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6 - Guardians of a Helpless Race
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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- Fatal Self-Deception
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- 24 October 2011, pp 111-130
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Summary
We, above all,…were guarding the helpless black race from utter annihilation at the hands of a bloody and greedy “philanthropy,” which sought to deprive them of the care of humane masters only that they might be abolished from the face of the earth, and leave the fields of labor clear for that free competition and demand-and-supply, which reduced even white workers to the lowest minimum of a miserable livelihood, and left the simple negro to compete, as best he could, with swarming and hungry millions of a more energetic race, who were already eating one another's heads off.
– E. A. PollardJustifications for slavery rested on a general belief in black racial inferiority and on a specific belief in black inability to compete with whites in the marketplace. Personal correspondence, diaries, plantation record books, agricultural periodicals, and sermons trumpeted variations of those beliefs. Proslavery spokesmen proclaimed widespread agreement in the North as well as the South that without vigilant masters, blacks would die like flies and revert to some alleged African barbarism, paganism, even cannibalism. Hence, considerations of humanity and interest required masters to rule their plantation households with an iron hand, intervening to keep blacks from hurting themselves, each other, and whites.
Blacks as well as whites commented on the frequency with which slaves sought protection from masters against the abuse of hostile whites, especially the lower-class roughs who served on slave patrols. When slaves dreaded their own master or lacked access to him or expected a severe beating, many ran off to the woods, but more than a few ran to a neighboring slaveholder to ask for his intercession, which they often got. The heroic Solomon Northup, who became a prominent abolitionist after enduring slavery in Louisiana, fled to a kind former master when his current master threatened his life. Was a slave about to be hanged for killing another slave? His master petitioned for commutation. Did a slave stand accused of raping a white woman? The master provided legal counsel, demanding an inquiry into the woman's character and reputation. Was the overseer a brute? The responses of masters varied, but he risked dismissal. In Georgia, an overseer shot a locally prominent planter who had fired him for abusing slaves. Did white mechanics try to prevent slaves from hiring their own time? Masters made sure that the laws remained largely unenforced. All such instances invited slaveholders’ self-congratulation.
5 - The Blacks’ Best and Most Faithful Friend
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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- Fatal Self-Deception
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- 24 October 2011, pp 89-110
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The negro has never yet found a sincere friend but his master.
– George M. TroupGreater self-deception is hard to imagine than that displayed by Governor George M. Troup in his address to the Georgia legislature in 1824. Self-deception, not hypocrisy. Troup expressed a long-gestating and widespread conviction. As the slaves’ self-anointed friend, the master offered protection against the slaves’ incompetence and emotional fragility. Privately as well as publicly, Southerners insisted that the slave recognized his master as his “best and most faithful friend.” Proslavery northern public opinion helped. Southern newspapers relished and republished the frequent accounts from northern newspapers about the fine conditions and contentment of the slaves and about the urban misery of emancipated blacks who expressed a wish to be enslaved and return to the South. Beyond the principal newspapers of Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, small cities and towns reprinted directly from northern newspapers or from such southern newspapers as the Fayetteville Observer, Semi-Weekly Mississippian, Mobile Tribune, Daily Alabama Journal, Macon Daily Telegraph, Texas State Gazette, Arkansas Gazette, and Weekly Raleigh Register.
As the South moved toward secession, assertions of slaves’ loyalty and friendship grew louder, echoing long after the demise of slavery. They proceeded, especially among women, in tandem with notions of blacks’ racial inferiority and general incompetence. The Massachusetts-born Tryphena Fox, married to a Louisiana slaveholder, wrote to her mother in 1856, “Negroes are so slow that they put me out of patience, not doing in all day what a good white man would do in an hour.” A year later: “Talk about freeing negroes, some of them couldn't take care of themselves ten days.” Adelaide Stuart Dimitry of Mississippi cried that emancipation dissolved the bonds of kindness between master and slave, depriving blacks of their staunchest friends: “Poor black dupes.” Planters urged freedmen to stay with their old masters, since other whites cared nothing for them and would exploit them to the hilt. At the beginning of the War, Grace Brown Elmore of South Carolina asked, “Who but devils would seek to destroy the pleasant relations existing between Master & servant?” Elmore rated blacks the lowest of races: “What can the poor, uneducated, stupid, negro expect in the competition with white labor, which must sooner or later come?” And again: “The Negro as a hireling will never answer.” With emancipation, “His and the Master's interests are now separate and there is no bond but dollars and cents between them.” In 1895, Letitia A. Burwell of Virginia wrote, “Never again will the Negroes find a people so kind and true to them as the Southerners have been.”
