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Introduction to the Wesleyan Edition

Introductions of this sort present an unusual opportunity to reply to serious criticism. I have indeed been privileged to receive both directly and implicitly alternate views of the subject by Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, Gavin Wright, and no few others. To these challenges I have done my best to reply elsewhere. Here, we may pass lightly over the specifics of this or that economic formulation and calculation, which properly remain of importance to economic historians. The correct calculation of hog weights, for example, does have significance for other calculations that bear on some large problems. Since I published my own calculations, better ones have been made by those sophisticated in techniques beyond my own training, but their results reinforce my central argument.

By the time I wrote this book, I had largely abandoned my youthful notion that the rate of profit in cotton production was low and probably lower than the interest rate. Even before the pioneering work of Alfred Conrad and John Meyer and long before the drastic revisions of Fogel and Engerman, others, most notably Kenneth Stampp, had shaken that notion, which, nonetheless, does seem to peep out of my text here and there despite my efforts to leave it behind. It should also be clear that my discussion of productivity will not do, not so much because it is wrong—I do think it makes a strong point—as because I use the term in a laymen’s sense that, whatever its merits, plays loose with the customary technical meaning.

Rather than try to clean up these matters in this Introduction, I have chosen to republish an essay on “The Slave Economies in Political Perspective,” co-authored with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, which reflects my current thinking on basic problems. That essay was originally published in the Journal of American History in 1979 and was revised and enlarged for our book Fruits of Merchant Capital (1983), which contains a reformulation and refinement of the principal theses of The Political Economy of Slavery. Fruits of Merchant Capital also contains three chapters of special relevance to the themes explored here: a discussion of the historical role of merchant capital; a critique of Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross; and an analysis of the debate it provoked. A discerning reader of Fruits of Merchant Capital should have no trouble in seeing how and where I would try to improve this book were I to rewrite it.

More important, Fruits of Merchant Capital explains my reasons for jettisoning the term “prebourgeois” and some others like it without surrendering the concept for which it proved to be an unfortunate and confusing code word. Hard criticism from Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Lewis P. Simpson, the literary critic and greatest of the historians of the high culture of the Old South, helped me clarify my thinking and express much more clearly what I had been trying to say in the first place. But then, Ms. Fox-Genovese and Mr. Simpson thoroughly understood the main argument and did not succumb to the nonsense that I had ever regarded the Old South as feudal, seigneurial, or medieval—a position I rejected even when I began these studies as an undergraduate. I see no reason to review these and related matters here since I recently reviewed them in the Introduction to the Wesleyan University Press edition of The World the Slaveholders Made (1988).

I long feared that this book suffers from too mechanistic a view of the historical process with which it is primarily concerned. Forcing myself to reread it now, more than twenty years later, I do find it open to some criticism on that score but am relieved that I see so little I would want to change beyond details and secondary matters. The studies that constitute the book reflect the considerable change that had taken place in my thinking from the time I began them at Brooklyn College and carried them through as a graduate student at Columbia University to their publication in book form in 1965. In my twenties I took too brittle a view of the purely economic side of things, was overly concerned with profit rates, underestimated the strength of the slave economy in some important particulars, and tended to slide toward a historical determinism that even then I rejected philosophically. By the early 1960s, I had begun to revise my thinking on these matters, as the stronger parts of the book should show, but some of the older rigidities lingered on to 1964. Among my critics only Stanley Engerman seems to have seen the problem—that the book represents a transitional period in my thinking and would have been considerably refined had I waited a few more years. The exigencies of the academic world being what they are, I could not wait: if I expected to get a salary I could live on I had to get a promotion and tenure; to get a promotion and tenure I had to have a book. Therefore … Not an unusual story. In any event, I did begin that refinement a few years later in The World the Slaveholders Made and in other essays, some of which were collected in In Red and Black (1971, 1984). To be frank, I was not at all sure that, if I could bring myself to reread The Political Economy of Slavery, I would want it republished, despite the continued sales of the first edition and the knowledge that it has remained a text in a good many college and even high school classes. (When did high schools start to hire sadistic teachers?) Having finally had to reread it, I have concluded once again that Jeannette Hopkins of Wesleyan University Press is a lot smarter than I am, for with all its flaws I am satisfied that it remains a book on which I can stand. The discussions of soil exhaustion, livestock, the process of agricultural reform, and especially of the impediments to industrialization, the roots of slavery expansionism, and especially of the general crisis of slave society say most of what I still would say and have not said better elsewhere. As such, if the interpretation of the society of the Old South remains worth considering—and since it is still furiously damned as well as generously praised, I assume it is—then this book remains the indispensable introduction.

