James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982).

SYNOPSIS:

Arguing against Eugene Genovese's portrayal of American slaveholders as paternalists, Oakes asserts that most slaveowners were acquisitive capitalists who eagerly embraced the marketplace. The majority of Southern masters, Oakes points out, owned only a few slaves and their ranks were dominated by a diverse group of people who had fought their way into slaveholding. For this "middle-class" of slaveholders, the right to own slaves was an opportunity to gain wealth and status which they openly pursued. Moreover, these small-holding slaveowners, politically active and eager to move to western territories, were the most influential group of slaveholders in the South, defending the peculiar institution as both racially and economically expedient. While guilt-ridden over slavery because of their evangelical Christianity, American slaveholders in Oakes's interpretation increasingly abandoned the myth of paternalism. For them, and for Oakes, this placed slavery at the center of American development into a capitalist economic system, not as an aberration.

EXCERPT:

"Such cruelty followed logically from the nearly universal goal of the slaveholders-material advancement. The poorest German or Scotch-Irish immigrant joined with the wealthiest English planters in viewing America as a land of unprecedented abundance. As slavery became the most popular means of acquiring wealth and status, the restraining force of reciprocal obligation gave way to the truly invisible hand of the marketplace." (p. 25) -"If different masters manifested varying degrees of guilt, few escaped it entirely, for the elements of psychological conflict were intrinsic to slaveholding culture. But that culture also produced a secular ideology that explicitly repudiated the suggestion that slaveholding was immoral. Grounded in the historical and material experiences of the master class, this ideology contained a major ambiguity of its own: the more slaveholders glorified success, the more they feared failure. Thus did their secular ideology reinforce the slaveholders' moral dilemma: To succeed was to risk one's soul; to fail was a disgrace." (p. 122)

RELATIONSHIP:

We find much to agree with in Oakes' interpretation of the market orientation of slaveholding and its role in the Southern economy. Our examination of Augusta does not find, however, that paternalism was weakening. Instead, paternalism continued to characterize the households of many of the wealthier slaveholders at the same time as these individuals diversified, employing slave labor across a range of industries and settings. Slaveholders in the middle class with one or a handful of enslaved laborers rented and hired out their slaves.