The Political Economy of Slavery. Eugene D. Genovese

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      Introduction to the Wesleyan Edition

      Introductions of this sort present an unusual opportunity to reply to serious criticism. I have indeed been privileged to receive both directly and implicitly alternate views of the subject by Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, Gavin Wright, and no few others. To these challenges I have done my best to reply elsewhere. Here, we may pass lightly over the specifics of this or that economic formulation and calculation, which properly remain of importance to economic historians. The correct calculation of hog weights, for example, does have significance for other calculations that bear on some large problems. Since I published my own calculations, better ones have been made by those sophisticated in techniques beyond my own training, but their results reinforce my central argument.

      By the time I wrote this book, I had largely abandoned my youthful notion that the rate of profit in cotton production was low and probably lower than the interest rate. Even before the pioneering work of Alfred Conrad and John Meyer and long before the drastic revisions of Fogel and Engerman, others, most notably Kenneth Stampp, had shaken that notion, which, nonetheless, does seem to peep out of my text here and there despite my efforts to leave it behind. It should also be clear that my discussion of productivity will not do, not so much because it is wrong—I do think it makes a strong point—as because I use the term in a laymen’s sense that, whatever its merits, plays loose with the customary technical meaning.

      Rather than try to clean up these matters in this Introduction, I have chosen to republish an essay on “The Slave Economies in Political Perspective,” co-authored with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, which reflects my current thinking on basic problems. That essay was originally published in the Journal of American History in 1979 and was revised and enlarged for our book Fruits of Merchant Capital (1983), which contains a reformulation and refinement of the principal theses of The Political Economy of Slavery. Fruits of Merchant Capital also contains three chapters of special relevance to the themes explored here: a discussion of the historical role of merchant capital; a critique of Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross; and an analysis of the debate it provoked. A discerning reader of Fruits of Merchant Capital should have no trouble in seeing how and where I would try to improve this book were I to rewrite it.

      More important, Fruits of Merchant Capital explains my reasons for jettisoning the term “prebourgeois” and some others like it without surrendering the concept for which it proved to be an unfortunate and confusing code word. Hard criticism from Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Lewis P. Simpson, the literary critic and greatest of the historians of the high culture of the Old South, helped me clarify my thinking and express much more clearly what I had been trying to say in the first place. But then, Ms. Fox-Genovese and Mr. Simpson thoroughly understood the main argument and did not succumb to the nonsense that I had ever regarded the Old South as feudal, seigneurial, or medieval—a position I rejected even when I began these studies as an undergraduate. I see no reason to review these and related matters here since I recently reviewed them in the Introduction to the Wesleyan University Press edition of The World the Slaveholders Made (1988).

      I long feared that this book suffers from too mechanistic a view of the historical process with which it is primarily concerned. Forcing myself to reread it now, more than twenty years later, I do find it open to some criticism on that score but am relieved that I see so little I would want to change beyond details and secondary matters. The studies that constitute the book reflect the considerable change that had taken place in my thinking from the time I began them at Brooklyn College and carried them through as a graduate student at Columbia University to their publication in book form in 1965. In my twenties I took too brittle a view of the purely economic side of things, was overly concerned with profit rates, underestimated the strength of the slave economy in some important particulars, and tended to slide toward a historical determinism that even then I rejected philosophically. By the early 1960s, I had begun to revise my thinking on these matters, as the stronger parts of the book should show, but some of the older rigidities lingered on to 1964. Among my critics only Stanley Engerman seems to have seen the problem—that the book represents a transitional period in my thinking and would have been considerably refined had I waited a few more years. The exigencies of the academic world being what they are, I could not wait: if I expected to get a salary I could live on I had to get a promotion and tenure; to get a promotion and tenure I had to have a book. Therefore … Not an unusual story. In any event, I did begin that refinement a few years later in The World the Slaveholders Made and in other essays, some of which were collected in In Red and Black (1971, 1984). To be frank, I was not at all sure that, if I could bring myself to reread The Political Economy of Slavery, I would want it republished, despite the continued sales of the first edition and the knowledge that it has remained a text in a good many college and even high school classes. (When did high schools start to hire sadistic teachers?) Having finally had to reread it, I have concluded once again that Jeannette Hopkins of Wesleyan University Press is a lot smarter than I am, for with all its flaws I am satisfied that it remains a book on which I can stand. The discussions of soil exhaustion, livestock, the process of agricultural reform, and especially of the impediments to industrialization, the roots of slavery expansionism, and especially of the general crisis of slave society say most of what I still would say and have not said better elsewhere. As such, if the interpretation of the society of the Old South remains worth considering—and since it is still furiously damned as well as generously praised, I assume it is—then this book remains the indispensable introduction.

      The first essay, “The Slave South: An Interpretation,” reflects the weaknesses as well as what I hope are the strengths of the book as a whole, although I think it a good deal stronger when read in conjunction with the last essay, “The Origins of Slavery Expansionism,” which was written a half dozen years later and which, contrary to some of the sillier criticism I have received, does not remotely constitute an “economic” interpretation. Far from it. I sought the taproot of Southern expansionism in the exigencies of the slaveholders’ class rule, which simultaneously embraced all facets of their lives. Thus I heartily concur with Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s splendid dissection of Southern honor and only wish he had associated it more closely to the nature of the master-slave relation. I did argue in this book that slavery had to expand for economic reasons among others, notwithstanding its economic incapacity to master the territorial question. But I also tried to make clear that no one could begin to understand the increasing intransigence of the Southerners on the territorial question during the 1840s and 1850s without full attention to the point d’honneur. Those who wished to keep slavery out of the territories implicitly—and often explicitly—condemned it as an immoral social system and condemned the slaveholders as the human embodiment of that immorality. Free-soilism constituted a frontal attack on Southern honor and, as such, was not to be borne. Those condilatory Southerners who objected that the invocation of Southern rights was spurious because of economic conditions unfavorable to slavery in the territories steadily ran afoul of the argument from Southern honor as a guiding principle inseparable from Southern rights. From this point of view the territorial question was by no means the “abstraction” it was often called.

      Between “The Slave South: An Interpretation,” written in my twenties, and “The Origins of Slavery Expansionism,” written in my mid-thirties, I had the opportunity to do further research, to benefit from some excellent new work by Southern historians, and to reflect upon and rein in some of my youthful enthusiasms, and I did make modest changes when I republished it in this book. I would now modify СКАЧАТЬ