Essay by Celine Clark
The debate over slave culture began in antebellum times with attempts to characterize the
work patterns and work attitudes of slaves. Historians who subsequently took up these
questions sought to understand the way that the slave system of labor operated, the
relationship of slaves to each other in the work process, and the relationship of slaves to
their masters. Characterizations of the work patterns and the work ethic of slaves have
been among the most critical points in the interpretation of slave culture. It deeply
influenced views of other aspects of slave life including family mores, religion, music,
folk tales, art, and the nature and extent of slave resistance to oppression.
Historians argued whether or not slavery was a benefactor or detriment to the United
States. Some of the major American historians of the second half of the twentieth
century--Stanley M. Elkins, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, for example--have
contributed powerfully to the modern debate about Southern slavery. Curiously,
however, much of the modern historiographical argument has been shaped by two greatly
influential historians, Kenneth Stampp and Ulrich B. Phillips. Be aware that covering the
interpretations of these historians on the many aspects of slavery is close to impossible
without writing a book.
Ulrich B. Phillips came close to greatness as a historian, perhaps as close
as any historian this country has produced. We may leave to those who
live in the world of absolute good and evil the task of explaining how a
man with such primitive views of fundamental social questions could
write such splendid history...He asked more and better questions that
many of us still are willing to admit, and he carried on his investigations
with consistent freshness and critical intelligence...American Negro
Slavery is not the last word on its subject; merely the indispensable first.
(Eugene D. Genovese)
Since World War II increasing numbers of American historians have been reading Ulrich
B. Phillips with hostility, suspicion, and even contempt; worse, they have not been
encouraging their students to read him at all. This negative reaction is not difficult to
account for, although it stands in the starkest contrast to PhillipsÕ enviable reputation in
his own day. However, as criticized by Eugene Genovese, Phillips has Ògone out of
styleÓ along with racism and a patronizing attitude toward the Negro which have
embarrassed United States foreign policy.
Let there be no mistakes about it: Phillips was a racist, however benign and paternalistic.
Some historians have argued that he was gradually moving away from racist doctrines as
he began to catch up with the new anthropological and biological researches making their
appearances in the last decade or two of his life. Between American Negro Slavery
(1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), two of his most renowned works, he
is supposed to have shifted away from a view holding the Negro to be biologically
inferior to one holding him to be culturally backward. This was a shift from a less to a
more sophisticated racism that could not have stood critical examination even in his day.
His racism cost him dearly and alone accounts for his lapse from greatness as a historian.
It blinded him; it inhibited him from developing fully his own extraordinary insights; it
prevented him from knowing many things he in fact knew very well.
Phillips based American Negro Slavery on extensive research in plantation records but
also on a deep attachment to the old South and a belief in black racial inferiority. In this
work, published in 1918, he treated the slave as the beneficiary of a patriarchal but
unprofitable institution designed to maintain the South's cardinal principle of white
supremacy. The framework established by Phillips and his followers cast the slaves
themselves primarily in the role of objects, whether as victims or beneficiaries. The focus
was on slave "treatment", as well as on the performance of the slave economy and the
efficiency or inefficiency of slave labor. One of the remarkable features of the Phillips
interpretation was its longevity. It survived for thirty years, at least, as the conventional
wisdom on the subject.
The fundamental priorities of slavery and Southern slave society are involved in many
discussions. If slavery was above all a rational economic system devoted to the pursuit of
profit, those who controlled it would have retained their investment in it only as long as it
continued to show greater profits than alternative forms of enterprise or labor
organization. However, if slavery was even more important for other reasons--as an
instrument of social adjustment or racial control, or as a status symbol--owners may have
been content to maintain it for those reasons alone, as long as it did not prove cripplingly
unprofitable.
Phillips and his followers thought that slavery often laid a burden of unprofitability upon
the planters, which they shouldered because they supported and maintained the institution
for other reasons. However, it does not follow that because slavery yielded a good return,
profit was the only motive and ambition of slave holders. Phillips tended to grasp the
complexity of his subject and indicate the need to probe many fronts.
In general, Ulrich B. Phillips provided numerous examples intended to demonstrate the
inherent laziness, docility, and incompetence of blacks, whether enslaved or free. He did
not value their worth in any way and held a mainly racist view in his interpretations of
slavery.
