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