Eugene D. Genovese: The Mind of a Marxist Conservative

Few historians have left their mark on a field as decisively as Eugene D. Genovese. The shape of southern history, particularly slavery studies, would look rather different without his substantial corpus. Debates in southern history continue to be framed around the issues first raised or developed by Genovese in his early work on the Old South and slavery. More than any other historian of slavery, he has set the agenda for antebellum southern historiography and bears responsibility for both its strengths and its limitations. Writing from the standpoint of an odd ideological conjuncture—as a self-professed Marxist and an unabashed admirer of southern slaveholders—Genovese's Janus-faced political loyalties, to use a metaphor he himself has employed, have shaped his work. In this article, I will critically examine the import and influence of his vast scholarship in nineteenth-century southern history, especially of his most significant book, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974).

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Genovese began his career with a devastating critique of the South's slave economy coupled with a flattering rendition of the "civilization" of the planter class. In his first book, The Political Economy of Slavery, published in 1965, Genovese argued that slavery had given rise to a distinct premodern, precapitalist society and had impaired the economic development of the South. According to him, the retarding effect of slavery on the southern economy became evident in the failure of the slave South to industrialize and diversify its economy due to the subordination of town to country and the concomitant lack of a fully developed internal market. Plantation slavery's central and determinative place and the comprador role of manufacturers and industrialists were a testament to the slaveholders' hegemony. The inferior quality of the South's livestock industry and the stillborn nature of southern agricultural reform illustrated the limits of economic development in a society dominated by slavery. The low productivity of slave labor, which, at this point, he attributed to the conditions of southern slavery rather than to the African identity and culture of the enslaved, further doomed the South to economic underdevelopment. The political economy of slavery was thus based on the dominance of the master class and characterized by the crises generated by its overwhelming reliance on slave labor. Faced with economic retardation and soil erosion, Genovese argued, slaveholders insisted on the expansion of slavery to the west and came headlong into confrontation with an equally expansive capitalist North, which inevitably led to secession and the American Civil War. ¹

Genovese's economic indictment of slavery was infused with his sympathy for southern slaveholders as men responsible for the precapitalist, premodern social formation of the antebellum South, a supposed alternative to the triumphant march of capitalism in the Anglo-American world. Like many southern nationalists, he insisted on referring to the Civil War as the War for Southern Independence (presumably independence for only white southerners). According to Genovese, the planter class, as good Hegelians, clung to slavery as the source of its political and cultural identity even though it was an unprofitable institution that made the slave South an economic backwater. Despite several asides on slaveholders' ideology, psychology, and politics, and an interesting conclusion on their decision to secede, the main focus of the different essays that comprise The Political Economy of Slavery remained overwhelmingly economic and, as he later acknowledged, somewhat mechanistic. Genovese's later works, rather than his first piece of scholarship, serve as better illustrations of his repudiation of his predecessors' economic determinism and vulgar Marxism.

Genovese overstated the notion that slavery was an economic drag for southern slaveholders in his eagerness to portray them as prebourgeois paternalists rather than profit-hungry capitalists.Slaveholders, he conceded, may have been acquisitive and prone to conspicuous consumption, but they were not motivated by profit maximization. Despite the fact that several economic historians before and since have demonstrated convincingly that slavery was an enormously profitable institution for small and large slaveholders...