The first essay, “The Slave South: An Interpretation,” reflects the weaknesses as well as what I hope are the strengths of the book as a whole, although I think it a good deal stronger when read in conjunction with the last essay, “The Origins of Slavery Expansionism,” which was written a half dozen years later and which, contrary to some of the sillier criticism I have received, does not remotely constitute an “economic” interpretation. Far from it. I sought the taproot of Southern expansionism in the exigencies of the slaveholders’ class rule, which simultaneously embraced all facets of their lives. Thus I heartily concur with Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s splendid dissection of Southern honor and only wish he had associated it more closely to the nature of the master-slave relation. I did argue in this book that slavery had to expand for economic reasons among others, notwithstanding its economic incapacity to master the territorial question. But I also tried to make clear that no one could begin to understand the increasing intransigence of the Southerners on the territorial question during the 1840s and 1850s without full attention to the point d’honneur. Those who wished to keep slavery out of the territories implicitly—and often explicitly—condemned it as an immoral social system and condemned the slaveholders as the human embodiment of that immorality. Free-soilism constituted a frontal attack on Southern honor and, as such, was not to be borne. Those condilatory Southerners who objected that the invocation of Southern rights was spurious because of economic conditions unfavorable to slavery in the territories steadily ran afoul of the argument from Southern honor as a guiding principle inseparable from Southern rights. From this point of view the territorial question was by no means the “abstraction” it was often called.

Between “The Slave South: An Interpretation,” written in my twenties, and “The Origins of Slavery Expansionism,” written in my mid-thirties, I had the opportunity to do further research, to benefit from some excellent new work by Southern historians, and to reflect upon and rein in some of my youthful enthusiasms, and I did make modest changes when I republished it in this book. I would now modify it more substantially. In particular, the emphasis on “aristocratic” and “backward-looking” would give way to less stark formulations that would take account of the yeomanry and the “progressive” or “modern” features of a slaveholding class and society, which even then I had the wit to perceive and describe as hybrids. In subsequent books and essays I have been trying to develop a more nuanced and empirically sounder set of formulations. The Mind of the Master Class: The Life and Thought of the Southern Slaveholders which I am now writing—to my great good fortune—with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, should contain the full and integrated analyses and reflections for what has been a life’s work.

Used suggestively, “aristocracy” has advantages, and no suggested alternative—e.g., “gentry” or “country squires”—serves any better to capture the slaveholders of the Old South, who constituted a class of a new type with some important features in common with aristocracies. I never intended an identification of such classes across historical periods but could have done more to delineate the limits of the historical image I invoked. More seriously, I referred to “planters” too freely when I clearly should have written “slaveholders.” I thereby gave the unintended impression of writing about a tiny social elite instead of the class as a whole, and, indeed, the very argument of the book depends upon an understanding that the class as a whole is at issue. But in insisting upon this correction, I have no wish to give aid and comfort to those who perversely read me in the first place as assuming that the slaveholders were a homogeneous group, a monolith. Rather, I have presented the slaveholders here and elsewhere as a class that exhibited sufficient political, ideological, and moral coherence to move as a class-for-itself—a class that could self-consciously express and defend its interests—during the decisive moments of its internally rent history. At that, the argument refers to the plantation heartland and its tributaries rather than to the “South” as a geopolitical region, large parts of which the slaveholders did not dominate.

