granddaddy of them all ( )

Eugene Genovese, in his Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, reinterpreted the history of slavery in the antebellum South. Genovese posited that slaves and masters lived in a type of symbiotic relationship, a paternalism “accepted by both masters and slaves” that “afforded a fragile bridge across… a society based on racism, slavery, and class exploitation” (p. 5). This idea of a “two-sided” paternalism stood in opposition to the earlier view, held by scholars like Ulrich B. Phillips, that slaveowners held unbridled power over their conversely powerless charges. Instead, slaves made their own world, adapting to their lot in life in various ways, from religion to family life. This often resulted in slaves seeking and retaining better living and working conditions for themselves. Though these ideas descend from Marx via Antonio Gramsci’s idea of social hegemony, and Genovese refers too often to the then recently passed social movements, often radical, of the late 1960s, his ideas must be considered by all who study the course and nature of American slavery.

Genovese utilized a wealth of sources, most of them primary, to buttress his thesis. He cited numerous diaries, plantation records, and travel accounts to get the white side of the story and used court records and published interviews, many of them from the WPA, to get the black side. He even employed the cliometrical work of Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel, then in its infancy (p. xxi). A helpful “Note on Sources” serves as a sort of bibliographical essay and accompanies his notes, though a separate bibliography would have been appreciated. Genovese’s command and grasp of this material shows both his familiarity with and mastery of the subject matter.

Genovese’s chief argument in Roll, Jordan, Rollis that the slaves were not, as traditionally thought, at the mercy of their all-powerful masters. Nor did the slaveowners necessarily control their captives through brute force but they imposed their collective will through what Gramsci called “hegemony.” The slaveholding class, like other ruling classes, held society together not by lone brute force, but through a set of hegemonic values and mores that kept the working classes, in this case black slaves, in check. The slaves in this case accepted the paternalism of their masters not because they “liked” or “accepted” slavery, but “by accepting a paternalistic ethos and legitimizing class rule, developed their most powerful defense against the dehumanization implicit in slavery” (p. 7). The paternalism of the slaveholders served not only to keep the slaves “happy,” but justified to themselves that they were good people—enlightened despots, in a sense. Genovese notes numerous instances were the masters lightened the burdens and punishments of slavery, perhaps to assuage their own moral guilt. Thus castration and other forms of mutilations as a form of punishment for a wide range of offenses nearly disappeared, to the point a Tennessee slaveholder in 1850 was punished for castrating a “turbulent, insolent, and ungovernable slave” (pp. 67-68). The slaves knew, according to Genovese and the evidence he amasses, that they could make their experience better by exploiting the paternalistic ideas of their masters. Genovese summarizes his thesis by stating: “Southern paternalism may have reinforced racism as well as class exploitation, but it also unwittingly invited its victims to fashion their own interpretation of the social order it was intended to justify” (p. 7).

The rest of Genovese’s Book One attempts to prove this thesis. He draws on various sources to show, what at first glance my be paradoxical, that in the thirty years before the Civil War opportunities for manumission decreased while working conditions got better. Genovese notes how paternalistic attitudes ensured that laws protected the humanity of the slave even as they denied them that humanity. He notes, for instance, the wrenchingly ambiguous ruling of Kentucky’s high court in 1836: “…although the law of this state considers slaves as property, yet it recognizes their personal existence, and, to a qualified extent, their natural rights” (p. 30). The first section of the second book details slave religion on this same theme. If religion was merely a tool of the masters to keep their chattel servile and docile, an opiate of the masses, Christianity would have been roundly rejected by the slaves. Instead, they created a syncretic Christianity, sometimes under the nose of their superiors, with a different salvific focus and eschatology. This religion was creative, vibrant, and, oftentimes, undermined the worldview of the slaveholders. Yet it was allowed to exist and even flourish. The last part of Book Two discusses how slaves were able to retain and create their own working rhythms even under the pressure of their owners: “The actual work rhythm of the slaves, then, had to be hammered out as a compromise between themselves and their masters” (p. 303). Genovese continues: “The masters held the upper hand, but the slaves set limits as best they could” (p. 303).

Book Three adds more evidence to substantiate Genovese’s main thesis. Slaves had vibrant families under a system that seemed dead set against allowing the institution to exist. It is yet another instance of slaves having “agency,” to use that well-worn word, in their lives. Book Four discusses various incidences of slaves directly challenging the authority of the master class. The most intriguing notion is explaining why large-scale slave revolts were relatively rare in the antebellum South when compared to other areas of the slaveholding New World. Genovese posits that slaves insurrections were uncommon not only because slaves were rather few in number or that they were kept down by a continuous, oppressive violence. Instead, perhaps, the lack of many rebellions indicates that slaves were quite able to carve out tolerable lives for themselves, without ever accepting or enjoying the institution of slavery itself (pp. 590-591). Still, revolts proved to Genovese that the Southern slave system was not one where owners held all the power and the slaves held none. The “very existence” of slave insurrections, he wrote, was the “ultimate manifestation of class war under the most unfavorable conditions” (p. 588).

All the evidence that Genovese covers in his book is aimed at portraying the master’s paternalism as a form of hegemony, a socio-cultural control mechanism by which the ruling class rules over the working class. In this Marxian paradigm, the slaves have agency, a modicum of power that can be used as a shield to blunt the blows of the slaveowners. The slaves were able to carve out a life for themselves under the umbrella of paternalism and they knew it. The slaves agitated for and often received “concessions” from their oppressors because they had some power to make demands. In the traditional paradigm of master-slave relations in the antebellum South, the paternalism of Ulrich B. Phillips for example, slaves had no power and lived at the whim of their owners. Genovese’s book provides a thesis and the attendant evidence to counter customary assumptions about slavery. ( )

A cornerstone to understanding the antebellum period in the US ( )