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Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South. Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
The thesis of Fatal Self -Deception - historians Eugene Genovese's and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's final collaboration - is simple yet incisive. Slaveholders in the American South did not intend to fool posterity with their outrageous claims of slavery's beneficent nature; they largely believed what they said and wrote in defense of the institution. They had fooled themselves: "Indeed, their desperate need to deceive themselves propelled Americans, black and white, into our greatest national tragedy" (5).
Genovese and Fox-Genovese present the various slave apologias one by one, offering evidence of masters' sincerity, if not their powers of observation and reasoning. White southern elites argued that Thomas Jefferson was wrong; slave owning did not breed tyranny in adults or children. They spoke of slaves as "quasi-kin," bringing them within the embrace of a fictive paternalist family, a definition rarely applied to white servants or free black...