When, therefore, I wrote that the slaveholders constituted a “premodern” class, I meant that its fundamental social relations and an essential aspect of its ethos—by no means the totality—bore the characteristics of premodernity and antimodernity. I did not deny the reverse: that the specific kind of slaveholding class described here was and could only be a product of the modern, bourgeois world and its trans-Atlantic culture, the ethos and sensibilities of which it necessarily had to absorb even as it struggled to repudiate much of them. I might have said more, as I promised to do and have since tried to do, about the ideological and psychological tension created by that contradictory development—by the warring elements in that “hybrid” class and its world. But if my presentation may be faulted as encouraging a one-sided view, I still insist that it properly focuses on that side which contributed most to the forging of the slaveholders as a class and, through them, the forging of Southern slave society as a unique social formation that could not be assimilated to the bourgeois world in which it had originated.

I confess to liking “The Slave South: An Interpretation” much more than I thought I would. For if I have to smile at its unqualified generalizations—its exaggerations—I would hone and modify its principal theses rather than subject them to radical alteration. The excellent scholarship of many colleagues during these last two decades compels all kinds of revisions—we would all be in bad shape were that not the case—but compel no retreat from fundamentals. The Old South, I believe more strongly than ever, must be understood as a historically discrete slave society, the basic tendencies of which were antibourgeois despite its being embodied in a capitalist world and world market. Southern slave society could never fully assimilate bourgeois ideology and morals, nor could it remain at peace with the trans-Atlantic bourgeoisie, most especially not with the Northern bourgeoisie with which it had to share national-state power in the United States. In subsequent published work and work in progress in collaboration with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, I have been hacking down some dead trees, pruning others, and even planting a few new ones, but I have left the forest essentially intact.

I now see that forest as much lusher and more variegated but as distinctly recognizable from my early picture of it. I wrote in this book that the psychological and ideological aspects of the argument could only be hinted at here and would have to be developed. I have spent more than twenty years in trying to do just that and have taken special comfort from the work of Lewis Simpson and Drew Faust, among those whose work on these matters is generally compatible with my own despite their non-Marxist frames of reference. I have also been learning a great deal from such scholars as Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Michael O’Brien, William Freehling, Larry Tise, and others with whom I have a variety of quarrels. The articles Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and I have been publishing in recent years, separately and together, should serve as a respectful response to explicit and implicit criticism of my earlier formulations of the cultural history of the Old South. As for the earlier formulations presented here, I see much to amplify, clarify, and refine, but little of importance to repudiate.

Without restating the argument of “The Slave Economies in Political Perspective,” I would like to draw attention to the deep disagreement I have with my friends and colleagues Fogel and Engerman, as well as with some other economic historians—the disagreement over the relation of high growth rates to the problem of industrialization and, more broadly, of economic development. If the growth rates were slighted in The Political Economy of Slavery, the same cannot be said for “The Slave Economies in Political Perspective,” but, in any case, empirically verifiable high growth rates are not the central issue. Rather, the issue concerns the structural constraints (political and ideological as well as economic) on economic development—the possibilities for the qualitative changes in the economy necessary for the maintenance of class power.

Fogel, Engerman, and others pose a counterfactual: if the war had not intervened, the South would have shifted capital and other resources into manufacturing as soon as it paid to do so or, alternatively, would have gone on for an indefinite period as a high-growth, staple-producing region. Gavin Wright, especially in The Political Economy of the Cotton South, subjects that thesis to tough criticism from an economic point of view. With due respect to Wright’s sophisticated analyses, even if with some uneasiness about his own counterfactuals, I argued in this book and subsequently that the central issue concerned the political power of the dominant class, not the economic performance per se, and that the question of political power would never have led to a bloody sectional war had it not reflected the fundamental character of a ruling class of a special type.

In developing that thesis, I tried to pay close attention to the relation of the slaveholders, especially the big planters, to the industrialists and to show that a significant number of planters did invest in industry. Yet some critics have produced their own evidence of the same thing and announced that my interpretation has thereby been refuted. I can only suggest that they read what I actually wrote. Quibbles aside, the argument of this book rests on the portrayal of the slaveholders as a distinct ruling class and on the judgment that neither they nor any such class can be understood if we try to make an analytical separation of their material and, as it were, subjective aspects.

