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.
Contents
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
| Agr. Hist. |
Agricultural History
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