a contribution to the understanding of the world of ideas?
Because its economy was based on unfree labor, Genovese characterized the antebellum South as precapitalist, premodern and prebourgeois. It was the relations of production – – slave labor — not the relations of exchange – – the market- – that shaped antebellum southern society. Unlike the North, where a modern, capitalist society had emerged, he argued, the South was still fixed in earlier economic and thus social forms, based in the foundational and defining relationship between the ownership and means of production: the relationship between master and slave. But Genovese regarded this relationship as far more than simply economic or material; it shaped class and social structures and created the ideology of power that gave meaning to every action within the southern social order.
Genovese was not simply a Marxist, but a Gramscian, embracing the views of the early 20th century Italian Marxist philosopher who developed the notion of “cultural hegemony.” This was the term Gramsci created to describe how a ruling class might use ideological domination rather than raw force or coercion to create widely shared beliefs that would work towards maintaining power and the status quo. Gramsci influenced Genovese to focus on ideas rather than simple economic self-interest as fundamental to southern slavery and the master class. When Genovese began publishing, most southern historians regarded Marx as largely irrelevant and potentially dangerous to scholarly practice; I would wager almost none of them had even heard of Gramsci. But Genovese would use Gramsci to turn southern history upside down. [v]
Identifying the master/slave relationship as the defining force in the society, economy and the structurally-linked world view of the Old South, Genovese posited what he called “paternalism” to be the essence of this bond; he described it as an “organic relationship based on reciprocal obligations” understood by both the enslaver and the enslaved, the Old South’s version of cultural hegemony. Genovese hastened to clarify that masters and slaves entertained radically different interpretations of these obligations. The enslaved came to use them as a claim on their enslavers, a set of customary rights and a means of setting limits on the absoluteness of the enslavers’ power. And Genovese emphasized that paternalism should not be misunderstood as kindness, for whites were often “extraordinarily cruel” in their treatment of their human property. But paternalism represented an ideology generated by the material basis of social relations in the South, in the value of workers as property, which yielded the enslavers’ stake in the enslaveds’ well-being. This, he argued, led necessarily to an affirmation of their humanity. Christianity provided much of the language in which the reciprocal obligations of enslaver and enslaved were framed: a form of self justification for the one; a foundation for resistance and hope for liberation and salvation for the other. I am sure that Gene delighted in shocking his Marxist colleagues by placing religion at the heart of his rendering of the South’s relationship of the ownership to the means of production.
The South’s ruling class framed its power and control in the rhetoric not just of Christianity, but of kinship – – in the oft repeated trope: “our family black and white.” But the notion of family it embraced was one of hierarchy and dominance, not the bourgeois, egalitarian and sentimental understanding of family emerging in capitalist society to the North. As Genovese wrote in Roll, Jordan, Roll, “The slaveholders’ ideology constituted an authentic world-view in the sense that it developed in accordance with the reality of social relations. If it was nonetheless self-serving and radically false in its fundamental philosophical content, so is every other ruling class ideology. The slaveholders understood as much and could therefore embrace it without hypocrisy – – or rather, without a larger dose of hypocrisy than must attend every attempt to justify the exploitation and oppression of others.” This was a key distinction, ever more central to his evolving portrait of the ideology of the South’s ruling class: self deceiving rather than hypocritical. They were, he argued, sincere. [vi]
For all Genovese’s categorical condemnations of the cruelty of slavery and its exploitative nature, many of his critics regarded these proclamations as more ritualized than fully felt; they found the concept of paternalism to represent a disquieting romanticization of the peculiar institution. “Aunt Jemima in Dialectics,” one critic charged. Was Genovese himself offering some kind of scarcely-concealed apology for the enslavers? And was the notion of the reciprocity between enslaved and enslaver implying a kind of complicity of the enslaved in their own bondage? Was he discounting their rebelliousness and their resistance to their oppression?
In the course of the two decades that followed the publication of Roll Jordan Roll, these critiques continued and intensified, demonstrating both the contentiousness of Genovese’s claims and the strength of their hold on the field of southern history. Scholars elaborated their criticisms, pointing out other shortcomings: his rather cavalier disregard of differences of time and place: 1730 was not 1830; slavery in Virginia was not slavery in Mississippi. Genovese’s rendition of slaveholder ideology was charged as insufficiently attentive to race and racism in the construction of the white southern world view. His analysis was seen as focusing on too narrow an elite even within the slaveholding class. And attacks on the notion of the South as precapitalist escalated.
