Noah’s curse, and the ability of Enlightenment thinkers to combine monogenesis with provocative speculations about racial difference, suggest instead that religion could be used to rationalise racism or slavery even while monogenesis might keep them in check. For those with the stamina and the curiosity, this point can be seen even more clearly in The Mind of the Master Class, a massive study of slaveholders in the American South by Eugene Genovese and the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.
Eugene Genovese is the First Mrs Rochester of the American historical profession. Nearly forty years ago, he won prizes and rave reviews for his studies of the antebellum South, and he enlivened a stagnant field by bringing a Marxist analysis to the sectional conflict. Cheered on by the New Left, he claimed that the South had developed into a distinctive slave society ranged against a North of capitalist exploitation. In the afterglow of the Civil Rights era, historians took for granted that Genovese would be as scornful of slavery as he was of capitalism, and his early commitment to writing about slaves as well as masters did much to deflect attention from the conservative potential of his argument. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, Genovese and his wife produced a series of books which seemed troublingly like apologias for white slaveholders. They also fired off angry letters to newspapers and professional organisations about political correctness and multiculturalism, and they were effectively sidelined by their liberal colleagues.
A reader of The Mind of the Master Class who is unaware of this back story may be surprised by its belligerence. ‘This book is about white Southerners,’ reads the first sentence, ‘and it is not about their “whiteness” – whatever that term may mean.’ There’s more of this, including the Genoveses’ determination to write about ‘the War for Southern Independence’ rather than the ‘Civil War’ or ‘the War of Northern Aggression’. Then there’s the thesis: the ‘master class’ of white Southerners preserved slavery before 1860 not for material motives, but because they feared the bourgeois individualism, religious experimentalism and rampant capitalism that might prevail in a ‘free’ society. Southerners read their Bibles carefully, found encouragement there, and strove for a political, moral and intellectual decency that only a slave society could facilitate.
The Genoveses themselves seem beguiled by the master class and its logic. The epigraph of their book is from Santayana: ‘The necessity of rejecting and destroying some things that are beautiful is the deepest curse of existence.’ The crabby introduction applauds our current aversion to racial subjugation as ‘a rare example of unambiguous moral progress’, then adds a discordant caveat: ‘Whether what is now recognised as wrong was always wrong – wrong in all circumstances and contexts – is a more complex issue than generally acknowledged.’ The exhaustive survey of Southern intellectual life that follows is slanted towards the book’s central preoccupation with explaining a slaveholding worldview. Like Michael O’Brien, in his Conjectures of Order (2004), the Genoveses are exasperated with the tendency of historians to dismiss Southerners as anti-intellectual, provincial or crassly materialistic. Unlike O’Brien, they suggest that slavery was the phenomenon about which Southerners thought most deeply and sincerely.
For the Genoveses, Northern antislavery campaigners in the 1840s and 1850s gravely endangered the authority of scripture by replacing the injunctions of the Bible with the judgments of conscience. Southerners linked this sort of moral experimentalism with the liberal social thinking that had eroded family relations in the North, or with a heartless capitalism throughout the Western world, or even with the French Revolution. Southerners maintained slavery as a ‘hedge’, the Genoveses claim, against ‘the excesses of their own epoch’. Their achievement was to wage a principled and pious rearguard action against the unhinged moralising of the North.
It would be foolish to deny the religious sincerity of many Southerners, but Mammon was hardly banished from the South after the American Revolution. In 1860, two-thirds of the richest men in America lived below the Mason-Dixon line. The slave system itself was deeply embedded within the broader American economy. Slaveholders dealt amicably with Northern merchants and suppliers, and cotton became the export commodity that drove the nation’s capitalist expansion in the antebellum years. Even if we accept the premise that religious conviction trumped material interest, there’s another problem that returns us to the issue of race. The Genoveses concede that Southerners had trouble justifying racialised slavery from the Bible; so why were the slaves of the master class exclusively black?
