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20 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent source about the southern viewpoint of slavery, November 18, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures) (Hardcover)
There are innumerable controversies between the vast schools of thought in American history. Perhaps one of the largest is that of slavery in the United States. Throughout their years of public education, students are taught that slavery is immoral and wrong. Eugene Genovese, on the other hand, shows the side that students are not often taught. He tells of the reasons why slavery was so strongly supported and gives his interpretations and support of slavery in his book, A Consuming Fire. According to Genovese, the slave owners of the South didn't believe that slavery was inhumane. In fact, they believed that it was God's will that slaves be owned. Southern pastors found many Biblical passages which convinced Southerners not only to own slaves, but how to treat them and what rights to give them, or not give them. Genovese says that many slave holders were torn between politics and Christianity by saying, "The efforts to recognize slave marriage, to keep slave families intact, and to repeal the literacy laws confronted slave holders with an uncomfortable choice between their religion and their political and socioeconomic interests," (pg. 23). One of the arguments Genovese makes is that since God wants people to own slaves, He would allow them to win the war. The first few battles of the Civil War supported this side, since the Confederacy seemed to be winning against such impressive odds. Later, when the South lost the war and slavery was non-existant, the Christian South claimed that it was because they did not live according to God's commandments of being good slave owners. Genovese's work, A Consuming Fire, is an excellent portrayal of the system of slavery in Southern eyes. This book is filled with interesting facts, and the reader learns that the laws created by the Southern government were often opposed by slave owners themselves. Stated on the cover is, "The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South." Nothing better summarizes Genovese's theory than this statement.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Haunting Look at the Mind and Soul of the Slaveholders, April 30, 2009
Eugene Genovese offers another excellent contribution to understanding the Old South in "A Consuming Fire." Genovese takes the slaveholders seriously instead of just condemning them and, in this work, he takes a look at their religious thought. Across all denominations, clergymen from the South defended slavery as sanctioned by God and the Bible and presented their cases articulately. They went beyond "the curse of Ham" and offered detailed accounts of how the Bible supported their views. Genovese also looks at how some slaveholders, again using the Bible and their faith, opposed harsh treatment of slaves and fought to preserve slave families and have services and churches. Genovese also shows how Southerners viewed the results of the war and how they attempted to preserve their faith in God despite the collapse of the Confederacy. If you are looking for a simple condemnation of the slaveholders, you are not going to get it from Genovese. But if you are looking to understand how a people dedicated to republican government and the Christian faith could embrace a wicked institution like slavery then you can do no better than looking at this excellent study.
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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Immorality as a Morally Closed System, September 3, 2009
This is an important book, not just because it is authored by the eminently esteemed Professor of History and author of the magisterial "Roll, Jordan, Roll," (still one of the best books I have ever read) Professor, Eugene D. Genovese, or for the superb research that supports the main thesis line, but also and more importantly, because of what its subtext implies about religious morality: that once a morally corrupt theology becomes a closed moral system, the sheer logic of its own inbred immorality prevents any true moral light from ever entering it. Once the logic of the immorality becomes ironclad, any opposing "truth, or true morality," creates a Cognitive Dissonance that the mind simply rejects at all cost. Such was the case with the Confederacy on the issue of slavery and white supremacy.
Convinced by the scriptural story of "Noah's curse," that white men were superior and endowed with a divine duty to be God's stewards over their darker, accursed and heathen slave brethren, there was no way to undo the moral corruption that white supremacy and slavery had become in the collective mind of the religious south. To them, both white supremacy and slavery were divine causes sanctioned in the scripture by a jealous vengeful southern God. And as a result, southerners were blocked from ever getting beyond their own religiously reinforced denial (not to mention getting beyond the denial of the more worldly fact that the economic survival of their "slave run" plantations, depended on slaves), from ever seeing slavery and white supremacy for what they were: twin incestuous but unmitigated evil and sinful institutions. Thus the South shattered the Union and marched off to war in the full belief that "their God" would smite the "Yankee infidels," and validate their claims to the morality of the enslavement of blacks and the corresponding superiority of whites.
However, as rebel war dead piled up, doubts began to seep in as to whether or not God would indeed validate the Southerners claims. However, as the ironclad logic of a closed system always dictates, the doubts that entered their minds were not doubts about questions of the immorality of slavery itself, or even about the evils of white supremacy per se, but about the sins of not being good stewards of God's trust. Thus in order to regain God's favor, the proper war time mid-course correction was reforming and strengthening, not eliminating either white supremacy or the institution of slavery: Good stewards of God's trust would improve and strengthen white paternalism and white supremacy by allowing slaves to learn to read; they would stop sexually abusing black women; and they would cease the practice of breaking up slave families: In other words, all that was required for the religiously devout southerner to get back into God's good graces, and thus turn the war to the South's favor, was to reform the slave codes and become better white supremacists.
Even at war's end, when the south was roundly and unceremoniously defeated, a majority of the religiously devout southerners still held on to the logic of the closed racist system. Even though it turns out that their God apparently had not supported their cause as they had prayed for and predicted, after all, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy nevertheless rationalized lost of the war to other scapegoats such as war-profiteers, extortioners, etc. but not to the evils of either their undying commitment to white supremacy or to the evils of slavery.
Small wonder that during the post-Reconstruction period of the "redemption," that slavery would not only be reinstituted by the more novel means of "Jim Crow," but that even after losing the shooting war, by generalizing its own bankrupt morality across the rest of the nation, the south effectively won the only battle that mattered to it, the immoral religious battle. Arguably, they did eventually make America over as "one Nation United under a savagely racist white god." And although it is somewhat of a stretch, since Hitler eschewed religion altogether (at least in the more formal sense), the template of morality used by the Confederacy is exactly the same as that used by the Nazis, or for that matter by Osama bin Laden. All three are closed corrupt immoral systems. Because it is Professor Eugene D. Genovese, Five Stars
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