Kenneth Stampp accepted the framework Phillips had constructed, but, more than
matching his predecessor's research in the plantation record, he completely overturned
Phillips's conclusions. Stampp saw the slave as the maltreated victim of a profitable
economic system; in a nutshell, where Phillips had viewed slavery as mild but inefficient,
Stampp saw it as harsh but profitable. Kenneth Stampp went further than any other postPhillips scholar in rejecting the traditional interpretation of slavery. In The Peculiar
Institution, Stampp argued that investments in slaves were quite generally profitable,
indeed, highly profitable for most planters. He also rejected the contention that economic
forces would by themselves have led to the demise of slavery, even in the upper South.
Nor did Stampp find any evidence to support the claim that slavery prevented
industrialization and economic growth. He pointed to "innumerable experiments" which
"demonstrated that slaves could be employed profitably in factories," arguing that slave
holders preferred to operate in agriculture because, for the South, agriculture "seemed to
be the surest avenue to financial success."
Stampp even expressed doubts about the fourth proposition in the traditional
interpretation--that slavery was less efficient than an economic system based on free
labor. "Slavery"s economic critics overlooked the fact," he said,"that physical coercion,
or the threat of it, proved to be a rather effective incentive, and that the system did not
prevent masters from offering tempting rewards for the satisfactory performance of
assigned tasks."
Stampp hesitated to go on to the conclusion that slaves were equal to free men in the
efficiency of their labor. He conceded that slave productivity was sharply reduced by "the
slave's customary attitude of indifference toward his work, together with the numerous
methods he devised to resist his enslavement." Stampp was able to hold on to his
contention that slavery was profitable only by arguing that there were other advantages
which more than compensated for whatever superiority free labor had in efficiency.
These advantages
included longer hours of work, more complete exploitation of
women and children, and lower real wages for slaves than free men.
Why did Stampp, who broke with so much of the traditional interpretation and who came
so close to rejecting the myth of the incompetence of slave labor, fail to do so? Why did
he, as it were, pull back just as he seemed about to do so? The answer lies in Stampp's
preoccupation with the refutation of Phillips on point about the treatment of slaves.
Stampp provided testimony that cruelty was indeed an ingrained feature of the treatment
of slaves. The cases of cruelty which Phillips regarded as unusual, as outside the
unwritten rules of the master class, emerged as a common pattern of white behavior in
The Peculiar Institution. Cruelty, Stampp said, "was endemic in all slave holding
communities"; even those "who were concerned about the welfare of slaves found it
difficult to draw a sharp line between acts of cruelty and such measure of physical force
as were an inextricable part of slavery."
Stampp decided to move in a direction that appears quite different from the one chosen
by other historians. He argued that slaves did not succumb; they resisted. Resistance did
not generally take the form of revolution or strikes. Such open forms of resistance were
sheer suicide. Stampp believed that the characteristic of slave behavior was common:
slaves lie, steal, feign illness, behave childishly, and shirk their duties. To Stampp, the
theme of the inferiority of slave labor was due to "day to day resistance."
The view which prevailed for many years was that slaves worked long and hard simply
because they were forced to under the threat of the lash, but they have achieved no higher
level of efficiency. Kenneth Stampp"s interpretation belongs broadly to this school of
thought. He sees incentives as but one weapon in as armory of slave control which
included firm discipline, demonstration of the master's power (symbolized by the whip),
and the inculcation of a sense of slave inferiority.
Essay by Melissa Negrin
Eugene Genovese is right to denounce the "celebrations of self-indulgence" and "the
irrational embrace by the left of a liberal program of personal liberation"; these have, in
some circles, taken the place of any serious effort to build a righteous society. He is right,
moreover, to condemn the incoherence and hypocrisy of pretending "to respect
community autonomy while denying each community its own exclusiveness."
"Racism," says Genovese, "should be put beyond the pale everywhere." He rightly
observes that "black communities have good reason to demand considerable political
autonomy." Such autonomy is necessary, he explains, "for the re-establishment of [the]
moral order" that alone can ward off the horrifying future he projects for black America.
Genovese, while busily advising black people how to combat "social decay" in their
ranks, fails to note that the main reason black communities demand political autonomy
the only reason a racially-defined, "black" community exists is that another community,
the white community, exercises political authority over black people.
