The Paternalist Thesis: Virginia as a Test Case

THE PATERNALIST THESIS: Virginia as a Test Case Fred Siegel The current interest among American historians in the concept of paternalism is, in some measure, part of the continuing response to the work of Louis Hartz. His book The Liberal Tradition in America enveloped all of American history within the framework of liberalism, and ever since historians have been trying with mixed success to redeem a past that breaks loose from Hartz's tethers.1 Numerous candidates have been put forth as champions of a genuine alternative; Christian mercantilists, the working class, the populists, the planters and most recently, in a promiscuous fit of fancy, intra-psychic elements. But while the most promising and most convincing advances have come from the study of working class history, it is the study of die planters which has, perhaps, done the most to fire the irons of historical disputation. Like the Mafia, the planters are able to exert an incredible hold on our imaginations. The planters and the Mafioso, like the Jewish immigrants and the slaves, are intriguing precisely because their experiences are readily available to us directly, or in the case of the planter, mythically, and yet like so much of classic European literature draw on precapitalist experience and sensibilities. It seems almost inevitable that given the pallid quality of a history lacking the glamor of court, courtiers and courtesans, the planters and Southern romanticism were bound to have become the objects of fascination. The fascination with the Old South intertwined with die most direct and pressing domestic concerns of the 1960's, die black rebellion, an uprising in which culture became an almost palpable political weapon. The black concerns with cultural identity dovetailed with the growth of a new intelligentsia, which temporarily freed from pressing economic constraints created its own brand of cultural politics. In this politics the bedrock of economic and demographic reality was obscured in favor of a modernist sensibility which recognized no physical limitations on the process of self-creation. In the face of an impending aquarian age, 1 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955). Civil War History, Vol. XXV, No. 3 Copyright ® 1979 by The Kent State University Press 0009-8078/79/2503-0003 $00.80/0 THE PATERNALIST THESIS247 earlier historical traditions which emphasized materialist, or what will be particularly important for this paper, interest group considerations, were pushed aside as being hopelessly mechanical and simplistic. The charge was often correct. A great deal of liberal institutional economics as well as Beardian and Marxian thought had in fact reduced people to dieir objective interests. The most creative response to this criticism came through the assimilation of the ideas of a number of British and European Marxist scholars. Their scholarship seemed in part capable of responding to this new emphasis on culture as an autonomous or semiautonomous influence.2 With regard to the South, the new American scholarship proposed to assault the Soutiiern castle, not as had the abolitionists of old and new by hurling stones and scaling the walls from without; instead it proposed to infiltrate the master's chambers in order to learn his innermost secrets and dius come to terms with the planter from the inside out. This attempt at entry by psychological insinuation was part of a long and honorable historical tradition that began with Vico. The effort requires above all that the historical actors be taken on their own terms. Their ideas must not be seen merely as masks for privilege or interest but as manifestations of the internal and personal life histories taken in the broadest sense. The implications of this approach are, in the words of the 1960's slogan, that die personal is political.3 The initial benefits of the approach were considerable. Historians saw what had been obscured by racial doggerel, that after a long period of acculturation some masters and some slaves were, despite the enormous gulf that separated them, capable of developing important personal ties, ties of both interest and genuine affection. For as Julius Rubin has suggested, that "intimate relations involving mutual warmth and care can also involve working people half to death should not be surprising: they (the planters) will...