The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (review)

One of the most persistent myths about the Old South is that it had no "mind"—that white southerners, as a "conscious minority" besieged by criticism over slavery and living amid their "troublesome property," acted out of passion, fear, anger, and even fury rather than studied philosophies. The myth gained currency because few people outside the South, then and now, took seriously the southerners' proslavery apologies as having any intellectual rigor or moral worth. Whatever "mind" the master class did have supposedly was incapable of thinking beyond defending slavery and one's "honor." In such a world, intellectual pursuits were suspect at best, dangerous at most. Forty years ago Clement Eaton presented the arguments of various southern planters, clergy, writers, and other intellectuals to suggest the Old South had a mind, limited though it was, and more recently scholars such as Drew Gilpin Faust, Jon Wakelyn, and Robert Brugger, among others, in a series of biographical studies and Michael O'Brien in two thick volumes on southern thought discovered an intellectual ferment in the Old South that challenged the myth of the Old South as an intellectual desert. Now, with the publication of their much-awaited magnum opus, Eugene Genovese and the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese have settled the matter. In The Mind of the Master Class, they bring together a lifetime of inquiry to discover the ways in which elite white southerners "reflected on the world they lived in and on the bearing of history and Christian faith on their lives as masters in a slaveholding society" (p. 1). In doing so, they reveal a vibrant and sophisticated southern intellectual life, albeit one that fixated on demonstrating and affirming that the South's slave society, rooted in a corporate patriarchal structure and rural independence, promised the most stable Christian social order known to humankind.

The Genoveses have read all manner of public and private musings of hundreds of southern planters, clergy, novelists, and others engaged in a century of investigation and debate on the nature of social order and obligation, faith, and political economy in and for a slave society. By the Genoveses' reckoning, these earnest southern intellectuals were well versed in Scripture, theology, moral philosophy, classical and medieval history, Enlightenment ideas, the transatlantic revolutionary movements of 1789-1848, cultures across the world, and much more. They read deeply and widely partly out of intellectual curiosity but mostly out of fear. Their intellectual stance was in the end defensive, for they recognized their ways were out of tune with the march of political democracy, theological liberalism, and market capitalism that threatened their world. They read and wrote to "justify themselves to themselves" (p. 382) and to reclaim moral authority in a nation they worried was fast sinking into corruption and apostasy because of abolitionism and all that it represented. The master class confronted modernity. They found appealing, for example, the seeming stability of medieval society, grounded in hierarchy, and some among them even conceded that the Catholic Church had provided a civilizing force in history. To be sure, the elite southerners were also conflicted, for they "pronounced themselves simultaneously progressive and conservative" (p. 225), and they could never be sure of the extent to which their ideas and interests were shared by those below them. They admired the ancients but acknowledged that history moved in cycles so that decadence and decline were almost inevitable. They never resolved their "fondness for individual freedom descended from the Greeks and transformed by Christian doctrine and their approval of a socially cohesive medieval corporatism designed to minimize class antagonisms" (p. 668). Ideas about free will contested with those of Calvinist preordination, all the while evangelicalism swirled about them. Protecting slavery might demand the creation of a strong nation-state, which contradicted their reliance on states' rights, a fatal tension, I might...