What is this "white" community? It is not biological; all reputable scientists agree that,
biologically, "race" is a fiction. It is not cultural; if, as Genovese points out, "there is
nothing that can seriously be called an Italian-American or Irish-American culture," what,
then, is "white" culture except, possibly, Wonderbread and television game shows?
The white community is defined only by its unblackness. It is held together by the
knowledge that its most degraded members share a status higher, in certain respects, than
the status of the most exalted persons excluded from it; in return, those members give
their support to the system that degrades the others. Until the white community is
abolished, there will be no "reassertion of community life . . . for the American nation as
a whole," because, as C.L.R. James pointed out, "the protection of the white
neighborhood is exposed as the dissolution of neighborhood ties and the destruction of
the community as a political force."
I agree with Genovese that we face a crisis today which makes the old left-right spectrum
irrelevant. Racism is both the original sin and the fatal flaw of the republic. I believe it
must be our number one priority. I am gladdened that the most vigorous voices in the
black community insist that their people must also work harder to strengthen their
families (still the cornerstone of civil society), and pull their communities together. But,
to do their part, blacks will need the kind of internal spiritual renewal that both Rivers
and Cornel West call for, and it is the responsibility of whites to make sure they get all
the resources, material and spiritual, they need to do it. This will take lots of money and
imagination. But it will take something else as well: "If you don't pray, don't come.
Yet all the chapters are window-dressing in light of the central essay and theme of the
book. Chapter 1, "The Slave South: An Interpretation," stands alone in both depth of
argument and importance. Genovese's interpretation of the slave South provides a holistic
approach to the history of Southern slave society. The crucial aspects of slave society are
bared, in both their best and worst light, and the nature of Southern society illuminated.
Genovese accomplishes two tasks in this chapter, which still, whether one agrees with the
conclusions or not, influence the way historians have seen Southern history in the last 30
years. On one hand, Genovese takes the South seriously, as a thoughtful society filled
with thoughtful men and women, concerned about the direction their social and political
development is taking. Slavery, to them, is not something they can easily throw away,
any more than modern Americans can discard industrial capitalism at the drop of a hat. It
was the society they were born into, the institution that shaped their lives, and, even when
critical of it, unconsciously adapted their ideas and visions to its structure and rhythms.
Slavery engendered certain cultural and social outlooks that worked to preserve the
institution and sustain Southern class structure. Hence, as historians, we would do equally
as well to take them seriously.
On the other hand, Genovese presents us with an argument that links social, cultural,
political and economic elements in a seamless web. The different parts of Southern
culture worked together, both to preserve slavery, and lead the South to its ultimate doom
in 1861. The "uniqueness of the antebellum South" (p. 1) was manifested in its social
beliefs, political ideology and public policy. The demands of slave society, or more
precisely the slaveowners, limited the development of industry, retarded the growth of a
home market, and undermined the drive for technological progress. Slavery made it
impossible for the plantation to reform itself, or introduce new methods of restoring soil
fertility, eroding the possibilities for economic advancement. The planters developed an
"aristocratic, antibourgeois spirit with values and mores emphasizing family and status, a
strong code of honor, and aspirations to luxury, ease, and accomplishment" that
weakened the Northern work ethic and capitalist values of thrift and self-denial. At its
core, Southern society rested on the master-slave relationship, with all of its
inconsistancies, fears, and hidden meanings, a relationship that permeated Southern life.
In the long run, the southern system, with its peculiar set of values and ideals, and unique
social relations and political ideology, could not stand the strain of co-existence in a state
dominated by industrial capitalists, employing free labor ideology and the doctrines of
the Declaration of Independence. The seamless web of Southern society, in the end,
turned into the hangman's noose.
The various chapters that follow "The Slave South: An Interpretation" illustrate certain
facets of Genovese's general argument, demonstrating in more detail the linkage of
society, economy and ideology. For example, the discussion of soil exhaustion, reform,
and plantation agriculture is closely related to the overall discussion of Southern society.