Fatal Self-Deception
- Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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Slaveholders were preoccupied with presenting slavery as a benign, paternalistic institution in which the planter took care of his family and slaves were content with their fate. In this book, Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese discuss how slaveholders perpetuated and rationalized this romanticized version of life on the plantation. Slaveholders' paternalism had little to do with ostensible benevolence, kindness and good cheer. It grew out of the necessity to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation. At the same time, this book also advocates the examination of masters' relations with white plantation laborers and servants - a largely unstudied subject. Southerners drew on the work of British and European socialists to conclude that all labor, white and black, suffered de facto slavery, and they championed the South's 'Christian slavery' as the most humane and compassionate of social systems, ancient and modern.
Introduction
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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- Fatal Self-Deception
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It is natural that the oppressed should hate the oppressor. It is still more natural that the oppressor should hate his victim. Convince the master that he is doing injustice to his slave, and he at once begins to regard him with distrust and malignity.
– Chancellor William Harper of South CarolinaDecades of study have led us to a conclusion that some readers will find unpalatable: In most respects, southern slaveholders said what they meant and meant what they said. Notwithstanding self-serving rhetoric, the slaveholders did believe themselves to be defending the ramparts of Christianity, constitutional republicanism, and social order against northern and European apostasy, secularism, and social and political radicalism. Just what did slaveholders say and mean? Southerners, having measured their “domestic slavery” against other ancient and modern social systems, declared their own social system superior to alternatives and a joy to blacks as well as whites. Viewing the free states, they saw vicious Negrophobia and racial discrimination and a cruelly exploited white working class. Concluding that all labor, white and black, suffered de facto slavery or something akin to it, they proudly identified “Christian slavery” as the most humane, compassionate, and generous of social systems.
The westward movement of planter households significantly altered economic development, national politics, and southern culture. More specifically, the difficulties and hardships of emigration strengthened relations between masters and slaves and a sense of the interdependence of plantation households. In 1853, a planter with the nom de plume “Foby” decreed: “All living on the plantation, whether colored or not, are members of the same family and to be treated as such.…The servants are distinctly informed that they have to work and obey my laws, or suffer the penalty.” The master “possessed all judicial, legislative, and executive power and arrogates the settlement of disputes to himself.” With these few sentences, “Foby” depicted the master-slave relation in a paternalistic household that entailed duties, responsibilities, and privileges without denying despotism and violence. Kindness, love, and benevolence did not define paternalism, which depended on the constant threat and actuality of violence. The household, as celebrated by apologists, may often have softened attitudes and behavior, but countervailing pressures remained and often prevailed. Above all, commodity production required profit maximization, which more often than not entailed severity. Mary R. Jackman observes in The Velvet Glove, her arresting sociological study of paternalism: “The presumption of moral superiority over a group with whom one has an expropriative relationship is thus flatly incompatible with the spirit of altruistic benevolence, no matter how much affection and breast-beating accompanies it. In the analysis of unequal relations between social groups, paternalism must be distinguished from benevolence.” Jackman adds that the dominant group's characterization of subordinates as having distinct personal attributes frees superordinates to claim that the needs of the subordinates are also distinct from those of the dominant group.
Manuscript Collections
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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- Fatal Self-Deception
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Frontmatter
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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1 - “Boisterous Passions”
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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The Devil was to be overcome, not by the power of God, but by His righteousness.…But since the devil, by the fault of his own perversity, was made a lover of power and a forsaker and assailant of righteousness – for thus also men imitate him so much the more in proportion as they set their hearts on power, to the neglect or even hatred of righteousness, and as they either rejoice in the attainment of power, or are inflamed by the lust of it. Not that power is to be shunned as though it were something evil; but the order must be preserved, whereby righteousness is before it. For how great can be the power of mortals? Therefore let mortals cleave to righteousness; power will be given to immortals.
– St. AugustineIn Notes on the State of Virginia, a distressed Thomas Jefferson penned an indictment of slavery that reverberated for decades, causing Southerners no end of pain, anger, and soul searching:
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.…The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.
