James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).

SYNOPSIS:

James Oakes offers an interpretation of the Old South that stresses the paradoxical relationship between slavery and liberal capitalism in the American South. American attachments to liberal capitalism celebrated the freedom of the individual, shaping an important aspect of Southern ideology. But the institution of slavery was the explicit denial of that freedom, and so the Old South was made up of contradicting ideological tendencies. Slaveholders celebrated the liberal rights of white men while also denying those same rights to slaves, explicitly placing the slave outside of society. This awkward relationship between slavery and liberal capitalism affected all aspects of Southern society, such as the evolution of Southern legal, political, and social institutions. Yet it also exacerbated tensions between slaveholders and non-slaveholders and ultimately set the North and South against one another. For Oakes it was the ambiguous relationship between liberal capitalism and slavery that produced the series of conflicts which ended in war between the North and South. Indeed, Oakes argues, "the pathway from the American Revolution to the Civil War begins at the intersection of slavery and liberal capitalism" (xiv).

EXCERPT:

"This does not mean that the slave South was, at bottom, a liberal capitalist society. Nor does it mean that liberal capitalism was thoroughly compatible with slavery. In the end the universalization of rights and the dynamic force of free labor overwhelmed and destroyed slavery. But southern slave society emerged within rather than apart from the liberal capitalist world, and that made a crucial difference. For the ambiguous relationship between slavery and liberal capitalism thereby became intrinsic to the Old South, not merely the basis of sectional animosity. And herein lay the greatest of all the ironies that mark southern history. The slaveholders had emerged triumphant from the American revolution, wielding considerable influence in a new and unified nation, but in their very triumph they had helped to unleash forces over which they would eventually lose control." (79)

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