Genovese places soil exhaustion into a larger, comparative framework, drawing on work
dealing with ancient Rome and medieval Britain, as well as the American South. For
Genovese, "The main problem" with soil exhaustion "lies in the reaction of social
institutions," and the reaction of Southerners to soil exhaustion was, inevitably, shaped by
the existence of slavery (p. 88). He was not the first to argue this, as Genovese himself
notes. But Genovese places the responsibility for soil exhaustion at the feet of the masterslave relationship. A sound agricultural system would have recognized the dangers to
prosperity and social structure, and adjusted accordingly. Indeed, many in the South
sounded the warning. John Taylor of Caroline, Edmund Ruffin, J.D.B. DeBow and others
promoted agricultural reform as a means of restoring fertility to the soil and renewing the
advance of prosperity for the future. But, all their efforts at rousing the South proved
fruitless.
With the spotlight provided in "The Slave South: An Interpretation," Genovese proceeds
to illuminate a number of other aspects of Southern society and economy. The lack of a
home market, the dependence of industry on the planters, the low productivity of labor
led to economic stagnation. The slaveowners' pretensions and pride blinded them to the
real problem, that of slavery and slave society. They willingly adopted political panaceas
for economic and social problems, because it was the last bastion of their power and
authority. If their social structure was slowly, if irreversibly, crumbling under the weight
of soil exhaustion, low productivity and lack of economic diversification, they could
always use their political power to reverse the trends. Hence the weight placed on access
to the territories and further expansion in Mexico and the Caribbean. Finally, in 1860, it
was clear that the planters were going to be unable to pursue their plans within the
structure of the Union. Independence, as slave-holding republic, seemed to be the only
route to safety. Even this step, Genovese implies, would have disappointed the planter
elite. The problems of their society were structural. Political intervention might have
slowed the pace of decline and decay, but only for a time.
Since the publication of the book, critics of Genovese's argument have often appeared.
Criticism tends to fall into two main categories. Economic historians, using econometrics
and theory, have worked on the structure of slavery as an economic system. Robert Fogel
and Stanley Engerman, in Time on the Cross, argue that slavery was an adaptable system,
with high enough levels of labor productivity and adequate profit rates, to preserve the
institution, even within the structure of the Union. From an economic viewpoint there
was no inevitability to slavery's collapse. Other historians have criticized Genovese's
argument from the perspective of social history. James Oakes, in The Ruling Race, takes
exception with Genovese's focus on the planter elite as a hegemonic elite (although
Oakes, in his latest book Slavery and Freedom, seems to modify his earlier stance). In
reality, the great planters tended to be a small, isolated group, particularly concentrated in
the Southeast, who were unrepresentative of the mass of slaveowners. Laurence Shore
and Frederick Siegel argue that Genovese underestimates the independence and effect of
industrial capitalism on Southern society. Both economic and social historians stress the
'bourgeois' nature of Southern slaveowners. The planters, particularly the nouveau riche
of the old Southwest, were motivated by the emerging norms of antebellum American
society: individualism, pursuit of self-interest, and pursuit of wealth. Slavery was merely
the means of realizing their ambitions. The Civil War was an in-house conflict between
different interests, not a struggle between worldviews and incompatible social structures.
David Potter contended that the argument based on essential cultural differences
"exaggerates the points of diversity between the North and South, minimizes the
similarities, and leaves out of the account all the commonalties and shared values of the
two sections" (Potter, Impending Crisis, p. 32). Thus the South represents one regional
variant of a general American commitment to capitalism and capitalist values. What the
critics fail to take into account is the unusual nature of capitalism in a slave economy.
The crucial question is this: Can a slave be treated in the same manner as a wage-worker?
Can they be fired or laid off in an economic downturn? Does a capitalism based on the
ownership of labor, rather than the hiring of labor power, present a challenge to the
values of self-interest, individualism and wealth? Genovese, focusing on the master-slave
relationship, feels that the values inherent in a slave system are fundamentally different
from, and incompatible with, the values of an industrial capitalist society. Only when the
critics can answer the above questions can their case be proven.