Genovese would moderate and modulate his arguments up until the very eve of his death. He shifted his language about the diametrical opposition between North and South, largely abandoning the terminology of “pre-bourgeois” and “premodern.” He declared instead that the South was “in but not of” the capitalist world. And he focused increasingly on the enslavers’ side of the ideology of paternalism until it became more purely an ideology of dominance rather than one of reciprocity. He seemingly abandoned the idea that the enslaved had in any way bought in – – even to claim their own interest. [vii]
Among the most important factors weakening the hold of paternalism on the field and pushing these revisions in Genovese’s thought were a series of new scholarly studies of the slave trade. This work delineated a reality completely at odds with the paternalistic ethos he had described: slavery was a market, not a family. Michael Tadman’s rigorous quantitative research on slave sales, published in 1989, demonstrated that well after the African slave trade had been outlawed, a vibrant and even growing exchange in human beings within the South had prospered. Fully half of enslaved families in the antebellum era, he determined, had experienced the traumas of separation through sale. As historian George Fredrickson observed, this reduced “any concept of slaveholder paternalism to the realm of propaganda and self-delusion.” When the eminent scholar John Hope Franklin published what would prove to be his last book in 1999, he and his co-author chose to put paternalism in quotation marks. But it is telling they still used the term. [viii]
In Soul by Soul, also published in 1999, Walter Johnson built on Tadman’s work in an exploration of the New Orleans slave market – – depicting in powerful and evocative prose the inhumane practices of southern slaveholders and the resilience of the enslaved. Human trafficking, commodification of human property, the market in human beings, not some notion of paternalism, these studies suggested, were the heart of the South’s society, economy and culture. Johnson declared paternalism to be an absurd “fantasy.” But he did not abandon it altogether; paternalism and commercialism coexisted, he posited; paternalism could be seen as a “way of imagining, describing and justifying slavery rather than direct reflection of underlaying social relations.” Those social relations, in Johnson’s view, were defined instead by the brutal realities of commodification institutionalized through the centrality of the market. Paternalism was relegated to the self-serving world view of the ruling class. [ix]
The shifts of interpretation Genovese offered in the last decade of his life seem almost to accept such a rendition of his concept, though I doubt he would have openly conceded as much to Johnson and his other critics. [x] At the same time that Genovese and Fox-Genovese were becoming increasingly conservative, their work was focusing more exclusively on the white ruling class and less on the detailed circumstances of their relationship with their enslaved property or on the lives of the enslaved themselves. Their long promised trilogy: The Mind of the Master Class (2005), Slavery in White and Black (2008); and Fatal Self Deception(2011) comprised an exhaustive, prodigiously researched treatment of the ideas of white southerners, what they wrote, what they thought and what they read. In the Preface to Fatal Self-Deception, Genovese made clear, “We use ‘Southerners’ to mean the whites who constitute our principal subject.” There is little about the experience or attitudes or culture of the enslaved, and no claims about “reciprocity” or buy-in from the enslaved to a shared construction of the master-slave relationship. Neither “Gramsci”, nor “hegemony” appear in the indexes of any of the three books. The subtitle of Fatal Self–Deception is “Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South” and here, a year before his death, Genovese took his final stand on the matter.[xi]
Paternalism had come to mean for Genovese a ruling class ideology designed to do significant emotional as well as political work on behalf of the powerful. He now paid scant attention to its Marxian roots in the relationship between the ownership and means of production. And he readily acknowledged it to have been self-serving and self-deluding – – and he portrayed the shock felt by the deluded planter class when their rationalizations were destroyed as the enslaved ran to Union lines and seized their own freedom during the Civil War. But, he insisted, the master class “said what they meant and meant what they said.” Although the ideology they had developed served them in the immediate term, in the longer term, as the title indicates, it fatally deceived them. “Proslavery Southerners, he wrote, “like people in other circumstances, heard what they wanted to hear.” The book provides example after example—culled from work in nearly two hundred manuscript collections – – of the voices of white southerners explaining themselves in the rhetoric of paternalism. Perhaps one could argue that they protest too much, but the Genoveses’ voluminous archival research suggests that in the minds of the South’s ruling class, the flawed logic of paternalism had taken a powerful hold. And as Genovese reminds us, people hear what they want to hear, and ruling classes almost always believe in their own righteousness. I cannot help but think of a favorite quotation of mine from John Adams, one of the only pre-Civil War U.S. presidents not to be a supporter of slavery. As Adams once mused on the nature of government, of republics and of human weakness, he declared, “Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.” Genovese’s final work attempts to offer us a portrait of that “great soul,” of how the South’s ruling class tried to live with itself and the unjust and exploitative institution it perpetuated for nearly 300 years.
