Eugene Genovese, The Slaveholders' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992).

SYNOPSIS:

Genovese argues that Southern intellectuals, long underestimated and ignored by modern historians, wrestled in the decades before the Civil War with the dilemma of how to couple slavery with freedom and progress in American society. It seemed to them almost a choice between a forward-moving society that embraced modernity and possibly lost slavery in the process, or a society which chose to embrace the order and stability of slavery over modern progress. Examining in detail several Southern intellectuals, Genovese asserts that these intellectuals overcame the dilemma by forming arguments that celebrated slavery as a bulwark against the worst excesses of unrestricted modern "progress." Unwilling simply to abandon progress, Southern intellectuals argued that slavery was in fact a social system uniquely suited to careful progress, that blacks were uniquely suited to slavery, and that the South's slave-based society provided more real freedom than the North's progressive "wage-slavery."

EXCERPT:

"The southerners' warm praise of the benefits of freedom and progress have led many able historians, reviewing these and other matters, to attribute to the slaveholders a basically bourgeois worldview to which they merely tacked on an opportunistic defense of slave property and racial stratification. These historians have found irresistible the invitation to conflate the slaveholders' searing ambivalence with the kind of moral objections to the social devastation attendant upon unregulated capitalist development that were being heard in London, Paris, New York, and Boston, as well as in Charlottesville and Williamsburg, Columbia and Charleston, Huntsville and Mobile. They err, for the slaveholders, unlike conservatives in the North and abroad, explicitly identified the free-labor system itself as the source of the moral evils and forged a critique that struck at its heart. With varying degrees of boldness, one after another came to view the freedom of labor as a brutal fiction that undermined the propertied classes' sense of responsibility for the moral and material welfare of society." (33-34)

RELATIONSHIP:

Our study concentrates on the material worlds of slavery and free-labor communities, not on the intellectual histories of these ideologies. Slaveholders in Augusta had every reason to see slavery not as inconsistent with modern progress but vitally connected to it.

"Black people enslaved in Augusta married, raised families, and worked at all sorts of jobs, but they were never far removed from the tangled affairs of whites."