This brings me to a second, more personal, criticism of The Political Economy of
Slavery. An interest in agricultural reform in the South originally led me to the book. It is
possible that slave society was more flexible than Genovese argues. John Taylor felt that
expansion, not slavery, was the barrier to the adoption of better, more efficient farming
methods. While recognizing that free land was an essential resource for an agrarian
society, Taylor also noted that free land, by encouraging emigration and dispersed
settlement, dissolved the fundamental tie which bound farmers to the land and
community. With the easy availability of land, "the best informed agriculturalists are
driven... or seduced by the temptations of wealth...to sell their lands, which require
labour, for the purchase of a better profit" (Arator, p. 29). The effect was to short-circuit
the necessity of adopting better modes of agriculture. Only where planters were forced by
necessity to improve their farming would agricultural reform and proper agricultural
practices take root. There was no doubt that the frontier mentality was the evil Taylor and
other reformers fought. But it was rooted in habits of behavior that could be changed,
given proper information and constraints on migration and expansionism.
Taylor's program of agricultural reform was, in his view, compatible with slavery.
Genovese makes a distinction between the "Virginia" and the "Southwest" solution to the
problem of inefficient slave agriculture. In Virginia, a process of diffusion was underway
by the early 1800s. Slaveholding was becoming both widespread among the farming
population, and evolving into smaller units. Taylor, far from advocating the end of
slavery, in reality violently opposed to overseers and other managers on a plantation who
came between the master and slave, and introduced inefficiencies into the plantations'
organization. The owner, in order to make the plantation run properly and to further
agricultural reform, had to take a hand in the day-to-day operations of the estate. Closer
supervision by the master could make the entire plantation run more efficiently, raise
labor productivity, promote diversification and raise the quality of livestock, all problems
that Genovese ascribes to the slave system. In the old Southwest, the solution to the
problem of soil exhaustion and decline was consolidation of estates in to larger units,
capable of effectively overcoming the burdens of soil infertility and low productivity. I
am not entirely sure whether the Virginia solution depended on a market for surplus
slaves in the Southwest. Inheritance, for example, helped distribute slaves among the
farming population. Certain counties in eastern Virginia approached slave ownership
rates of 90 per cent or more in the antebellum period. Increasingly, for antebellum
Virginians, the real competition was between slavery and machines, and it is possible that
slaves were a more flexible instrument for agricultural reform and increased production,
on smaller units, than a machine or capital input would be. In any case, I would argue that
these are two distinct solutions to the problem of soil exhaustion and reform. The
question is: which would have been more advantageous for the long-term preservation of
slavery?
Even my criticism cannot really "refute" Genovese's conception of Southern society.
Taylor, as a member of Southern society, had to assume that there were real possibilities
for reform inherent in the slave society of early national Virginia. The real achievement
of The Political Economy of Slavery is in the realm of paradigms. Eugene Genovese has
given us a fully-functioning, logically-constructed model of Southern slavery and society
that historians are still arguing with, attempting to refute or explain in greater detail. Like
Bentham's system of utilitarian morality, when an historian tries to refute Genovese's
model, "it is with reasons drawn, without his being aware of it, from that very principle
itself... Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes: but he must first find out another
earth to stand on." The Political Economy of Slavery has done what all great history
books do: asked the questions and raised the issues that alter and shape our understanding
of the past and the research we undertake in the future.
A Nettlesome Classic Turns Twenty-Five
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll.
New York: Random House, 1976, 823 pp. $19.00.
Re-reading by Walter Johnson
Would I still recommend reading Roll, Jordan, Roll twenty-five years after it was
published?
Absolutely.
What? You thought I was going to say no? Of course, there's a lot to get through: the
usage of stories about black people who gave the author bad directions on Southern roads
in the 1950s to illustrate a point about dissimulating slaves in the nineteenth century
(116-17); the full-throated celebration of the devotion of the enslaving class to its
"mammies" (343); the kooky exoticism of the supposed distinction in black culture
between "bad" and "baaaad" Negroes (635); the strange, unforgettable declarative
sentences like, "The slaveholders were heroes," (97) that punctuate almost its every page.
All of this makes Roll, Jordan, Roll seem a bit dated today, as does its (inevitable) failure
to engage issues that have emerged as central themes in scholarship in the years since
1976: the role of African culture in American slave culture; the complex interrelation of
racial domination and economic exploitation in New World slave societies; the salience
of gender and sexuality to any real understanding of slavery and the South.
