The Political Economy of Slavery. Eugene D. Genovese

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СКАЧАТЬ and laborers. The successful defense of slavery presupposed an adequate rate of material growth, but the South could not keep pace with an increasingly hostile North in population growth, manufacturing, transportation, or even agricultural development. The weaknesses of Southern agriculture were especially dangerous and galling to the regime-dangerous because without adequate agricultural progress other kinds of material progress were difficult to effect; galling because Southerners prided themselves on their rural society and its alleged virtues.

      Part Two examines the agricultural base of the Southern economy and especially labor productivity, soil exhaustion, the quantity and quality of livestock, crop diversification, and the movement for agricultural reform. These studies attempt to demonstrate that the efforts of Southerners to develop a sound agricultural economy within the slave system were yielding meager results and had little hope of success as measured by the general and political needs of the slaveholders.

      Part Three consists of three studies that take up some of the more important impediments to industrialization: the retardation of demand, the ambiguous position of the industrialists in a slaveholding society, and the relationship of the slaveholding planters to industrial development. These subjects do not exhaust the list of impediments, and none of the studies pretends to exhaust its particular subject. They are submitted in the hope that they demonstrate the partial and restricted nature of industrial advance under the slaveholders’ regime.

      Part Four begins with a paper on “The Origins of Slavery Expansionism,” which may serve as a conclusion for the book as a whole. It tries to demonstrate that the South had a great stake in the struggle over the Western territories, which tore the country apart between the Mexican War and the secession crisis. This paper is followed by a discussion of the profitability of slavery in relation to the theme of the other studies.

      

Two

      The War for Southern Independence, from the viewpoint of these studies, arose naturally from the long process of the development of the slaveholders’ regime. Since this viewpoint is not generally accepted, it would be proper to give some account of the contending interpretations. Historians fall into two broad camps: the traditionalists have seen the war as an irrepressible or inevitable conflict, whereas the revisionists have seen it as an unnecessary bloodbath that could have been prevented by good will or statesmanship. Until about thirty years ago the lines were firmly drawn.

      In recent decades a great shift has occurred. The revisionists have scored a series of stunning victories over their opponents and forced them to abandon most of their ground. They have done hard digging into source materials, whereas since the appearance of Arthur C. Cole’s admirable The Irrepressible Conflict (1934) the traditionalists have largely contented themselves with writing nice essays. Originally, the traditionalist argument posited a wide area of antagonism between the North and South, viewing slavery as a moral issue but also as the basis of intense material differences. Their notion of material differences contained two debilitating tendencies: it centered on narrow economic issues like the tariff, which hardly added up to a reasonable cause for a bloody war; and it assumed, in accordance with a rigid theoretical model, a slavery-engendered soil exhaustion and territorial expansionism which empirical research did not establish.

      The revisionists have offered a great many monographs which argue that slavery did not necessarily prevent soil reclamation and agricultural adjustment; they have investigated the conditions for Southern expansionism and concluded that slavery neither needed nor had prospects for additional territory. As a result of their work, the traditional or irrepressible-conflict interpretation has come to rest almost entirely on moral grounds: the conscience of the nation could not tolerate forever the barbarism of slavery. The question of a profound material antagonism has thereby virtually been laid to rest.

      If we had to choose between the two positions narrowed to embrace the moral question alone, it would be difficult to avoid choosing some variation of the revisionist, especially since such neo-revisionist historians as Allan Nevins and David Donald have avoided the more naive formulations of earlier writers and offered attractive alternatives. In effect, they each deny that North and South represented hostile civilizations and stress the inability of American institutional structure to cope with problems and disagreements that were in themselves negotiable. Against such an interpretation, continued harping on the moral issue becomes trying. Moral issues do have their place, as do the irrational actions with which they are sometimes associated, but to say that slavery was merely an immoral way to command labor and that it produced no special society is to capitulate before the revisionists’ thrust. They maintain simply and forcefully that time and good will would have removed slavery had a holier-than-thou attitude not prevailed in the North and had there not been so much room for the demagogy of scheming politicians in both sections. The best that the recent traditionalists have been able to offer as a reply is the assertion that Southern immorality proved too profitable to be dispensed with. This is no answer. The notion that the values of the South’s ruling class, which became the values of the South as a whole, may be dismissed as immoral is both dubious and unenlightening, but we may leave this point aside. If the commitment of the slaveholders to slavery was merely a matter of dollars and cents, a national effort could have paid them to become virtuous. The answer, I suppose, is that the North could not be expected to pay to free slaves when it believed slaveholding immoral in the first place. As a matter of fact, it could have, and there is not much evidence of such high-mindedness in the North outside of a small band of abolitionists. Either the revisionists are essentially right or the moral question existed as an aspect of something much deeper.

      I begin with the hypothesis that so intense a struggle of moral values implies a struggle of world views and that so intense a struggle of world views implies a struggle of worlds—of rival social classes or of societies dominated by rival social classes. In investigating this hypothesis I have rejected the currently fashionable interpretation of slavery as simply a system of extra-economic compulsion designed to sweat a surplus out of black labor. Slavery was such a system, but it was much more. It supported a plantation community that must be understood as an integrated social system, and it made this community the center of Southern life. It extruded a class of slaveholders with a special ideology and psychology and the political and economic power to impose their values on society as a whole. Slavery may have been immoral to the world at large, but to these men, notwithstanding their doubts and inner conflicts, it increasingly came to be seen as the very foundation of a proper social order and therefore as the essence of morality in human relationships. Under the circumstances the social conflict between North and South took the form of a moral conflict. We need not deny the reality of the moral issue to appreciate that it represented only one aspect of a many-sided antagonism. These studies seek to explore the material foundations of that irrepressible antagonism.

      Let us make our bows to the age: I do not believe in inevitability in the everyday meaning of the word, nor in a mechanical determinism that leaves no place for man’s will, nor in sin. I do say that the struggle between North and South was irrepressible. From the moment that slavery passed from being one of several labor systems into being the basis of the Southern social order, material and ideological conflict with the North came into being and had to grow worse.² If this much be granted, the question of inevitability becomes the question of whether or not the slaveholders would give up their world, which they identified quite properly with slavery itself, without armed resistance. The slaveholders’ pride, sense of honor, and commitment to their way of life made a final struggle so probable that we may safely call it inevitable without implying a mechanistic determinism against which man cannot avail.

      I have attempted to demonstrate that the material prerequisites for the slaveholders’ power were giving way before internal and external pressures; that the social system was breaking on immanent contradictions; that СКАЧАТЬ