Jefferson had predecessors for his anxiety over slavery's effects on masters. Educated Southerners knew Locke's psychological portrait of children as natural seekers of dominion. And they knew Montesquieu's critique of the master's unlimited authority, which Jefferson, in effect, paraphrased. The slaveholder, Montesquieu wrote, “insensibly accustoms himself to the want of all moral virtues, and thence becomes fierce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel.” The Reverend David Rice, father of western Presbyterianism, and other late eighteenth-century emancipationists assailed slavery for undermining the moral and political virtue of the white community, especially of its young men. In the 1760s, George Mason of Virginia denounced slavery for impairing the morals of whites, much as it had impaired the morals of the Romans and led to the decay of ancient civilization. Mason returned to the theme at the federal Constitutional Convention: “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant.” Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut taunted him: If so, Mason and other Virginians should free their slaves. Ebenezer Hazard of Philadelphia described southern gentlemen in 1778: “Accustomed to tyrannize from their infancy, they carry with them a disposition to treat all mankind in the same manner they have been used to treat their Negroes.”
Index
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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Contents
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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Notes
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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2 - The Complete Household
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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A complete household or community is one composed of freemen and slaves.
– William J. GraysonFredrika Bremer of Sweden encountered two slaves about to fight because one had slighted the other's master. Edward Bourne of Tennessee talked about his father's only slave, “who nearly killed another negro, because he reflected upon my father.” It was an old story. Quintilian pleaded that slaves had justification for killing free men who offended their masters. He quoted Cicero's “Defence of Milo,” a work assigned in southern schools: “Milo's slaves did what everyone would have wished his own slaves to do under similar circumstances.” An ideological imperative embedded itself in the southern slaveholder's psyche. Slaves became quasi-kin: Whites referred to “our family, white and black,” and blacks referred to “my white folks.” Indeed, throughout the world, masters, to preserve self-esteem, needed to credit every such story. They called slaves “my children,” and slaves called them “father.”
Although gentlemen in seventeenth-century Virginia considered white indentured servants household members and considered black slaves chattel, a reversal occurred in the eighteenth century. George Washington typified eighteenth-century Virginians, much as Patrick Calhoun typified nineteenth-century South Carolinians. Referring to their slaves as “my people,” they tried to know something about each. Slowly, the reality of the plantation as household induced a sensibility expressed in the language of “family.” In 1774, John Harrower, an indentured Scots tutor, wrote to his wife: “Our Family consists of the Coll., his Lady & four Children, a housekeeper, an overseer and myself all white. But how many blacks young and old only the Lord knows for I believe there is about thirty that work every day in the fields besides the servants about the house.” Anna McKnight, a poor woman in Berkeley County, Virginia, pleaded with President Thomas Jefferson, “My slaves are as My Children & if I could Procure 5 hundred dollars I can secure all I have.”
Preface
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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- Fatal Self-Deception
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In previously coauthored books by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1941–2007) and Eugene D. Genovese, her name came first, on the principle of Ladies First or, if you prefer, “F” before “G.” This book, too, is a product of decades of professional collaboration in research, in the editing of each other's drafts, and in countless discussions. Here, I place my own name first because, although Betsey contributed considerably to Fatal Self-Deception, her declining health prevented her criticizing, reviewing, and fine-tuning the drafts. Had she lived, she might well have made substantial changes in style and content. Hence, I assume full responsibility for errors and infelicities.
“The War” refers to the war of 1861–65. We use sic only when it seems indispensable. Words in italics are from quoted texts. The names of identified authors of anonymous publications appear in brackets. A question mark indicates that the author in brackets is probable. We use “Southerners” to mean the whites who constitute our principal subject. We identify blacks discretely, although well aware that they were no less Southerners. If we had to qualify “Southerners” every time we referred to whites, the text would become well-nigh unreadable.
Abbreviations
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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- Fatal Self-Deception
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3 - Strangers within the Gates
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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And the Lord said unto Moses and Aaron, This is the ordnance of the Passover: There shall no stranger eat thereof: But every man's servant that is bought for money, when thou has circumcised him, then shall he eat thereof. A foreigner and a hired servant shall not eat thereof.