This question receives no sustained discussion, and at crucial moments the Genoveses struggle to deny the obvious conclusion that Southerners fused their biblical arguments for slavery with an unbiblical racism. Noah’s curse, for example, was the most popular Southern justification for keeping black people in chains. The Genoveses admit that the curse was viewed even by many Southerners as the ‘scripturally and intellectually weakest point in the biblical defence of slavery’, but they also acknowledge that it ‘emerged as the politically strongest’. The interesting question is why this should be so, and surely the Genoveses dodge this because they won’t like the answer. Southern defenders of slavery were willing to appropriate scripturally weak arguments when these might serve their political agenda: to keep blacks rather than whites in chains.
There are other omissions in this long book which undermine the Genoveses’ central argument: that Southerners defended the Word by maintaining slavery. Slaveholders frequently reached for Providence rather than the Bible to explain black inferiority, and these arguments depended on religious and historical speculation rather than the verities of scripture. In the 17th and 18th centuries, according to the most popular providential claim of the antebellum era, God had brought blacks from the barbarism and ignorance of Africa to receive learning and religion on the American plantations. He would send the black race ‘back’ to Africa when their education was complete. This comforting narrative enjoyed support throughout the South (and in the North), and gripped leading theologians such as Benjamin Palmer of New Orleans even after 1860. But these more slippery, providential arguments are absent from The Mind of the Master Class, as is any sustained discussion of the scientific racism that became popular in the United States from the 1840s onwards.
One of the Genoveses’ most prominent subjects, the politician James Henry Hammond, provides telling testimony against their thesis. If Hammond was a God-fearing Christian who read his Bible faithfully, he had a strange way of showing it. In the mid-1840s, he was driven from the governor’s mansion in Charleston when word leaked out that he was having sexual relations with all four of his nieces. A decade later, his career miraculously revived, he became the most prominent spokesperson for what was later termed herrenvolk republicanism: the idea that one race could live happily and prosperously by subjugating another. There’s nothing about Hammond’s personal life in The Mind of the Master Class – even his wife refused to live with him when he insisted on keeping his slave mistress in their home – but the omission of his views on race is especially startling. In 1858 he told the US Senate that all successful societies depended on ‘a class to do the menial duties’, and that this ‘mudsill’ had been provided in the South by slavery. ‘We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity,’ Hammond said. ‘Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race.’ He also warned his Northern counterparts that their dependence on a white, enfranchised population to do this work was a huge mistake. The North had been wrong to abolish racialised slavery, and would get its comeuppance when the West was fully settled and the urban poor turned on the Northern master class.
A handful of Southerners, like the eccentric social theorist George Fitzhugh, endorsed white slavery by the end of the 1850s for practical rather than religious reasons. Davis notes that Abraham Lincoln may have stiffened his opposition to the South in the belief that Fitzhugh’s ideas had caught on. In fact, Southerners remained unwilling to enslave white people for the same reasons as planters in the 17th-century Caribbean: it was hard to turn white Christians into slaves, and there were distinct social benefits in preserving an indelible line between white and black workers. In the South, the master class consolidated its position by persuading non-slaveholding whites (who outnumbered slaveholders) that racial belonging trumped economic status: poorer whites with no slaves often indulged in the most virulent racism, defining themselves as utterly different from the mudsill that held up the planter elite.
The presumption of black inferiority was ubiquitous among the whites who built and maintained these slave systems, but it rested on shaky intellectual and religious foundations. Perhaps these prejudices gained their power from the fact that they were more often worked out in actions than in words. This might help to explain why, when Britons and Americans finally turned against slavery, they focused much more on the institution itself than on the people they had enslaved or the prejudices that had supported the trade. In fact, whites proved surprisingly amenable to racist thinking even as they rejected racialised slavery.
Historians have long recognised that the development of a formal, intellectual racism in the Caribbean and United States was inspired by the antislavery challenge: when slaveholders came under concerted attack for the first time after 1770, they searched for a more durable basis for black inferiority in the hope that this would sustain slavery indefinitely. Although they lost the argument, planters found that their white antislavery opponents were far less hostile to new thinking about black inability and racial hierarchies. This irony overshadows the idea of abolition as a moral triumph, and forces us to think more carefully about why the movements in Britain and America to abolish slavery did little to combat the toxic racism that outlived it.

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