And yet there's no getting around the categories. Roll, Jordan, Roll is the locus classicus
for some of the most powerful and important ideas that have shaped the discussion of
slavery for the last quarter century. Paternalism, hegemony, the distinction between
individual and collective acts of resistance, the master-slave dialectic, the triangular stress
and negotiation between overseers, planters, and slaves: all of these remain key terms in
the historiography of slavery, terms that it is impossible to discuss without thinking of the
world Eugene D. Genovese made. In thinking aloud about why I still read, teach, and
argue with this book I want to concentrate on the two concepts--paternalism and
hegemony--with which I think the book is most often identified, and to both clarify
Genovese's usage of the terms, and specify what I think that usage misunderstands,
elides, and sometimes simply ignores.
Paternalism first. For Genovese, paternalism was an ideology rooted in the political
economy of antebellum slavery, particularly in the efforts between 1831 and 1861 of a
group of slaveholding "reformers" to stave off the growing antislavery movement in parts
of the upper South and the nation at large. Through a set of managerial reforms and
emotional transformations, Genovese argues, slaveholders attempted to "humanize"
slavery while at the same time consolidating the institution's political position. Genovese
gives a number of examples of what he means by slaveholding paternalism. Slaveholders,
he tells us, "almost with one voice . . . denounced cruelty" (71). They "boasted of the
physical or intellectual prowess of one or more of [their] blacks, much as the strictest
father might boast of the prowess of a favored child" (73). They thought of their
obligation to feed, clothe, and take care of their slaves as "a duty and a burden" upon
themselves even as they tried to make their slaves' work "as festive as possible" (75, 60).
They described their own children and their slaves as being part of a single "family black
and white" (without any apparent ironic recognition of the degree to which this was often
literally the case) (73). And they were genuinely shocked, dismayed, and devastated-"betrayed" is the word Genovese uses--when their erstwhile slaves took off in search of
freedom at the end of the Civil War (97). At that historic moment (as well as at a host of
local moments throughout the period of slavery), Genovese argues, it became clear that
the slaveholders' actually believed what they were saying, that they "desperately needed
the gratitude of their slaves in order to define themselves as moral human beings" (146).
Slaveholders were themselves living lives defined and limited by slavery.
The notion of slaveholders fabricating themselves for an audience of their own slaves in a
kind of Hegelian dialectic is an extraordinarily powerful one, and it illuminates countless
aspects of American slavery. It does not, however, quite capture the quicksilver
slipperiness with which slaveholders could reformulate the nominally beneficent
promises of paternalism into self-serving regrets, reactionary nostalgia, and flat-out
threats. Can it be mere coincidence that so many examples of planters expressing
ostensibly "paternalist" sentiments refer to slaves who have disappeared or are in the
process of disappearing? Apart from the literature in slaveholder periodocals like
DeBow's Review and Southern Agriculturalist on hygiene, medicine, housing, and
nutrition, which does indeed seem to emerge according to Genovese's reformist timeline
(although to be much more characterized by the evocation of "my workforce black and
white" than by any genuinely paternalist language), the most common sources of
evidence for slaveholders' paternalism seem to me to be three: statements that slaves are
not governed by the lash but by the threat of sale; effusions of heartfelt feelings of loss
for slaves who have just died (usually recorded in letters to other slaveholders); and the
forenoted statements of "betrayal" at the hands of former slaves who took off at the end
of the war (also recorded in letters between whites and other whites).
Paternalism, it turns out, as often expressed a sort of nostalgia for dead slaves and the lost
cause as it did the actively governing ideology of a ruling class. In many cases it seems
more properly read as a sort of a pose that slaveholders put on for one another than as a
praxis through which they governed their slaves. Except, of course, in relation to the
slave trade. For it was the slave trade--the threat of sale--that allowed slaveholders to
formulate a system of labor discipline that relied not on torture but on terror as its axis of
power. "I govern them the same way your late brother did, without the whip by stating to
them that I should sell them if they do not conduct themselves as I wish," proudly stated
one Southern "paternalist" in an 1838 letter to another. To judge by this statement at
least, the historical predicate for the effusion of paternalist language between 1831 and
1861 might well be seen as the expansion of the interstate slave trade into a central
feature of the political economy of slavery. The paternalist ideology of "my family black
and white" depended, at least in part, upon the ability of the white part of that "family" to
extract labor from the black part by threatening to destroy it through separation and sale.
Another way of describing the relationship of slaveholders' effusive paternalism to the
threats of family separation through which they increasingly governed their slaves is this:
the slaveholders were liars.