The attacks on paternalism that Walter Johnson had begun to elaborate in Soul By Soul would in the early years of our new century join others in a crescendo of criticism that soon amounted to a dismissal – – and then near erasure – – of the concept of paternalism altogether. And this was accompanied by a series of studies that sought to overturn the fundamental paradigm of the Genoveses’ four decades of scholarly work: the assumption that North and South were sharply distinct and that the South represented some version of a pre capitalist society. This new work embraced an essentially opposite set of conclusions: the South was not just capitalist; its “peculiar institution” of slavery had served as the cause and engine of capitalism’s emergence and growth in the United States.[xii]
The scholars advancing this interpretation focused their attention on what has come to be called “The Second Slavery,” the expansion in the early nineteenth century of plantation agriculture and unfree labor from the coastal areas of declining profits and exhausted soils in Virginia, the Carolinas and parts of Georgia into the Old Southwest: into the rich, fresh alluvial lands of the lower Mississippi and Texas where cotton and sugar cultivation promised almost unimagined riches. The cotton boom became the major foundation for not just southern but national wealth and a capitalist economy shared by North and South. Cotton was “the preeminent global commodity” of the nineteenth century and slavery “front and center” in “the nation’s spectacular pattern of economic development.” Slavery was not regional, but the “foundational American institution.” Cotton cultivated by enslaved workers became the nation’s “most valuable export.” As South Carolina politician and proslavery polemicist James Henry Hammond had declared on the Senate floor in 1858, “Cotton is King.” The value of slave property exceeded that of all the nation’s railroads and factories combined. North and South thus became equally complicit in the perpetuation of the slave institution. [xiii]
Three major works are often seen to comprise the essential statement of this position, often referred to as the New History of Slavery’s Capitalism: Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013); Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014) and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (2014).[xiv] All three were intended to revolutionize the field, to make a clear break with the Genovesean paradigm. But it was perhaps Baptist’s work that delivered the greatest shock. (Ed was a member of the History Department at the University of Miami for a number of years and did some of the early work on the book when he was teaching here.) If any vestiges of paternalism remained in the understanding of slavery, Baptist all but obliterated them. The Second Slavery was created by a Second Middle Passage: the transportation of some million enslaved workers from the Upper South “down the river” West and South, breaking up families and communities and introducing these laborers to a far harsher and crueler institution. The potential for enormous financial gain incentivized planters to push the enslaved with all but unrestrained violence, what Baptist called “the whipping machine,” invoking the notion of mechanized “modern” torture. The drive for profits and “efficiency” created a system of measurement, surveillance and coercion—a scheme of rationalization that Baptist argues made the Industrial Revolution and a new capitalist order possible. The productivity of Deep South cotton plantations increased 400 percent between the 1810s and the 1850s, largely Baptist argues, because of the introduction of these new management techniques, which derived from the commodification and unrelenting exploitation of the enslaved worker and from the capitalist rationalization of work. The dominance of market forces rendered enslaved workers the equivalent of a factory’s machines. Genovese had posited a system of paternalism that affirmed the slave’s fundamental humanity; the system Baptist described turned humans into objects. It would be hard to believe that the whites who perpetrated such a system would have been able to delude themselves about their supposed “benevolence,” or convince themselves that slavery worked to the benefit of both master and slave as had the ruling class Genovese described. The new capitalists assumed other justifications for the world the slaveholders had made.
