Читать книгу The Political Economy of Slavery - Eugene D. Genovese - Страница 12

Introduction

One

These studies fall under the rubric of “the political economy of slavery,” not “the economics of slavery,” because they are concerned less with economics or even economic history as generally understood than with the economic aspect of a society in crisis. They argue that slavery gave the South a social system and a civilization with a distinct class structure, political community, economy, ideology, and set of psychological patterns and that, as a result, the South increasingly grew away from the rest of the nation and from the rapidly developing sections of the world. That this civilization had difficulty in surviving during the nineteenth century—a bourgeois century if any deserves the name—raises only minor problems. The difficulty, from this point of view, was neither economic, nor political, nor moral, nor ideological; it was all of these, which constituted manifestations of a fundamental antagonism between modern and premodern worlds.

The premodern quality of the Southern world was imparted to it by its dominant slaveholding class. Slavery has existed in many places, side by side with other labor systems, without producing anything like the civilization of the South. Slavery gave the South a special way of life because it provided the basis for a regional social order in which the slave labor system could dominate all others. Southern slavery was not “mere slavery”—to recall Louis Hartz’s luckless term—but the foundation on which rose a powerful and remarkable social class: a class constituting only a tiny portion of the white population and yet so powerful and remarkable as to try, with more success than our neo-abolitionists care to see, to build a new, or rather to rebuild an old, civilization.

The first of these studies, “The Slave South: An Interpretation,” sketches the main features of antebellum Southern civilization, which it describes as having been moving steadily into a general crisis of society as a whole and especially of its dominant slaveholding class.¹ The slaveholders’ economic and political interests, as well as ideological and psychological commitments, clashed at many points with those of Northern and European capitalists, farmers, and laborers. The successful defense of slavery presupposed an adequate rate of material growth, but the South could not keep pace with an increasingly hostile North in population growth, manufacturing, transportation, or even agricultural development. The weaknesses of Southern agriculture were especially dangerous and galling to the regime-dangerous because without adequate agricultural progress other kinds of material progress were difficult to effect; galling because Southerners prided themselves on their rural society and its alleged virtues.

Part Two examines the agricultural base of the Southern economy and especially labor productivity, soil exhaustion, the quantity and quality of livestock, crop diversification, and the movement for agricultural reform. These studies attempt to demonstrate that the efforts of Southerners to develop a sound agricultural economy within the slave system were yielding meager results and had little hope of success as measured by the general and political needs of the slaveholders.

Part Three consists of three studies that take up some of the more important impediments to industrialization: the retardation of demand, the ambiguous position of the industrialists in a slaveholding society, and the relationship of the slaveholding planters to industrial development. These subjects do not exhaust the list of impediments, and none of the studies pretends to exhaust its particular subject. They are submitted in the hope that they demonstrate the partial and restricted nature of industrial advance under the slaveholders’ regime.

Part Four begins with a paper on “The Origins of Slavery Expansionism,” which may serve as a conclusion for the book as a whole. It tries to demonstrate that the South had a great stake in the struggle over the Western territories, which tore the country apart between the Mexican War and the secession crisis. This paper is followed by a discussion of the profitability of slavery in relation to the theme of the other studies.

Two

The War for Southern Independence, from the viewpoint of these studies, arose naturally from the long process of the development of the slaveholders’ regime. Since this viewpoint is not generally accepted, it would be proper to give some account of the contending interpretations. Historians fall into two broad camps: the traditionalists have seen the war as an irrepressible or inevitable conflict, whereas the revisionists have seen it as an unnecessary bloodbath that could have been prevented by good will or statesmanship. Until about thirty years ago the lines were firmly drawn.

In recent decades a great shift has occurred. The revisionists have scored a series of stunning victories over their opponents and forced them to abandon most of their ground. They have done hard digging into source materials, whereas since the appearance of Arthur C. Cole’s admirable The Irrepressible Conflict (1934) the traditionalists have largely contented themselves with writing nice essays. Originally, the traditionalist argument posited a wide area of antagonism between the North and South, viewing slavery as a moral issue but also as the basis of intense material differences. Their notion of material differences contained two debilitating tendencies: it centered on narrow economic issues like the tariff, which hardly added up to a reasonable cause for a bloody war; and it assumed, in accordance with a rigid theoretical model, a slavery-engendered soil exhaustion and territorial expansionism which empirical research did not establish.

The revisionists have offered a great many monographs which argue that slavery did not necessarily prevent soil reclamation and agricultural adjustment; they have investigated the conditions for Southern expansionism and concluded that slavery neither needed nor had prospects for additional territory. As a result of their work, the traditional or irrepressible-conflict interpretation has come to rest almost entirely on moral grounds: the conscience of the nation could not tolerate forever the barbarism of slavery. The question of a profound material antagonism has thereby virtually been laid to rest.

