The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (review)

finest independent commander in the western army" other than Bedford Forrest (p. 122), at his assertion that Beriah Magoffin was "the head" ofthe Kentucky Unionists in 1861 (p. 48). But these are minor points in a general history of so large a subject so well conceived and so brilliantly executed. Vandiver is at his best in describing the military operations he knows so well. But he devotes precious few pages to battles in this book. With all he has to tell there is no room here for detailed maneuvers. Yet, in a brief page or two he somehow sets the stage of battle; and then, with dramatic prose, he makes the scene come alive with dogged men locked in mortal combat. One has the feeling he is an eyewitness. It is not only battle scenes that come alive. The reader is taken on a conducted tour through the embattled Southland, and he sees it all: war refugees crowded into Richmond, inflation, bread riots, "cold-water" parties, art, literature, music, the theatre. The Trans-Mississippi Confederacy is given adequate treatment and so is soldier life: disease, hard work, no pay, short rations. Politics, cotton diplomacy, commerce raiders , the Trent Affair, inflation, produce loan, tax-in-kind, impressment, problems of supply, inadequate transportation, blockade running, suspension of habeas corpus, the arming of slaves—nothing is neglected. The reader comes to the end of the book with a sweeping overview of life in the Confederacy—the war, the suffering, the exhilaration of combat and victory, the agony of final defeat. Through it all Vandiver moves with the sureness of the master who has a complete knowledge of the sources and a thorough acquaintance with the literature of his subject. Albert D. Kirwan University of Kentucky The World the Shveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation. By Eugene D. Genovese. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969. Pp. xii, 274. $5.95.) In two essays Eugene D. Genovese extends a class analysis of the Old South begun in The Political Economy of Shvery (1965). Those expecting documentation of his previous contentions will not find it here. Instead The World the Slaveholders Made serves up Genovese's usual heady brew of brilliant human and theoretical insights, incredible overstatement , combative prose, and sparse factual substantiation. In his first essay, "The American Slave Systems in World Perspective," he argues that "slavery must be understood primarily as a class question and secondarily as a race or narrowly economic question." Genovese demonstrates this proposition by using class to explain why, of all the American slave societies, only the antebellum South was willing to 261 262CIVIL WAR HISTORY fight for slavery. A sweeping survey of various slaveholding ruling classes in the Americas reveals to Genovese that Old South planters, having come "closest to perfecting slavery as a distinct mode of production ," had built around slavery a premodern society with values antithetical to those of the bourgeois North. The slaveholders thus fought a Civil War not merely to defend property, but, more importantly, to perpetuate a civilization. Let us give this essay its due. Genovese ably delineates the contributions and limitations of prior work in comparative slavery; his analysis argues forcefully for a broader framework than race relations. One finds in these pages remarkable reflections on the psychology of slaveholding, the impact of European traditions in America, and the relation of an emerging world market to growth patterns of slave societies. But the particular class analysis advanced is less weighty than the sum of its individual insights. Genovese avoids too many crucial questions to be convincing. His argument seems to depend, for instance, on a high degree of planter class solidarity on the secession issue. Yet historians have demonstrated that there existed deep divisions among slaveholders concerning secession. Genovese makes no real attempt to resolve this apparent conflict, though it seems to call his whole analysis into question. His second essay, "The Logical Outcome of the Slaveholders' Philosophy ," does attempt to handle ideological cleavages in the planter class. Genovese admits that antebellum southern thought was a confusion of modern and premodern values, but attributes this to the South's peculiarly anachronistic situation. Such confusion masked the essential reality of a reasonably coherent planter world...