It was material, not ideological matters that concerned them.[xv] Profit making was the driving force, the almost exclusive human motivation of this ruling class, although Baptist also described the centrality of sexual exploitation of enslaved women as an ancillary impetus and another horrifying reality. Many of the white southerners portrayed by these New Historians of Capitalism seem hardly to have needed ideas or ideology at all. In one prominent recent contribution to this historiography, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers describes the enslavers’ “fundamental relationship to slavery as a relation of property . . . economic at its foundation.” There is no paternalism here. Her study, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slaveowners in the American South, foregrounds the testimony of their enslaved, almost to the exclusion of the voices of the women of the ruling class. The astute observations of the oppressed workers, she argues, were the best foundation for describing their oppressors. “Only enslaved people,” Jones-Rogers writes, “could speak about their female owners’ profound economic contributions to their continuing enslavement with such astonishing precision.” Jones-Rogers is right in insisting that too many studies of slavery have depended exclusively on the diaries and letters of the white ruling class. Especially in the Genoveses’ late work, no longer focused so much on slavery as on what they called the mind of the master class, they relied overwhelmingly on their extensive – – one might say exhaustive – – use of such documentation. Yet without such sources, it is difficult to get access to the self-mystifying ideologies that shaped slaveowners’ understanding of their world. But however self-serving, should we neglect them entirely? If we are to understand the nature of power, don’t we need to investigate how it comes to believe – – and at least sometimes convince others – -that, as John Adams observed, it “has a great soul”? I find myself left without answers to my longstanding question: how could human beings come to do such things to one another? [xvi]
The concept of paternalism is now dead and gone – – and good riddance. It was flawed from the start, with its disturbing echoes of the work of early twentieth century historians like Ulrich B. Phillips and his assumptions about slavery as a benevolent school for an inferior and uncivilized race. For all their protestations that paternalism was not about kindness, that indeed cruelty lay at its heart, the Genoveses could not convince their critics that they were not on some level endeavoring to rehabilitate the master class. And their later work and right-wing political evolution only intensified those suspicions. But the death of paternalism leaves a void in understanding that historians have yet to fill.
Let me consider for a minute where all this situates the project of southern intellectual history, the endeavor that concerns so many of you here. Let’s take a look at those three defining terms.
I will start with southern. The new rendition of southern history I have described dismisses the notion of the South’s distinctiveness. The Genoveses had characterized the regional contrast between North and South as capitalist versus precapitalist, and many other non Marxist scholars had for years portrayed the two sections as possessing fundamentally different cultures and values. For example, another of SIHC’s early and longtime members, the late Bertram Wyatt-Brown – – one of those Great Men I described to you earlier – – identified the concept of honor as the force that permeated and differentiated southern society. But the New History sweeps all of nineteenth century America up into an emerging hub of world capitalism, dependent on slavery even in the areas of the North where it had been legally abolished in the years after the Revolution. The North and South are both complicit in and reliant upon the slave system. Yet if the South is not distinctive, why make an explicit study of it? Why southern intellectual history, as opposed to a more general approach? The New History directly challenges this premise of such work.
Is there a South? Was there a South? These questions preoccupied scholars more than a half century ago – – well before even I began graduate school. Are we back to debating them again? Even if we concede that the New Historians might be right in their portrait of an emerging pan-US capitalism – -and I should note that there are many critics who challenge this depiction of the early American economy despite the widespread acclaim these New Historians have received – – what about the South’s society, culture and world view? Are they indistinguishable from the North? Isn’t it different to regularly witness slave whippings as a resident of Alabama or Mississippi than to count your profits in a sterile cotton mill office in Massachusetts? And if these regions were so similar why did they fight each other and murder some 750,000 men in a bloody Civil War? Isn’t there still a case to be made for a distinctive South and thus for a particularly southern intellectual history?[xvii]
The second term: Intellectual. Gramsci gave Genovese a way to unite the materiality of history with a system of ideas through the concept of hegemony. Power was at once economic, social and ideological. Members of the South’s ruling class, Genovese insisted, “typically recoiled at the notion that profit is the goal of life.” [xviii] Human motivations were far more complex. A configuration of ideas, Genovese asserted, extracted at least some degree of compliance, if not acquiescence from those the ruling class sought to coerce; domination was not just about whippings and physical control. At the same time the ideology assured the powerful that they deserved their position of mastery. The New Historians of Capitalism focus much more singularly on material self-interest. As Christopher Morris has written, “The New History gives us capitalism but not ideology.”[xix] And to a considerable degree, its look at white society is from the outside. When I began my graduate studies in 1970 in an American Civilization program heavily influenced by anthropology, I was taught that ethnographers define two contrasting approaches to their research: emic and etic. The etic looks from outside the culture under scrutiny; emic seeks to look through the eyes of the subjects themselves. For all the influences of postmodernism and the growing sophistication in analysis of perspective and point of view that has occurred in the last 50 years, I still find this a useful pair of analytic categories. And I still want to know: What was it like for the people who lived then? What did the world look like to them? What were their ideas, their mentalite, their world view? Back once again to how could Southern whites live with themselves? These are not seen as the questions at the heart of the New Historians’ inquiries.[xx]