If we had to choose between the two positions narrowed to embrace the moral question alone, it would be difficult to avoid choosing some variation of the revisionist, especially since such neo-revisionist historians as Allan Nevins and David Donald have avoided the more naive formulations of earlier writers and offered attractive alternatives. In effect, they each deny that North and South represented hostile civilizations and stress the inability of American institutional structure to cope with problems and disagreements that were in themselves negotiable. Against such an interpretation, continued harping on the moral issue becomes trying. Moral issues do have their place, as do the irrational actions with which they are sometimes associated, but to say that slavery was merely an immoral way to command labor and that it produced no special society is to capitulate before the revisionists’ thrust. They maintain simply and forcefully that time and good will would have removed slavery had a holier-than-thou attitude not prevailed in the North and had there not been so much room for the demagogy of scheming politicians in both sections. The best that the recent traditionalists have been able to offer as a reply is the assertion that Southern immorality proved too profitable to be dispensed with. This is no answer. The notion that the values of the South’s ruling class, which became the values of the South as a whole, may be dismissed as immoral is both dubious and unenlightening, but we may leave this point aside. If the commitment of the slaveholders to slavery was merely a matter of dollars and cents, a national effort could have paid them to become virtuous. The answer, I suppose, is that the North could not be expected to pay to free slaves when it believed slaveholding immoral in the first place. As a matter of fact, it could have, and there is not much evidence of such high-mindedness in the North outside of a small band of abolitionists. Either the revisionists are essentially right or the moral question existed as an aspect of something much deeper.

I begin with the hypothesis that so intense a struggle of moral values implies a struggle of world views and that so intense a struggle of world views implies a struggle of worlds—of rival social classes or of societies dominated by rival social classes. In investigating this hypothesis I have rejected the currently fashionable interpretation of slavery as simply a system of extra-economic compulsion designed to sweat a surplus out of black labor. Slavery was such a system, but it was much more. It supported a plantation community that must be understood as an integrated social system, and it made this community the center of Southern life. It extruded a class of slaveholders with a special ideology and psychology and the political and economic power to impose their values on society as a whole. Slavery may have been immoral to the world at large, but to these men, notwithstanding their doubts and inner conflicts, it increasingly came to be seen as the very foundation of a proper social order and therefore as the essence of morality in human relationships. Under the circumstances the social conflict between North and South took the form of a moral conflict. We need not deny the reality of the moral issue to appreciate that it represented only one aspect of a many-sided antagonism. These studies seek to explore the material foundations of that irrepressible antagonism.

Let us make our bows to the age: I do not believe in inevitability in the everyday meaning of the word, nor in a mechanical determinism that leaves no place for man’s will, nor in sin. I do say that the struggle between North and South was irrepressible. From the moment that slavery passed from being one of several labor systems into being the basis of the Southern social order, material and ideological conflict with the North came into being and had to grow worse.² If this much be granted, the question of inevitability becomes the question of whether or not the slaveholders would give up their world, which they identified quite properly with slavery itself, without armed resistance. The slaveholders’ pride, sense of honor, and commitment to their way of life made a final struggle so probable that we may safely call it inevitable without implying a mechanistic determinism against which man cannot avail.

I have attempted to demonstrate that the material prerequisites for the slaveholders’ power were giving way before internal and external pressures; that the social system was breaking on immanent contradictions; that the economy was proving incapable of adapting itself to reforms while slavery existed; that slavery was naturally generating territorial expansion; and that therefore secession and the risk of war were emerging as a rational course of action. I have, in other words, tried to rebuild the case on which a materialist interpretation of an irrepressible conflict may rest. In doing so, I realize that much of the argument is an extension and refinement of arguments presented as long as a century ago, and I cannot avoid feeling that the book falls within Gonzalez Prada’s definition of sociology—the art of saying old things in new ways and the science of affirming contradictions.

The studies are presented with full awareness that the issues sooner or later become those of ideology and psychology. Not every material interest is worth defending to the death, and it is not obvious that any should be. In this book I can only suggest a starting point for a discussion of the slaveholders’ ideology and psychology; but even if I or someone much more able could offer a volume, it would not be possible to array sufficient scientific evidence to close the debate between traditional and revisionist historians. A good revisionist could accept every one of the empirical findings in the studies presented here and rework his interpretation to account for them in a manner worthy of respect. The ultimate issues are those of history as social process and the place of men within it. No amount of research or argument on the origins of the War for Southern Independence could alone convert anyone to a position on those questions. The work of the revisionist historians has forced every honest opponent of theirs to rethink his position many times and to try to raise its level of analysis. If these studies do as much for them, the time and labor they represent will have been well spent.

NOTES

1 The generalizations presented in this first study require considerable elaboration and defense, which the following studies only begin to offer. I do, however, plan to submit several volumes after this one. In my study of George Fitzhugh, The Logical Outcome of the Slaveholders’ Philosophy, which is almost finished, I shall develop the ideological side of the argument. Also well under way is a study of rebelliousness and docility in the Negro slave, Sambo & Nat Turner, which will treat an important part of the story that had to be neglected here. Finally, I expect to submit, in what form I am not yet sure, extensive studies of the planters and the middle- and lower-class whites.

2 If I may pick a quarrel with Leon P. Litwack’s admirable North of Slavery (Chicago, 1961), I cannot understand the statement that abolition in the North came about as a result of ideological rather than economic factors. The lack of a large class of slaveholders, as distinct from a class of businessmen and professionals who owned some slaves, resulted in a lack of deep ideological commitment and economic interest, not to mention psychological dependence. To try to weigh economic against ideological factors seems to me a fruitless pursuit. In this setting the moral attack on slavery, which needs no elaborate explanation in the world of the nineteenth century—only its absence would require explanation—met little resistance from those who benefited from the system.