The Political Economy of Slavery. Eugene D. Genovese

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 and unforgettably laid bare by Stanley Elkins in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. In my several criticisms of Elkins—see the relevant essays in In Red and Black—I argued that the logic ought not to be confused with the history, for the slaves themselves, as well as their masters, generated formidable countertendencies. I am increasingly impressed, for example, with the effort of the churches and their ministers to combat the worst of the tendencies toward dehumanization. Indeed, in other ways, too, religion deeply influenced the society and the economy, for the slaveholders—I am now convinced—were a pious, God-fearing people. These problems Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and I have begun to explore in articles and shall return to in depth in our forthcoming book.

      Were I to try to enrich the primary theses of this book or, with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, those of Fruits of Merchant Capital, I would include an extended discussion of the objective and subjective significance of households in Southern slave society. Ms. Fox-Genovese has in recent years developed the interpretation of the Old South as a discrete slaveholding society, beginning with her formulation of slavery as a (noncapitalist) social formation within a worldwide (bourgeois) mode of production—a formulation that led to another, that the slaveholders, as a class, were in but not of the capitalist world. From that vantage point, which The Political Economy of Slavery had suggested but only mumbled, she has given the discussion a new turn with her work on Southern households, especially in her recent book Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. That fresh perspective we shall do our best to integrate into our forthcoming book on the slaveholders. Here let me settle for a few essentials that would point toward a deepening of the argument of this book.

      For slaves as for slaveholders, the experience of everyday life was firmly grounded in households that anchored Southern slavery as a social system. Southern households, in distinct contrast to their Northern counterparts, continued throughout the antebellum period to harbor a significant measure of production as well as reproduction. The differences between Southern and Northern experience in this respect emerges most dramatically from a comparison of the respective rates of urbanization in the free and slave states. The specifics may be followed in Ms. Fox-Genovese’s book, but the picture is clear enough. During precisely the period in which the Northern states were generating a city-system that embodied the dramatic growth of the market in Northern society, the slave states remained overwhelmingly rural, notwithstanding the presence of a few very large port cities. Thus, by 1860, among Southern slave states only Kentucky (with 10.4 per cent) exceeded 10 per cent urban.

      Southern households, which contained within themselves the fundamental social relations of production, successfully forestalled that market penetration which was, however unevenly, transforming Northern households. Many Southern households obviously did depend upon the world market, but that dependence may even have reinforced their essential character, for it affected their aggregate productions without transforming the relations among their members or the relations of individual members to a market in labor-power. In The Political Economy of Slavery, I emphasized the importance of slaveholders’ purchases of manufactures such as shoes primarily as evidence of the underdevelopment of the division of labor within Southern society. Slaveholders who bought shoes and other manufactured goods in bulk from the North, or specialty items from the North or from Europe, testified to—even as they reinforced—the failure of the South to develop those vital local markets that embodied Northern development. I also argued that although the South persisted longer than the North in household manufactures, the inefficiency of slave labor discouraged such manufacture in substantial quantities. It now appears that the case is more complex and that my argument about the division of labor in Southern society should be separated from my argument about the extent of household manufacture. In fact, many Southern households probably did engage in more subsistence production and home manufacture than I thought at the time. The census data on which I relied demonstrates that although Southern households persisted in such manufacture longer than Northern, the dollar value of the manufactures they did produce was not impressive. The problem of the dollar value remains troubling, but it does now appear that significant numbers of Southern households were producing a substantial amount of food and cloth. The narratives of former slaves, like many slaveholders’ plantation books, testify that slave women were regularly spinning and weaving in large numbers. The issue is less that of the measure of self-sufficiency than the division of labor outside of households and the development of markets in basic food supplies and commodities. For even those households that increased their purchase of supplies and goods did not, as did Northern households, get drawn into the market in labor-power. The outright ownership of labor buttressed Southern households against the influence of the market upon the relations among household members, including slaves. The division of labor that shaped the weaving and spinning was a division of labor by gender.

      The consequences were far-reaching. Throughout the antebellum period, slaveholders referred to their households, including their slaves, as “my family white and black.” The metaphor of family obscured the realities of the relations between masters and slaves, but nonetheless captured the masters’ commitment to noncontractual relations among household members. If many masters failed to live up to their self-proclaimed responsibilities, others remained concerned to provide decently for their slaves and to realize their reiterated conviction that slavery provided greater benefits for the laborer than a system of free labor.

      Frequently the discussion of the slaves’ well-being has been cast as a matter of treatment. Did slaves, or did they not, fare better than free laborers with respect to diet, housing, medical care, life expectancy? But the real cost of the system for the slaves lay elsewhere. For membership in the master’s household deprived male slaves of the ability to form their own. Deprived of legal marriage and the attendant control over their own women and their children’s futures that resulted from independent property ownership, including property in their own labor, slaves lacked independent material foundations for their distinct culture and beliefs. As I argued in Roll, Jordan, Roll, the slaves did develop a vital and distinct Afro-American culture that included a heavy infusion from their African past, but, however vigorous, that culture depended primarily on an act of will in the face of considerable odds. The household structure of Southern society in effect ensured that the slaves would live in close contact with and under the close supervision of the slaveholders, who had a decisive advantage in setting the terms of contact.

      For the slaveholders, Southern households reinforced their commitment to unequal relations among all members of society, especially those between masters and slaves and between men and women. The exigencies of living in intimate relation with a subordinate and hostile class reinforced the received wisdom that God and nature had ordained male superiority. Physical strength retained an immediate relevance to life in a society in which the head of the household had to be able to whip his prime male field hand himself. By the same token, women’s need for male protection justified male dominance—the СКАЧАТЬ