Southern. Intellectual. Now let’s turn to history. History is fundamentally about the nature of change over time. The New Historians of Capitalism acknowledge significant change leading up to the nineteenth century, when a Second and different Slavery and a Second and differently horrific Middle Passage transformed the America and its slave institution. But once they judge capitalism to have been established in the South and in the nation through the power of cotton, its production and its markets, there is something of an elision of time. Continuity unites the failures and evils of nineteenth, twentieth and even twenty first century capitalism. The “whole history of the United States,” Baptist writes, “comes walking over the hill behind a line of people in chains.” Capitalism elides not just the differences between North and South, but those between past and present. In the view of the New Historians, history’s indispensable work is in the present. As Baptist wrote, “Readers told me that they wanted to see professional historians using their access to archives, as well as their privilege, to participate in national conversations to make the important connections we already knew were there.” In what I would suggest is a newly emphatic way, the past seems never to be past.[xxi] These studies of capitalism in the past are intended to condemn it in the present. Are we abandoning the notion of change over time? What then do we mean by “history”?[xxii]
I return to the question that has animated me since I was a graduate student so many years ago. How do people use ideas and rationalizations and ideologies to justify what to us today seems unthinkable? Our very difference from people in the past can often help us to see them with a degree of clarity, even as we remain captured by our blindness to our own self-delusions. I have always believed that our recognition of the discontinuities of past and present can free us to perceive the contingency of our assumptions and choices. That is why we study history. We are, I have no doubt, filled with self-serving ideas, with the conviction, to hark back to John Adams, that we are possessed of “great souls” and a transcendent morality. Yet it has always been my hope that our scrutiny of the ideologies of the past will give us the capacity, as well as the analytic tools, to be more critical and less blind about our own. In an awareness of contingency – – of choices made and choices to be made – rests the possibility for change.
But that means we need to study those ideas. We need to fill the void that the death of “paternalism” has created. We need a new and better explanation of the beliefs of South’s ruling class, who cannot be reduced to purely economic actors. We can rightly condemn them, but we should also seek to understand and explain them. I still want to know: how did white southerners witness and come to accept the daily brutalities of slavery – – in their Natchez mansions, or on their upcountry farms, or on the streets of Charleston or Richmond, or New Orleans? How did they see these cruelties and injustices and still live with themselves?
We still need southern intellectual history.
[i] Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).
[ii] William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, 1936) 361.
[iii] David Brion Davis, “Southern Comfort,” New York Review of Books, October 5, 1995; George Fredrickson, “They’ll Take Their Stand,” New York Review of Books, May 25, 20062006; Steven Hahn, “Divine Rights,” The New Republic, February 6, 2006, 28-33. Peter Kolchin, “Eugene D. Genovese: Historian of Slavery,” Radical History Review 88(Winter 2004) 52-67; Peter Coclanis, “White Heat: Eugene D. Genovese and the Challenge of and to Southern History, Georgia Historical Quarterly 98(Winter 2014) 350-9.
[iv] Quoted in Michael O’Brien, Review of Genovese’s The Slaveholders’ Dilemma, reprinted in Placing the South, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). Another factor in Genovese’s political evolution was the end of the Cold War and the failure of communism. Genovese seems to have been stunned by the economic collapse the wave of revelations about the moral bankruptcy of Communism, of the “great Soviet, Chinese and Cuban Revolutions,” he had once hailed.
[v] See Eugene D. Genovese, “On Antonio Gramsci,” In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).
[vi] Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 86.
[vii] Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Fruits of Merchant Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
[viii] George Fredrickson, “The Skeleton in the Closet,” New York Review of Books, November 2, 2000; John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves (New York: Oxford, 1999.) New studies emphasizing the brutality of slavery also had an impact here. See for example William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days (New York: Oxford, 1996).
[ix] See Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)111; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Journal of the Early Republic 24(Summer2004) 299-308; Walter Johnson, “A Nettlesome Classic Turns Twenty Five,” Common-Place(July 2001); Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). An early critic of Genovese’s precapitalist paradigm was James Oakes, The Ruling Race (New York: Knopf, 1982).
[x] For examples of other critics see Anthony E. Kaye, who concluded that by 2009, southern historians had reached a consensus that the Old South was capitalist, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75(August 2009) 628; and who rejected any notion of an “ideological accord between slaves and owners,” quoted in William J. Harris, “Eugene Genovese’s Old South: A Review Essay,” Journal of Southern History 80(May 2014) 327-72, which is a very useful treatment of these issues. 2014; For other critiques of paternalism see, Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) who emphasized the role of violence, sexual and otherwise; Diane Sommerville, who has emphasized the centrality of rape and sexual exploitation, “Moonlight, Magnolias , and Brigadoon; or ‘Almost Like Being in Love’: Mastery and Sexual Exploitation in Eugene D. Genovese’s Plantation South,” Radical History Review 88(2004) 68-82; Lacy Ford, Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) dismissed paternalism as the planters’ ideology of self-delusion.
