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1 1 LORDS AND CAPITALISTS The Ideology of the Master Class I came here to make money & it I must have by any means it can be made in an honest way. — H E N R Y A. TAYLo E , February 6,1836 If I can ever regain my health I shall devote the remnant of my days to making money. There was a great difference between Calhoun 8c Kerr Boyce, but the children of the latter would hardly exchange name 6ccondition with those of the former. —JAMES H. ADAMS,January 14,1859 I understand you said in Petersburg that I had made a bad bargain & bought a very poor farm. You forget that poor people are not able to buy rich farms. —THOMAS G. BAYLOR to RICHARD BAYLOR, February 23,1856 "Is that man a Christianwho kneels at the altar and prays that, 'the colored man may be freed from bondage,' while thousands of needy souls perish within his hearing, and still regardless of their wants he throws his charity beyond them? What sensible master can free his slaves and cast them on the merciful charity of such hypocrisy? — GEORGE D. FARRAR from Cambridge, Mass., December 24,1858 To constantly see before you the maimed, the lame and the blind causes you to come to sympathise with their miseries as you feel the impossibility of relieving them. You can see more misery here than you could living a life time in the South. One of our slaves would feel himself degraded to beg with the importunity they do. — PETER W. HAIRSTON from Leghorn, Italy, December 20,1859 L O R D S AND C A P I T A L I S T S • 407 EARLY FORTY YEARS AGO, Eugene Gcnovese advanced the debat over the fundamental nature of the southern social order to a new level when he argued that the planter class of the Old South embraced a paternalistic, antibourgeois ideology antithetical to the value system of the capitalistic North. While admitting that the slaveholders were imbued with an acquisitive spirit and that, as a production unit, the plantation responded to the demands of the world market, he contended that the paternalistic master-slave relationship uniquely shaped interpersonal relations within the family, community, and region . The result was the development of a set of values and customs that emphasized family, status, honor, public service, and the accumulation of wealth for pleasure rather than as an end in itself.1 Although Genovese has somewhat modified his thesis in recent years, other historians, most but not all of them Marxists, have joined him in stressing the paternalistic, precapitalist character of antebellum southern society.2 At the same time, the Genovese school has been challenged by an equally imposing array of historians who contend that the slaveholders were indeed capitalists and that their fundamental values differed little from those of their northern counterparts. The planters have been described variously as agrarian capitalists, slaveholding capitalists, and entrepreneurial capitalists. Chief among the proponents of this capitalistic interpretation isJames Oakes, though he, like Genovese, has become somewhat less intransigent over time. In his initial book, The Ruling Race, Oakes contended that the emergence of a market economy in the postcolonial South tended to push the slaveholders away from a paternalist ideology and "toward an acceptance of liberal democracy and free-market com1 . Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1961), 28-29; Billings, Plantersand the Making of a "New South," 13. 2. In their more recent book, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York, 1983), Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese admit that "the slaveholders functioned like ordinary capitalists in many respects," but they could not be classified as either seigneurial or capitalist. Instead, they operated within what the authors term "a unique socioeconomic formation," whatever that means (p. 161). For examples of other historians who support the prebourgeois thesis, see Cashin, A Family Venture, 6; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 53, 55-56, 82; McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 70; Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 32, 80,138, 242-47; Douglas R. Egerton, "Markets Without a Market Revolution : Southern Planters and Capitalism,"Journal of the Early Republic 16 (Summer 1996): 207^208, 211, 220-21; Steven Hahn, "Capitalists All!" Reviews in American History n (June 1983): 219-25; and Johnson, "Planters and Patriarchy," 46,55. N [3.129.23.30...

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