Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, and the Proslavery Worldview

"My father, who . . . was the kindest of masters," wrote the Virginia-born abolitionist Moncure Conway, "had no idea that any slave of his desired freedom." In fact, early in the War of the Rebellion, the elder Conway had predicted: "The Northerners will see that these Negroes, instead of going to them, will remain loyally at our side through this ordeal."¹ The last two books by Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order (2008) and Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (2011) reveal that Conway's delusion was widely shared among white Southern slaveholders, and that this shared delusion fit into a common field of ideas that enabled them to make sense—and ultimately havoc—of their world. These two books help to pin down what Genovese and Fox-Genovese have come to mean by that word "paternalism," which has proved so troublesome for subsequent historians. They have also narrowed the meaning of the word to what slaveholders said they thought they were doing, which is not quite what it signified in Genovese's great, supple Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974).

A bit of eulogy, first. I am personally grateful to Genovese for reading my dissertation shortly after I defended it and presenting me (by old-fashioned postal mail, way back in 2001!) with a lengthy critique, which helped me to revise the dissertation into a reasonably well-received book. He certainly did not have to do that favor for me, and I suspect he did so at the behest of my dissertation advisor, Barbara Fields. I never met him or Fox-Genovese in person, and I was never even remotely involved in any of the political or personal brawls that they are infamous for. I know them only through the books and articles they wrote separately and together, which have profoundly influenced my own scholarship. My book Slave Country (2005) was, among other things, an attempt to trace, in the decades following the American Revolution, some crucial aspects in the transformation of the structure of slaveholders' power that resulted in the paternalist social relations that Genovese had described in Roll, Jordan, Roll. It places somewhat more emphasis on the coercive basis of mastery than can be found in Genovese's book, which memorably conveyed the Gramscian idea of hegemony to American historians.²

The passing of these two formidable intellectuals is a great loss to the writing of critical history.³ Both Slavery in White and Black and Fatal Self-Deception are written in a crisp and direct style. Fox-Genovese and Genovese do not waste or mince words here. Refreshingly, they do not suffer from some of the common tics and opacity of academic prose, like promising to "complicate" the conventional wisdom. (How much of an achievement is that?) Instead they pile evidence on top of itself, quotation after quotation from slaveholders' pens, in an erudite litany of proslavery apologetics. Slaveholders and their spokesmen appear mostly as names appended to quotations with a minimum of biographical context or social-historical depth. Some readers may find this approach tedious, as I confess I did with much of the massive Mind of the Master Class (2005); but in these more focused sequels, it pays off. Fox-Genovese and Genovese demonstrate a deep current of proslavery thought coursing through a wide ocean of writing, with some surprising upwellings.

Slavery in White and Black is devoted to proving that, by the late antebellum years, Southern slaveholders generally believed that slavery was the best, indeed only, remedy for the growing conflict between capital and labor in modern society. In The World the Slaveholders Made (1969), Genovese explored this idea through the atypical-yet-representative figure of George Fitzhugh. Fox-Genovese and Genovese show in Slavery in White and Black that Fitzhugh was not a fish out of water. His core premise permeated the worldview of Southern slaveholders, even those who explicitly denied that the logic of their support for slavery in the South led to support for "Slavery in the Abstract— personal...