If Genovese's concept of paternalism continues to provoke debate and demand
refinement, his discussion of slaveholders' hegemony is the most often misunderstood
element of the argument of Roll, Jordan, Roll. It is commonly seen as a denial of slaves'
"agency" which, in the common counter argument to the book, is to be rectified by
"giving" it back. The transitive verb "to give" encapsulates most of the problems with this
reading. First, the slaves in question are dead; it might be possible to give them a better
history, but giving them agency at this point seems out of the question. Second, this sense
of the giving of human agency (even in a historical narrative) to a human subject conveys
some of the absurdity (and residual racism) of a historical practice in which jobs can be
gained, books published, and major prizes received by historians who frame their project
around the argument that a group of human beings were (mirabile dictu!) human beings,
or in the canonical formulation, that they "preserved their humanity," as if it would have
occurred to them to do that, or even to do otherwise. Third, in so doing, the critique that
replaces Genovese's hegemony with the agency granted by the latter-day historian
formulates the role of the revisionist historian (the grantor of agency to the slaves) in the
very paternalist terms that it ostensibly repudiates. So, enough of that.
In fact, the important question and the question that Genovese is seeking to answer with
the concept of hegemony is predicated upon recognition of the agency of enslaved
people. What, he asks, was the field of possibility in which they acted and what were the
effects of their actions? In answering those questions, Genovese has something very
powerful (though, I believe, ultimately very wrong) to say.
Properly understood, the Gramscian notion of cultural hegemony is a theory of the
transformation of rule into consent. At certain moments in time, the Italian Marxist
philosopher Antonio Gramsci argued, rule by a single class can be enforced not through
violence, but through general, if unwitting, assent to a set of limiting definitions of the
field of the politically possible. Gramsci's own analysis and much of the like-minded
thinking that has followed it, has been particularly concerned with the ability of capitalist
ruling classes to make their own dominance seem as if it is predicated upon universal
participation and directed toward the common good. Following this line of argument, in
Roll, Jordan, Roll, Genovese claims that slaveholders were able, through their paternalist
ideology, to refigure what was fundamentally a system of class exploitation as a set of
more local relationships between slaves and slaveholders--personal, familial, communal.
Genovese does not argue that slaveholders always lived up to the rosiest promises of their
paternalism, though he certainly thinks they tried. Rather he argues that paternalism
provided the ideological mechanism through which they could disguise their exploitation
of their slaves. By reformulating the class relationships of slavery as a system of
reciprocal duties and obligations--you hew the wood and draw the water and I'll (have
you) whitewash the slave quarter and clean out the latrine--slaveholders exerted
hegemony over slaves, claiming that they ruled not in their own interested but in the
interest of those they owned.
According to Roll, Jordan, Roll this hegemonic sleight of hand was generally successful.
For even when their slaves rejected this claim and resisted their masters (as Genovese
freely admits they often did), their resistance generally took the form of localized
challenges to their owners' authority rather than large-scale, fully theorized collective
revolts designed to overthrow slavery itself. In Genovese's formulation, and this is the
heart of the argument, slowing down, playing sick, mouthing off, burning down
buildings, and, even, assaulting and murdering masters and overseers did not weaken the
authority of the slaveholders, but actually strengthened it. This because, first, these types
of resistance formulated the problem of slavery as a problem that occurred upon an
individual plantation or farm and between a master or overseer and a slave--they
localized, personalized, and naturalized what Genovese believes could only be properly
understood as a hemispheric system of class exploitation. And, second, because they bled
away resistance energy that might have otherwise gathered into the collective fury of
revolution. Day-to-day resistance to slavery was, by this argument, at best a "prepolitical"
or even "apolitical" form of "accommodation," and at worst "pathetic nihilism."(598,
659).
Whatever else this is, it is not an argument that denies enslaved people's agency or the
frequency of their daily resistance. It is, however, an argument that seems to me to be
predicated upon (at least) three faulty premises: first, the idea that there was not a
revolutionary aspiration among North American slaves; second, the notion that this
alleged failure to revolt must somehow be explained in reference to the slaves' own
culture rather than the balance of force in the society--by reference, that is, to
"hegemony" rather than simple "rule"; and, third, that there is a contradiction rather than
a continuum between individual and collective acts of resistance.