On another set of questions: I intended the essay on “The Negro Laborer in Africa and the Slave South” to dispose of certain racist assumptions that had largely been discredited but that nonetheless kept seeping into the literature. It seems to have done the immediate job well enough but could stand considerable revision at various points. For in this essay and elsewhere in the book I seriously underestimated the importance of the slaves’ initiative to the political economy. My strictures on the slaves’ diet, for example, should be qualified to take account of the extent to which the slaves found ways to provide for themselves. In Roll, Jordan, Roll, I strove for a better balance on such specific issues and, more important, I tried to assess the cultural development of the quarters. It turned out to be a story I had not imagined possible when I wrote these early studies. As for the discussion of slavery and servitude in Africa, it too may stand as an adequate approximation for immediate purposes, but we now have first-class studies by specialists that should be consulted by those who want a full and rich picture. I should especially recommend the work of Paul Lovejoy and Frederick Cooper.

In “The Negro Laborer in Africa and the Slave South” I wrote: “Once slavery passes from its mild, patriarchal stage, the laborer is regarded less and less as a human being and more and more as a beast of burden, particularly when he is a foreigner and can be treated as a biological inferior.” James Oakes, among others, has chided me for advancing this formulation while insisting upon the centrality of paternalism to the master-slave relation. I appreciate the criticism, which draws attention to a substantial problem, but I regard it as a legitimate demand for elaboration and a careful delineation of limits, not as a refutation of the argument for the ubiquity of paternalism. Here, too, in Roll, Jordan, Roll and elsewhere I have attempted to explore that explosive contradiction, and I remain convinced that both arguments are sound. They must, however, be understood as constituting the dialectical tension at the heart of the master-slave relation. If I may twit Mr. Oakes a bit, surely he recognizes as dogmatic nonsense the dreadful sentence with which I concluded my discussion and which opened the way to fair criticism: “Thus slavery, no matter how patriarchal at first, will, if permitted to grow naturally, break out of its modest bounds and produce an economy that will rip the laborer from his culture and yet not provide him with a genuine replacement.” Dogmatic nonsense it is, in refutation of which I wrote Roll, Jordan, Roll.

We do confront a powerful tendency toward dehumanization, the logic of which was imaginatively and unforgettably laid bare by Stanley Elkins in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. In my several criticisms of Elkins—see the relevant essays in In Red and Black—I argued that the logic ought not to be confused with the history, for the slaves themselves, as well as their masters, generated formidable countertendencies. I am increasingly impressed, for example, with the effort of the churches and their ministers to combat the worst of the tendencies toward dehumanization. Indeed, in other ways, too, religion deeply influenced the society and the economy, for the slaveholders—I am now convinced—were a pious, God-fearing people. These problems Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and I have begun to explore in articles and shall return to in depth in our forthcoming book.

Were I to try to enrich the primary theses of this book or, with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, those of Fruits of Merchant Capital, I would include an extended discussion of the objective and subjective significance of households in Southern slave society. Ms. Fox-Genovese has in recent years developed the interpretation of the Old South as a discrete slaveholding society, beginning with her formulation of slavery as a (noncapitalist) social formation within a worldwide (bourgeois) mode of production—a formulation that led to another, that the slaveholders, as a class, were in but not of the capitalist world. From that vantage point, which The Political Economy of Slavery had suggested but only mumbled, she has given the discussion a new turn with her work on Southern households, especially in her recent book Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. That fresh perspective we shall do our best to integrate into our forthcoming book on the slaveholders. Here let me settle for a few essentials that would point toward a deepening of the argument of this book.

For slaves as for slaveholders, the experience of everyday life was firmly grounded in households that anchored Southern slavery as a social system. Southern households, in distinct contrast to their Northern counterparts, continued throughout the antebellum period to harbor a significant measure of production as well as reproduction. The differences between Southern and Northern experience in this respect emerges most dramatically from a comparison of the respective rates of urbanization in the free and slave states. The specifics may be followed in Ms. Fox-Genovese’s book, but the picture is clear enough. During precisely the period in which the Northern states were generating a city-system that embodied the dramatic growth of the market in Northern society, the slave states remained overwhelmingly rural, notwithstanding the presence of a few very large port cities. Thus, by 1860, among Southern slave states only Kentucky (with 10.4 per cent) exceeded 10 per cent urban.