[xi] Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Elizabet Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Note that both these volumes are dedicated to priests. Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See also Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992); Eugene D. Genovese, “Slavery Ordained of God”: The Southern Slaveholders’ View of Biblical History and Modern Politics, Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture, Gettysburg College, 1985.
[xii] Economists have been highly critical of the work on the New History of Capitalism. See, for example Gavin Wright’s review of Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, Journal of Economic Literature 52(September 2014)877; Eric Hilt, “Economic History, Historical Analysis, and the ‘New History of Capitalism,’” Journal of Economic History (April 2017) and Stanley Engerman’s review of Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told and Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, Journal of Economic Literature 55(June 2017) 637-643. Wright notes that the New History of Capitalism has arisen “largely in isolation from economics.”
[xiii] Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of Economic Development, eds, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) 19, 27, 1. On the Second Slavery, see Dale Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery, Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Kaye, “The Second Slavery;” Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 18. This literature stresses the expansion of slavery in Cuba and Brazil as well as in the U.S. Old Southwest.
[xiv] Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History(New York: Knopf, 2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told ( New York: Basic Books, 2014).
[xv] See Jennifer L. Morgan’s trenchant dismissal of paternalism and the notion of the “family white and black,” “Slavery located Africans and their descendants in ledgers and bills of sale, not as members of households or families,” Reckoning With Slavery (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021) 4.
[xvi] Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Her bibliography lists only one collection of papers that might have included white women’s testimonies abut their perceptions of slavery. See my review of Jones-Rogers’ book, American Historical Review 125(June 2020) 960-964. Relatedly, in her study of the commodification of slave bodies, Daina Ramey Berry criticizes the New Historians of Capitalism for devoting insufficient attention to the minds and voices of the enslaved. Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017). A study that both emphasizes the commodification of enslaved bodies but offers important insights into their minds and experience is Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
[xvii] Stephanie McCurry raises these questions of how the New History of Capitalism can explain the Civil War and how past and present should relate in historians’ hands in “Plunder of Black Life,” Times Literary Supplement, May 19, 2017. I think Michael O’Brien grappled with the question of southern uniqueness as he worked through what became Conjectures of Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). He was also far less interested than I in the connections between slavery and southern thought and engaged in a much purer form of intellectual history, which placed southerners more in the context of Northern and European intellectuals than in their relationship to their own society. I think this is why not long before his death he announced he was abandoning southern history. Margaret Abruzzo has commented insightfully on this in “Michael O’Brien and the Southern Question,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 101, #4 (2017)329: “If we wish to understand the place of proslavery thought in southern intellectual life, we must take those other commitments seriously. We cannot treat them simply as ready-made bricks for a proslavery edifice” and cannot assume “that the logic of proslavery argument was dictated solely by the need to defend slavery.”
[xviii] Quoted by Bertram Wyatt-Brown “The Plantation Household Revisited,” Mississippi Quarterly 65(Fall 2014) 598.
[xix] Christopher Morris, “With ‘the Economics-of-Slavery Culture Wars,’ It’s Déjà vu All Over Again,” Journal of the Civil War Era 10(December 2020) 536. See also, Scott Reynolds Nelson, “Who Put Their Capitalism Into My Slavery,” Journal of the Civil War Era, 5(June 2015).
[xx] Edward E. Baptist, “’Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and One-Eyed Men: Rape, Commodification and the Domestic Slave Trade in the US,” American Historical Review 106(2001) 1619-1650. See 1620. Here asks questions about “the ideas and psychological forces” behind the “supposedly pre-modern institution of slavery,” but his book, published more than a decade later has all but abandoned Genovesean terms like “pre-modern” and is focused more on the enslavers’ raw cruelty and rapaciousness, although he emphasizes ideals of masculinity in his analysis. See also Edward E. Baptist, “Me and Southern Honor,” Historically Speaking (July/August 2008), 13-14.
[xxi] Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, xxiii; Baptist, quoted in Morris, 541.
[xxii] Baptist, The Half, xxiii; Baptist, quoted in Christopher Morris, “With ‘the Economics-of-Slavery Culture Wars,’” p. 541.