Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order (review)

This comparatively slender sequel to The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (2005) offers an equally stimulating interpretation of antebellum southern thought. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese again blend intellectual with social history to reveal the interplay between social relations and the white southern mind, focusing here on proslavery ideology. With characteristic mastery of the primary literature, the authors carefully argue that a startling number of white southerners adhered to the tenets of Slavery in the Abstract, “the doctrine which declared slavery or a kindred system of personal servitude the best possible condition for all labor regardless of race.” (1) Many southerners winced at a class-based defense of servitude, and no one openly advocated the enslavement of propertyless whites. Nevertheless, southern intellectuals who strived to defend racial slavery increasingly accepted that servitude most humanely reconciled the conflicting interests of labor and capital. Expanding on a thesis which veined much of their earlier work, Fox-Genovese and Genovese posit that “Proslavery Southerners drifted – some sprinted – toward an extraordinary doctrine that transcended race.” (4)

The abstract defense of slavery rested upon three propositions which blended in an uncompromising critique of free labor. The first held that southern slaves enjoyed material conditions superior to those of northern and European free workers. The second praised the southern social system as morally superior to those of liberal capitalist regimes. The final precept explained the second, maintaining that slavery, unlike bourgeois individualism, encouraged the fulfillment of Christian social duties. A broad range of white southerners accepted these principles, which fostered widespread belief in the inherent superiority of slave societies, particularly among southern travelers, whose sojourns abroad reinforced their disgust with free labor. Many southerners echoed the socialists’ erroneous proclamations of capitalism’s imminent downfall; unlike the socialists, they (often uneasily) predicted that white servitude would emerge from the wreckage of bourgeois individualism.

Fox-Genovese and Genovese focus on educated slaveowners, contextualizing them socially with a discussion of southern elites’ intellectual hegemony. The authors demonstrate that southern intellectuals molded southern thought through their dominance of print culture, education, and the theology disseminated by local preachers. This leads to the provocative conclusion that nonslaveholders received surprisingly “large doses” of Slavery in the Abstract. (7) The voices of nonslaveholders themselves are largely silent here, but there is evidence of their exposure to carefully rendered versions of the abstract defense of slavery. Hill country politicians, including William G. Brownlow, Thomas L. Clingman, and even Andrew Johnson, maintained the allegiance of their yeomen constituents while tacitly endorsing Slavery in the Abstract. Deeming servitude a necessary feature of Christian society, they celebrated southern enslavement of an ostensibly inferior race because it rendered white slavery thankfully unnecessary. Because Slavery in the Abstract was fully compatible with racism – even Alexander H. Stephens, the “high priest of white supremacy,” flirted with the doctrine (64) – southerners presumed that white servitude could be milder than black slavery. Still, white unfreedom haunted most southern thinkers. Slavery in the Abstract thus meshed with a commitment to white southern liberty while predicting the eventual enslavement of white workers in bourgeois societies not blessed with black chattels.

Fox-Genovese and Genovese treat the formidable champions of Slavery in the Abstract with deserved respect while frankly discussing their subjects’ intellectual shortcomings. Southern political economists, for instance, could not reconcile their science with the proslavery argument, despite the skilled efforts of Louisa McCord and others. A dual commitment to free trade economics and organic slave society proved untenable, especially since pessimistic political economists predicted the eventual eclipse of slavery by the cheaper system of wage labor. To escape this dead end, proslavery thinkers abandoned political economy in favor of sociology, combining social theory with theology to attack bourgeois liberalism and to defend slavery “on higher ground than political economy allowed for.” (196)

Sociology was the discipline of choice...