Southern households, which contained within themselves the fundamental social relations of production, successfully forestalled that market penetration which was, however unevenly, transforming Northern households. Many Southern households obviously did depend upon the world market, but that dependence may even have reinforced their essential character, for it affected their aggregate productions without transforming the relations among their members or the relations of individual members to a market in labor-power. In The Political Economy of Slavery, I emphasized the importance of slaveholders’ purchases of manufactures such as shoes primarily as evidence of the underdevelopment of the division of labor within Southern society. Slaveholders who bought shoes and other manufactured goods in bulk from the North, or specialty items from the North or from Europe, testified to—even as they reinforced—the failure of the South to develop those vital local markets that embodied Northern development. I also argued that although the South persisted longer than the North in household manufactures, the inefficiency of slave labor discouraged such manufacture in substantial quantities. It now appears that the case is more complex and that my argument about the division of labor in Southern society should be separated from my argument about the extent of household manufacture. In fact, many Southern households probably did engage in more subsistence production and home manufacture than I thought at the time. The census data on which I relied demonstrates that although Southern households persisted in such manufacture longer than Northern, the dollar value of the manufactures they did produce was not impressive. The problem of the dollar value remains troubling, but it does now appear that significant numbers of Southern households were producing a substantial amount of food and cloth. The narratives of former slaves, like many slaveholders’ plantation books, testify that slave women were regularly spinning and weaving in large numbers. The issue is less that of the measure of self-sufficiency than the division of labor outside of households and the development of markets in basic food supplies and commodities. For even those households that increased their purchase of supplies and goods did not, as did Northern households, get drawn into the market in labor-power. The outright ownership of labor buttressed Southern households against the influence of the market upon the relations among household members, including slaves. The division of labor that shaped the weaving and spinning was a division of labor by gender.

The consequences were far-reaching. Throughout the antebellum period, slaveholders referred to their households, including their slaves, as “my family white and black.” The metaphor of family obscured the realities of the relations between masters and slaves, but nonetheless captured the masters’ commitment to noncontractual relations among household members. If many masters failed to live up to their self-proclaimed responsibilities, others remained concerned to provide decently for their slaves and to realize their reiterated conviction that slavery provided greater benefits for the laborer than a system of free labor.

Frequently the discussion of the slaves’ well-being has been cast as a matter of treatment. Did slaves, or did they not, fare better than free laborers with respect to diet, housing, medical care, life expectancy? But the real cost of the system for the slaves lay elsewhere. For membership in the master’s household deprived male slaves of the ability to form their own. Deprived of legal marriage and the attendant control over their own women and their children’s futures that resulted from independent property ownership, including property in their own labor, slaves lacked independent material foundations for their distinct culture and beliefs. As I argued in Roll, Jordan, Roll, the slaves did develop a vital and distinct Afro-American culture that included a heavy infusion from their African past, but, however vigorous, that culture depended primarily on an act of will in the face of considerable odds. The household structure of Southern society in effect ensured that the slaves would live in close contact with and under the close supervision of the slaveholders, who had a decisive advantage in setting the terms of contact.

For the slaveholders, Southern households reinforced their commitment to unequal relations among all members of society, especially those between masters and slaves and between men and women. The exigencies of living in intimate relation with a subordinate and hostile class reinforced the received wisdom that God and nature had ordained male superiority. Physical strength retained an immediate relevance to life in a society in which the head of the household had to be able to whip his prime male field hand himself. By the same token, women’s need for male protection justified male dominance—the inescapable inequality between men and women.

