The Hybrid Regime’ of Slavery

Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made By Eugene Genovese Pantheon, 823 pp., $17.50 Eugene Genovese, a student of slavery for nearly thirty years, whose essays have established him as one of the leading historians of the Old South, is a Marxist devotee of Antonio Gramsci; he has spoken of Stalin’s “achievements,” denounced the New Left as nihilistic, shocked Rutgers by declaring for the Vietcong, and used to be fond of pointing out that America had not produced a Marxist historian who could hold a candle to E. P. Thompson or Christopher Hill. He defended William Styron’s fictional portrait of a tormented, fantasyridden Nat Turner when Styron came under attack as an arrogant racist who had stolen a black hero. And at a time when books like Stanley Elkins’ Slavery and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution were thought to have delivered crushing blows to the earlier work of Ulrich B. Phillips, Genovese devoted himself to a rehabilitation of the Georgian whose scholarship had dominated Southern historical writing for a generation. Richard Hofstadter had written in 1944 that Phillips’ books represented a “latter-day phase of the proslavery argument,” a point which Genovese conceded. To some befuddled colleagues, Genovese’s earlier writings represented still another and unique phase of the proslavery argument.

Clearly, Genovese was drawn to the South because he admired some of her ways. Revisionist scholarship had identified the planters as a typical, grasping bourgeoisie for whom paternalism provided a thin ideological cover. But Genovese, like Phillips, took the claims of the planters seriously, and chided his Marxist colleagues for their failure “to admit that certain elements of the slaveholders’ ideology deserve the attention and respect of those who would build a socialist order.” Conservatives, he wrote, “with a sense of the organic and traditional,” have been “better attuned to the essential qualities of Southern life.” As for Phillips, Genovese said unabashedly: “I . . . plead guilty to the charge that I believe [his] racism to have sharpened some of his genuine insights.”

JC

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Jack Chatfield

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Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made By Eugene Genovese Pantheon, 823 pp., $17.50 Eugene Genovese, a student of slavery for nearly thirty years, whose essays have established him as one of the leading historians of the Old South, is a Marxist devotee of Antonio Gramsci; he has spoken of Stalin’s “achievements,” denounced the New Left as nihilistic, shocked Rutgers by declaring for the Vietcong, and used to be fond of pointing out that America had not produced a Marxist historian who could hold a candle to E. P. Thompson or Christopher Hill. He defended William Styron’s fictional portrait of a tormented, fantasyridden Nat Turner when Styron came under attack as an arrogant racist who had stolen a black hero. And at a time when books like Stanley Elkins’ Slavery and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution were thought to have delivered crushing blows to the earlier work of Ulrich B. Phillips, Genovese devoted himself to a rehabilitation of the Georgian whose scholarship had dominated Southern historical writing for a generation. Richard Hofstadter had written in 1944 that Phillips’ books represented a “latter-day phase of the proslavery argument,” a point which Genovese conceded. To some befuddled colleagues, Genovese’s earlier writings represented still another and unique phase of the proslavery argument.

Clearly, Genovese was drawn to the South because he admired some of her ways. Revisionist scholarship had identified the planters as a typical, grasping bourgeoisie for whom paternalism provided a thin ideological cover. But Genovese, like Phillips, took the claims of the planters seriously, and chided his Marxist colleagues for their failure “to admit that certain elements of the slaveholders’ ideology deserve the attention and respect of those who would build a socialist order.” Conservatives, he wrote, “with a sense of the organic and traditional,” have been “better attuned to the essential qualities of Southern life.” As for Phillips, Genovese said unabashedly: “I . . . plead guilty to the charge that I believe [his] racism to have sharpened some of his genuine insights.”