Just As We Were Told

Time on the Cross sheds a little light on a subject which has generated, since 1830, almost nothing but fever heat. For close students of the Southern experience who have brought to their reflections enough of the honest regional memory to secure them against the received or “national” version of the record of American slavery, there is now surprising encouragement to insist publicly on what reasonable men knew all the time—knew but, for reasons political, sometimes decided to ignore. And, for those raised altogether inside that framework of Southern memory, there is no surprise at all.

Arguments from definition, denouncing slavery as a condition for Negroes on this side of the ocean, could not, in the context of our early nineteenth century society, have enlisted into the ranks of abolition numbers sufficient to accomplish either its proximate or its ultimate ends. It was therefore necessary to plead other objections, to defame the actual operations of the slave power and the character of its representatives. Atrocity stories were (and, with refinements, continue to be, even in recent scholarship) the rhetorical alternative: fallacious and bullyragging arguments from circumstance. From Olmsted and Mrs. Stowe to Bancroft, Hofstadter, Stampp, and Elkins, we have been treated to an unfolding chronicle of neglect, vanity, willful cruelty, and even more willful indifference to personal interest. It is difficult to imagine a character so monstrous or stupid as the composite slaveholder of these learned mythologies, a creature so lacking in conscience or so oblivious to the social, political, and economic realities of his times. But now, with this evidence, we can believe that, for reasons selfish and ethical, the Southern slaveholder was nothing like what his enemies and the latterday enemies of his political heirs have conjured up.

MB

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M. E. Bradford

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Time on the Cross sheds a little light on a subject which has generated, since 1830, almost nothing but fever heat. For close students of the Southern experience who have brought to their reflections enough of the honest regional memory to secure them against the received or “national” version of the record of American slavery, there is now surprising encouragement to insist publicly on what reasonable men knew all the time—knew but, for reasons political, sometimes decided to ignore. And, for those raised altogether inside that framework of Southern memory, there is no surprise at all.

Arguments from definition, denouncing slavery as a condition for Negroes on this side of the ocean, could not, in the context of our early nineteenth century society, have enlisted into the ranks of abolition numbers sufficient to accomplish either its proximate or its ultimate ends. It was therefore necessary to plead other objections, to defame the actual operations of the slave power and the character of its representatives. Atrocity stories were (and, with refinements, continue to be, even in recent scholarship) the rhetorical alternative: fallacious and bullyragging arguments from circumstance. From Olmsted and Mrs. Stowe to Bancroft, Hofstadter, Stampp, and Elkins, we have been treated to an unfolding chronicle of neglect, vanity, willful cruelty, and even more willful indifference to personal interest. It is difficult to imagine a character so monstrous or stupid as the composite slaveholder of these learned mythologies, a creature so lacking in conscience or so oblivious to the social, political, and economic realities of his times. But now, with this evidence, we can believe that, for reasons selfish and ethical, the Southern slaveholder was nothing like what his enemies and the latterday enemies of his political heirs have conjured up.