A mea culpa: on page 8 I wrote, “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 should have quit while I was ahead. I did not and do not believe in inevitability or mechanical determinism, but I do believe, and suspect I always did, in sin. Smart-mouthed one-liners like this reference to sin aside, even when I began to study the slaveholders as an undergraduate with a fierce and I fear dogmatic Marxist bias, I quickly came to view them as surprisingly strong and attractive men—I would now add, and women—who stood for some values worthy of the highest respect and who contributed much more to modern civilization than they have been credited with. I also viewed them as objectively retrograde and as responsible for the greatest enormity of the age—black slavery itself. That sense of the slaveholders as a class I carried into this book, to the squeals of outrage from left-wing and liberal critics who saw in it everything from proslavery apologetics and thinly disguised racism to the groveling attraction of an outsider before the pretensions of the rich, the mighty, and the well-born. I ask to be forgiven if my only reply to this left-wing childishness is that I have no time for imbeciles. The more than twenty years since I published this book have largely been spent in intensive further research into every possible facet of the slaveholders’ lives, and in consequence my respect and admiration for the best members of that class has, if anything, risen markedly. But so, especially in response to the work I did on Roll, Jordan, Roll, has my sense of horror at what, despite the best of intentions, they wrought. For the way white folks done black folks, as a former slave woman put it, they won’t never pray it away. The juxtaposition of these two aspects of the slaveholders’ life and legacy defines the genuine historical tragedy to which they succumbed.

And an awareness of the tragedy brings us to the problem of sin, however absurd it may seem for an atheist to invoke it. For if I was trying to tell my fellow Marxists anything, it was that Marx had misled us badly with his philosophy of humanity—his unabashed, unfounded, and preposterous insistence that the liberation of humanity from class exploitation and oppression would produce a new man and a new woman who would instinctively relate to each other lovingly and cooperatively. Marx did not invent that cant. It had had a long and bloody history and had become standard fare with the Enlightenment. The slaveholders heard it all the time and, serious Christians that most were, they had the wit to laugh. They also took the measure of those who deluded themselves with such pious hopes, and they therefore kept themselves ready to stand to their arms.

The Marxism with which I have identified proceeds on the basis of a rejection of the philosophy of humanity that Marx superimposed upon his great work of historical interpretation, which offers that philosophy not the slightest consolation. With The Political Economy of Slavery I began to try to tell the story of a great historical tragedy. Hence the political conclusion that ought to follow is that the slaveholders were honorable and admirable people who could neither be bought nor frightened and who therefore had to be crushed as a class. For pointing to that conclusion I have regularly been denounced by the geniuses of the Left as an apologist for the slaveholders. As apologetics go, I personally can live with these just fine. I doubt, however, that the slaveholders would have welcomed them.

Having referred to the work that Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and I have published in recent years, may I list those most relevant to the themes of this Introduction. Above all see Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988), especially its lengthy discussion of the significance of the households for the political economy of the region.

On the ideology of slavery see Genovese, Western Civilization through Slaveholding Eyes: The Social and Historical Thought of Thomas Roderick Dew (New Orleans: “The Andrew Mellon Lecture,” Tulane University, 1985); Genovese, “Larry Tise’s Proslavery: A Critique and an Appreciation,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, LXXII (Winter 1988), pp. 670–83; and Genovese and Fox-Genovese, “Slavery, Economic Development, and the Law: The Dilemma of the Southern Political Economists, 1800–1860,” Washington and Lee Law Review, XLI (1984), pp. 1–29.

On religion, which I passed over in this book but now regard as essential to an understanding of the life and thought of the slaveholders, see “Slavery Ordained of God”: The Southern Slaveholders’ View of Biblical History and Modern Politics (Gettysburg, Pa.: “The Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture,” Gettysburg College, 1985); Genovese and Fox-Genovese, “The Religious Ideals of Southern Slave Society,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, LXX (1986), pp. 1–16; and Fox-Genovese and Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order: Religious Foundations of the Southern Slaveholders’ World View,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LV (1987), pp. 211–33.

On principal themes of the development of the “high culture,” see Fox-Genovese and Genovese, “The Cultural History of Southern Slave Society: Reflections on the Work of Lewis P. Simpson,” in J. Gerald Kennedy and Daniel Mark Fogel, eds., American Letters and Historical Consciousness: Essays in Honor of Lewis P. Simpson (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), pp. 14–38.