– Exodus 12:43–45When southern slaveholders dared, they proclaimed themselves masters of all they surveyed despite the ambiguous status of hired whites. Yet, “plantation” and “household” were by no means identical terms. Able plantation employees, white and free black – even most tutors and governesses – won respect but, with few exceptions, did not qualify as members of the “family, white and black.” David Brown, a northern missionary, observed that Southerners used “household” in the “Scripture sense, including slaves, but not hirelings.” Hugh Legaré of South Carolina, among others, traced the southern distinction between slaves and free workers to ancient Jewish law and to Roman law and tradition, which reduced employees to servile status.
Sundry White Servants
Transatlantic public opinion stigmatized white servants as dishonest, lazy, and untrustworthy. Hence, when Paul Trapier of South Carolina entered Harvard in 1822, he was astonished to find himself waited on by white servants. By the 1850s, however, some elite families in port cities – Charleston, Mobile, Savannah – had white servants. The hiring of a good white nurse occasioned self-congratulation in Charleston since, as a contributor to the Southern Presbyterian Review complained, native whites, no matter how poor, shunned servants’ work. Clara Solomon of New Orleans hated to lose Mary, her Irish maid, who left to take care of her own relatives: “These Irish girls, their most fault is in having such a quantity of relations.” Rosalie Roos of Sweden reported that Charlestonians considered black servants much more reliable than “lazy” and “insolent” whites, who, if dissatisfied, left at will. Grace Brown Elmore of Columbia expressed a common thought – black servants were much more loyal than white.
7 - Devotion unto Death
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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Nine-tenths of the Southern masters would be defended by their slaves, at the peril of their own lives.
– Thomas R. R. CobbGeneral Thomas Williams spoke for many Union officers when he expressed confidence that the Confederacy would face servile insurrections as his troops moved south. A great many Southerners thought differently. In South Carolina during the 1830s, Senator William Smith and Representative William Drayton proudly proclaimed that, if war came, southern slaves would fight shoulder to shoulder with their masters. In the 1840s, Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, the British novelist, reported that sugar planters in Louisiana believed their slaves willing to die for them. Yet those same planters shuddered at the prospect of a war in which England sent black troops to incite slaves to repeat the horrors of Saint Domingue. Houstoun belittled the notion that Englishmen would resort to the barbarism of inciting race war, but she thought that slaves might desert even the best of masters in a crisis.
Armed Slaves: Friends or Foes?
Southerners had selective memories and never did strike a balance between confidence in slave loyalty and foreboding over slave revolt. A historically minded people, they knew that armed slaves and free people of color had helped to tame the frontier, defending farms and plantations against Indian raids. Nathaniel Bacon recruited black as well as white troops during his rebellion in Virginia in 1676. From the early settlements until the Yamassee War in the lower Southeast in 1715–17, probably as many blacks as whites served as front-line troops – until the sight of armed slaves frightened whites as much as the prospect of Indian attacks. During the eighteenth century, South Carolina manumitted slaves who saw battle in militia service. Charles Pinckney, a delegate to the federal Constitutional Convention and afterward governor of South Carolina, extolled slaves’ military contributions to the patriot forces in the Revolution. In New Orleans, free men of color cheered American annexation, and Governor W. C. C. Claiborne lauded their militia. During the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson and Zephaniah Kingsley hailed the performance of free colored militias in Florida, especially against Indians. Counterpoint: George Tucker, Virginia's fine statistician, recorded significant slave flight to the British. In 1818, the antislavery James Turner Morehead, speaking at the University of North Carolina, declared impolitic the establishment of a colony for emancipated blacks in the Northwest, warning that in time it would grow into a formidable hostile force.
4 - Loyal and Loving Slaves
- Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
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- Fatal Self-Deception
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My husband's influence over the slaves is very great, while they never question his authority, and are ever ready to obey him implicitly, they love him!
– Frances Fearn of Louisiana[My mistress] didn't never do anything to make us love her.
– Annie Hawkins of TexasSouthern masters – at least a great many – needed to feel loved by their slaves. Some of the clearest expressions came from Virginia. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, a political and constitutional scholar, maintained that slaves naturally learned to love their masters through everyday intimacy. John Coalter, a lawyer and planter who had difficulty controlling his slaves, wrote to his wife, “To all who love me and shew it by doing their duty give my love and assurances of best services in return.” The theme continued well into the twentieth century. Lily Logan Morrill described her mother, Kate Virginia Cox Logan, as confident that “the poor darkies adored her.” She effected that “affectionate tone so unconsciously used by southern aristocrats to engender devotion and yet retain respect among colored retainers.” Morrill's illusions did not stop there. The slaves’ “pathetic devotion” deflected attention “from their own race” and turned them “whole-heartedly toward their masters’ families.”
