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  • The Richness of Intellectual Life in the Antebellum South
  • Stanley L. Engerman (bio)

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, individually and jointly, have done much to shape the study of southern history and the history of American slavery. These contributions are based on a combination of brilliant insights and exceptional research in primary and secondary sources. Despite the reactions of some to what they regard as their recent political inappropriateness, all scholars of these subjects must end up dealing with their writings and interpretations.

These two volumes do not describe the lives of slaves, as Eugene Genovese has done already in the masterful Roll, Jordan, Roll, but are principally concerned with the beliefs and worldviews of the southern slaveholders, most generally in the late antebellum period. The authors view the southern slaveholders as quite intelligent, knowledgeable in most regards about the world around them, and able to deal as equals with non-Southerners in terms of intellectual ability and, with one exception, concern with morality and the well being of the lower classes. The exception, as they point out, was the acceptance of the system of slavery and the horrors it imposed on the slaves. In their descriptions of free workers in the North and Britain, the Southerners demonstrated serious concern for the lower classes, one that seemed lacking in their dealings with their slaves.

The authors stress two important aspects of the slaveholder belief system. First, it represents a line of American conservatism, based on religious principles, that was consistently applied to the defense of their system while being critical of developments in northern and British society. Second, when slaveholders compared slave labor to northern free labor, they pointed to the many difficulties within the society of the North and thus argued for the human advantage of slavery. Fox-Genovese and Genovese emphasize Southerners’ belief in 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.”

They have researched extensively in many different [End Page 23] varieties of writing by southern and northern authors, and provide a remarkable list of characters dealing with an exceptionally broad range of issues. In doing so, they offer a view of southern intellectual life that goes beyond the usual range of past and present collections of writings about southern thinkers, which deal almost exclusively with their proslavery arguments. Fox-Genovese and Genovese demonstrate that defenders of slavery had a broader vision than they are usually given credit for. There were many in the South thinking and writing about issues other than the defense of slavery. Southerners’ readings and writings show considerable knowledge of the nature of slavery in the past, and an awareness of the negative aspects of free labor and a capitalist society. Their knowledge of ancient and medieval slavery was often used to frame their discussions of slavery in the South.

Fox-Genovese and Genovese are, of course, not the only historians who have dealt recently with southern intellectual life. A major work by Michael O’Brien covers some of the same ground, pointing to the high level of the life of the mind in the South. O’Brien shows that Southerners were concerned not just with slavery and free labor but also religion, economics, politics, literature, and history. The southern intellectual elite often received college educations, in northern as well as southern schools, they traveled extensively in the North and Europe, they corresponded with northern and British intellectual figures, and read numerous books and journals—all of which meant that intellectuals in the South were on similar footing as those of the North. Part of the explanation for why antebellum Southerners have often been shortchanged is a frequent misreading of the 1850 census data on national literacy, which led to a major overstatement of North-South differences.

Those concerned with the economic arguments about slavery, and the presumed demise of the South on Malthusian grounds, will be interested to see that the same arguments were made, using the same basic economic model, to predict that the northern economy would also soon decline due to a population crisis with the ensuing immiseration of labor...

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