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"I OWN MY SLAVES, BUT THEY ALSO OWN ME": PROPERTY AND PATERNALISM IN THE SLAVE SOUTH Lacy K. Ford. Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 688 pp. Notes and index. $34.95.
Here's an argument familiar to every historian of the antebellum South: in the decades immediately following the American Revolution, white Southerners spoke of slavery as a "necessary evil"; but after about 1830 they developed a more aggressive defense of slavery and began to refer to it as a "positive good." This interpretation of Southern intellectual history still appeals to many scholars. But in the 1960s, historians began to reformulate the argument. To speak of a shift from slavery as a necessary evil to a positive good does not quite capture what actually happened to Southern thought. Instead, historians increasingly argued, the slaveholders responded to abolitionist attacks on their way of life by developing an "abstract" defense of slavery as a "paternalistic" system. Over the years this "paternalist thesis" has gone though several revisions.
As it was originally formulated in a series of books and essays by Eugene D. Genovese, the paternalist thesis assumed that slavery was a variant of patriarchy and that paternalism-given the right historical conditions-was its logical outcome. Those conditions developed in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, after the U.S. had withdrawn from the Atlantic slave trade in 1808 and in the face of a rising antislavery threat from the North. Hostile to the modern world of capitalism, paternalism was said to represent a rejection of liberalism and the commercial values of bourgeois society. Because it was based on the principle of universal hierarchy rather than fundamental human equality, paternalism allegedly had no need of racism, which Genovese originally discounted as a trademark of the bourgeois society to which the slaveholders were increasingly hostile. This version of the paternalist thesis made no sense at all. It was implausible to argue that the Southern slaveholders-devoted to the systematic mass-production of commercial crops and dependent on a global and, later, a national market in human beings- would logically generate an ethos hostile to commerce and markets. Still less convincing was the claim that racial ideology was somehow alien to a...