3 - Travelers to the South, Southerners Abroad
- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene D. Genovese
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- Slavery in White and Black
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- 27 October 2008, pp 97-151
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There is no country, not even the countries in which this relation [slavery] is wholly unknown to the laws, in which the difference of rank and of wealth does not put the labor of the poor at the disposal of the rich.
—Benjamin Henry LatrobeFamiliarity Breeds Disquiet
Europeans and Northerners traveled to the South; Southerners traveled to Europe and the North. Supposedly, if Northerners and Southerners visited each other more, sectional antagonisms would abate. Southerners urged Northerners to see for themselves the humanity of slavery in practice. During the congressional debate of 1819–1820 on Missouri, Senator Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina wished that an antislavery northern colleague “would go home with me, or some other Southern member, and witness the meeting between slaves and the owner, and see the glad faces and the hearty shaking of hands.” In Virginia in the mid-1830s, Lucian Minor and Edgar Allan Poe followed suit in Southern Literary Messenger. Minor concluded a series of five articles: “The North and South need only know each other better, to love each other more” – a theme advanced by Poe in a review of J. H. Ingraham's The South-West. By a Yankee. Southerners appealed to Harriet Martineau and others to stay long enough to observe slavery closely. If they stayed awhile – so went the refrain – they would embrace the southern point of view. The Reverend Adiel Sherwood, a New Englander, offered a pleasing illustration.
Afterword
- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene D. Genovese
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- Slavery in White and Black
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You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to evade it.
—Rabbi TarfonThe long gestating doctrine of Slavery in the Abstract had deep roots in the Old South. Its branches spread widely if unevenly. George Fitzhugh of Virginia alone offered the extraordinary if ultimately utopian insight that to prevail, a slaveholding world had to destroy the world market and dismantle the capitalist system. Henry Hughes of Mississippi advanced a more practical view that pointed toward twentieth-century doctrines of the corporate state. Despite a common defense of Slavery in the Abstract, their specific formulations pointed in opposite directions: the one backward, the other forward. Yet Fitzhugh, Hughes, Thomas Roderick Dew, and George Holmes shared with the South's leading theologians, social theorists, and political spokesmen certain convictions: Free society had failed; the laboring classes needed to be subjected to personal servitude; and corporatism, not individualism, was the lesson of the past and the wave of the future. They projected a new world order based on the subjugation of labor to individual masters, however much they implicitly disagreed about the proper relation of those masters to the state.
Were we to credit postwar pronouncements, we might wonder how slavery survived so long with so few adherents. But those who issued disclaimers were kind enough to leave behind their antebellum writings, speeches, and – much more revealing – their private diaries and letters, which tell a different story.
Introduction
- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene D. Genovese
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- Slavery in White and Black
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In everything, it is the nature of the human mind to begin with necessity and end in excess.
—Pliny the ElderElizabeth Fox-Genovese and I long insisted that the presuppositions of the southern defense of slavery ended with Slavery in the Abstract – the doctrine that declared slavery or a kindred system of personal servitude the best possible condition for all labor regardless of race. Proslavery logic cast enslavement, broadly defined, as necessary and proper for much of the white race, as well as for practically all of the black race. A vital question has remained unanswered: To what extent did so extreme a doctrine take root among slaveholders and nonslaveholders?
The expression “Slavery in the Abstract” roiled southern politics. It had several meanings, the most intriguing of which referred to a social system abstracted from race and best for whites as well as blacks. We here follow that meaning, but the principal alternative requires identification and explanation. A good many Southerners used the term to distinguish between support for specifically black slavery and support for slavery in principle. They rejected the resort to philosophical abstractions as akin to ideological special pleading. Theodore Dwight Bozeman, a gifted American historian, remarks that the Old School Presbyterians – Calvinistic Baconian advocates of induction – used words like “abstract,” “theory,” and “metaphysics” as “virtual obscenities.” Bozeman's observation also applies to Methodist Arminians and to secular intellectuals. Southern distaste for abstractions extended to all philosophic systems – Hegel's for example.
List of Abbreviations
- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene D. Genovese
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- Slavery in White and Black
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