The basic question out of which Roll, Jordan, Roll unfolds its discussion of hegemony is
this: why didn't North American slaves revolt more? And the analysis that follows is
developed comparatively. The revolts associated with Gabriel (1800 in Richmond,
Virginia), Denmark Vesey (1822 in Charleston, South Carolina), and Nat Turner (1831 in
Southampton County, Virginia) do not, in Genovese's view, compare favorably in their
"size, frequency, intensity, or general historical significance" to revolts in the Caribbean
and South America (588). And perhaps that is right.
But if we think a bit more broadly about what constitutes a slave revolt and what indexes
historical importance, I think we're led to a different conclusion about the "revolutionary
tradition" among North American slaves. Part of the problem is that many of the North
American revolts have been defined out of the mainstream narrative of American history.
And I don't just mean the 1811 revolt in Louisiana, which Genovese mentions, or the
countless smaller uprisings like that aboard the slave ship Creole in 1841, which he
ignores. I mean big, history-making military conflagrations: like the Seminole Wars, like
the American Revolution, like the Civil War. These events have entered the nation's
historical record under different headings, but they were all profoundly (and at various
turns decisively) shaped by the self-willed actions, both military and otherwise, of black
slaves fighting for freedom, of slave rebels. It doesn't seem a stretch to say that if we
apply to the history of American slavery the terms that are conventionally applied to
political and military history--that it is good politics and good strategy to take advantage
of schisms in the structure of rule in order to advance a cause--then we've got to begin to
think very differently about both the standard historical narrative of the United States and
about the revolutionary tradition of American slaves.
I'd further argue that thinking about the military history of American slavery can clarify
our thinking about hegemony. If the question driving the discussion is about the
comparative absence of slave revolts in North America, accepting for a moment the terms
in which Genovese defines a slave "revolt," then doesn't it make sense to look at the
balance of forces on the ground before asserting a tradition of "nonrevolutionary selfassertion" among Southern slaves? Speaking strictly from a tactical standpoint, the
balance of power between slaves and slaveholders in the United States was strikingly
different from that which characterized the Caribbean and South America--the ratio of
white to black was higher, holdings were smaller and more spread out, and the territorial
sovereignty of the United States (a nation committed by a Constitutional clause drafted in
the shadow of the Seminole Wars to the suppression of "domestic insurrections") was
almost unimaginably vast. Indeed, this balance of power was continually made clear to
enslaved people through the periodic outbursts of vigilante and state terror that historians
have labeled "slave revolt scares," events that make the history of the antebellum
slaveholding look like a counterinsurgency effort against a widespread, mobile, and, yes,
vast enslaved conspiracy. Add to this episodic but continual military campaigning the
daily violence through which slaveholders enforced their dominance over reluctant
slaves, and it seems hard to argue that Southern slaveholders ever transformed rule into
consent--that they ever, in the final instance, succeeded in ruling by anything other than
force. It seems, indeed, hard to argue that they ever tried.
There is finally the question of the relationship of individual to collective acts of
resistance--a question which has a much clearer formulation in Roll, Jordan, Roll than it
has had in much subsequent discussion. It does seem to me to be desperately important to
maintain this distinction and to think as hard about it as Genovese did. Breaking a hoe
and being Nat Turner are not equivalent manifestations of human agency in either their
causes or their consequences. Genovese formulates the relationship between these two
types of resistance as being one of contradiction, thus missing the historical effect of dayto-day resistance in enabling collective resistance among American slaves. For it was
through day-to-day resistance that enslaved people could come to know and trust one
another--that they could figure out who to depend on and who to avoid as they talked
about ideas and plans which could cost them their lives. Perhaps more importantly, it was
through day-to-day resistance that they flushed the character of the slaveholders' rule out
into the open. All of the whips and chains and bits, all of the jails and smokehouses and
slave pens, all of the threats and laws and passes: all of these were made necessary by the
fact that slaveholders knew that they weren't exercising hegemony but fighting something
that sometimes looked a lot more like a war. By resisting slavery everyday, slaves,
especially those who carried their own scars and stories to the North with them when they
ran away, made visible the historical character of the institution, and made possible the
formulation of the alliance that eventually brought about its (revolutionary) demise.