An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918

Preface

Preface The release of the Southern Illinois University Press edition of An Old Creedfor the New South, twenty-three years after its first printing, provides a welcome opportunity for me to reflect on the book's intellectual moorings and origins, and to comment on its method, arguments, reception, and value today. An Old Creed began as a doctoral dissertation in the 1970s at the University of Kentucky under the direction of Charles P. Roland, an authority on the Civil War and southern history. The research that I conducted at Kentucky spawned many of my laterwritings, most notably about historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips but also on Frederic Bancroft, George H. Moore, Alfred Holt Stone, and William Hannibal Thomas, whose Negrophobic book, The American Negro (1901), I first assessed in chapter 7.1 The 1970s was perhaps the most contentious, fruitful, and vibrant decade of the twentieth century for scholarship on African American slavery . Seemingly one landmark title after another appeared, including such seminal works asJohn W. Blassingame's The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South (1972), Ira Berlin's Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1974), Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross: The Economics qf American Negro Slavery (2 vols., 1974), Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), Peter H. Wood's BlackMqjority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina ]rom 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974), and Herbert L. Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976). In the midst of this explosion of slavery scholarship, a journalist observed astutely that "new books are Preface IX I considered slavery-as an intellectual and social construct as much as a labor system-to hold the key to understanding race relations, past and present, in American history. To test this thesis, my work focused on slavery as symbol and subject of historical inquiry after, not before, emancipation. Though the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect in December 1865, slavery as an idea remained very much alive in American thought for decades afterward. Then, as now, I was struck by the fact that slavery became a constant and persistent metaphor for various aspects of race, class, and gender relations in late-nineteenth-century America. I wanted to find out why and how. I began by studying a broad range of Progressive Era writers, many of whom considered themselves objective, "scientific" historians and "race thinkers" and who researched and analyzed the highly politicized su~ject of slavery. Despite their limited focus and, in the case of most white writers , their racism, the early historians of slavery made lasting contributions. They established African American slavery as a popular subject for scholarly analysis and debate, identified its institutional features, and unearthed essential primary sources that later students utilized. To understand the methodological problems pioneer historians and social scientists encountered when writing about slavery, I researched the history of slavery statutes and plantation records as sources, and the development of southern archives and research libraries in the post-Reconstruction era South. Early students of the "peculiar institution" relied most heavily on slave codes, so-called Negro laws, and court cases to document their publications. Perhaps not surprising was that virtually all white writers in these years defined slavery in rigid legal terms. They portrayed African Americans as commodities, objects, and things but rarely as human beings. In addition to studying the sources available to early writers on the history of slavery, I probed contemporary understandings of "scientific" history. I examined graduate training in history in the late-nineteenth-century South, especially at theJohns Hopkins University. Graduate students atJohns Hopkins, inspired by historian Herbert Baxter Adams and the Wissenschajllich empirical and historical methods that he imported from Germany, wrote the first institutional histories of slavery on the state level, examining the question of slavery's origins. Historians continue to cite these works today. Though scholars and popular writers professed objectivity when writing "scientifically" about slavery, my research identified strong and per- x Preface sistent patterns of neoabolitionist and proslavery thought-ideas openly attacking and defending slavery-long after General Robert E. Lee's men stacked their guns at Appomattox. Objectivity thus proved illusive, both a pipe dream and a "noble dream," for early students of African American slavery.7 For example, Hermann E. von Holst,James Ford Rhodes, and other "Nationalist" historians of...