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The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview

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Eugene Genovese, author of Bancroft Prize winning Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, has made another brilliant contribution to scholarship on American slavery. Genovese and his wife and co-author Elizabeth Fox-Genovese move beyond traditional assumptions about the slave-master relationship, humanize the hegemonic Master class, and provide fair analysis of the theology, corporate ethos and mentalité of the Southern elite.

Unfettered by moral imposition, and fears about assuaging those engaged in the structure versus agency debate, this work provides a human insight into an ugly, exploitative system that has in many ways defined and haunted American society. The notion of a southern mythology, wrapped in an extension of Christendom and medieval chivalric tendencies, is persuasively woven into the economic, religious, cultural and political complexities of the American South. Genovese and Fox-Genovese draw fine distinctions, and tease apart the most volatile of issues sustaining a clear and comprehensive discussion.

Humanities professor Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and retired history professor Eugene D. Genovese combine their talents in The Mind Of The Master Class, an intellectual history of the psychology of American slaveholders and slavery supporters in the antebellum South. The Mind Of The Master Class is so thoroughly researched, and draws so heavily upon primary sources, that every single page of the main text sports meticulous citations in footnote format. Though The Mind Of The Master Class is a scholarly text, scrutinizing in-depth exactly what made the slaveholding South tick. Why and how was American slavery once so thoroughly justified, defended, and fought for, in spite of its reprehensible violation of human rights - a violation as apparent to abolitionists and others 150 years ago as it is to all of America today? The reasoning and examples given in The Mind Of The Master Class flow very naturally, and will easily draw lay readers into the labyrinthine intrigue of the deceptions the human mind plays on itself. Highly recommended.

Ms. McKinney would do herself much good if she would either content herself with failing to commit the intellectual energy required by this book or to at least be content to wait until she has grasped the work before thoughtlessly dismissing a text she feels has defeated her. The authors did not intend this work to be an easy read; the weight of the book should dismiss any illusions a non-committed reader may have about bringing this along to the beach for a little "light" reading. But it is in demanding this subtlety of thought that the authors accomplished their initial aim: to allow the reader to actually grasp the nuance and complexity that were woven together into a fabric that was nevertheless "solid"--or, as Genovese has tried to explain for almost 50 years, the master class ruled southern society by means of cultural hegemony. Ms. McKinney, no doubt unaware of the 50 years of scholarship that culminated in this work, casts it off as "research" notes that the authors were simply too lazy to shape into a narrative arc. This is, of course, foolish, erroneous, and given the unquestionable brilliance of Dr. Genovese and the late-Dr. Fox-Genovese, a little more than arrogant of Ms. McKinney. The chapter titles she dismisses as lyrical epigrams to incoherent collections of quotations, are, on the contrary, nuanced history practiced at the most erudite level. These chapters are masterful: "The Holy Spirit in the Word of God" details how orthodox southern evangelicals began to grow culturally alienated from their northern brethren as northern theology drifted in a liberal direction that allowed believers to follow the impulses of "the Spirit" within them without cross-checking those impulses with what Scripture taught; white southern evangelicals, on the other hand, held fast in their orthodoxy, insisting that the "true" Holy Spirit would never lead the believer to any action contrary to the Word. As for McKinney's qualms about the chapter "Between Individualism and Corporatism," I would have to ask her--with no intentions of malice--if she was clear as to what body of scholarship this chapter addressed before she read the chapter, because if she had been, the basic points may not have been so obscure to her: southern slaveholders ruled over a means of labor-relations that were vestiges of centuries of "premodern" history, yet their own society--and the institution of slavery as well--was thoroughly embedded in a modern, capitalist, liberal transatlantic economy; as a result of this "hybrid" labor and economic regime, white southerners had to attempt to strike a delicate balance between their commitment to "organic," hierarchical, and corporate structuring and obligations, and their vision of having their own role to play in the march of progress set off by the American Revolution--a vision of progress predicated upon the possessive individualism which struck at the very heart of their own labor system. But the Genoveses do not leave the readers here in imbiguity, as Ms. McKinney seems to want to believe; rather, they show that southerners attempted to reconcile their (seemingly)paradoxical commitments to corporate social relations and political individualism by arguing for progress of a different temperament than that envisioned in the bourgeois cultures of the Northeast and Western Europe: for southerners, progress could only advance safely and surely by advancing slowly: the disastrous results of the radical upheaval of traditional ways so evident in the aftermath of the French REvolution had been only one of history's more recent and definitive examples of this principle in the southerners' perspectives. Thus, hopefully Ms. McKinney can see the meaning of the subtitle of this masterwork: the hegemonic worldview shared by slaveholders was shaped by their common conclusions concerning what history and Christianity taught about the notions of progress, economic development, and bourgeois social values spreading everywhere that industrialism made itself king: true, southerners often bickered over the finer points of, say Arminianism and Calvinism, or how to best characterize the French Revolution, being that despite its myriad evils, it was nonetheless the product of a corrupt, decadent, decaying, and socially vacant Old Regime that ought to have been supplanted by a moderate republican culture that could patiently widen the sphere of liberty and progress by cautiously and slowly expanding the numbers of citizens granted the rights, duties, and responsibility of "freedom"; but despite the myriad, nuanced perspectives various southerners laid upon the scales of their orthodox faith and their reading of history, they always found that the scales leveled-off, and they shared a broad consensus that allowed them to identify with one another, and increasingly led them to find their countrymen to the North much more foreign and alien than they had foreseen. The Genoveses did not--as one scholar unfortunately was not able to understand--abandon a healthy perspective on the role that southern economic and social relations--that is, slavery in a slave society--shaped and was in turn shaped by their intellectual worldview. Thus, despite a good deal of heat and little light written about the Genoveses' "defection" to the Right and away from all they had accomplished, this remarkable monograph adds greater evidence to the typically Gramscian interpretation of history favored by Genovese: Gramsci's great achievement was to correct the unbalanced clumsiness of earlier "vulgar" materialist readings of "marxian" history by mashing it together with Croce's idealism. Genovese has ALWAYS been clear on this point: his early commitment to Marxism was predicated on a Gramscian understanding that dialectical materialism SHOULD take culture and the intellectual life of peoples quite seriously, as the material and the intellectual realities (or, structure and superstructure) of societies shape one another in a constant tug-of-war--that, of course, was what made such an improved reading of Marx trully DIALECTICAL, at least relative to the vulgar materialism of skeptics looking for an ideological home, or the craven idealism of the still-born, impotent New Left, many of whom still grasped pathetically for some sort of recognition as members of a Marxist, radical tradition rather than facing the anomie embedded in their own relativistic, intellectually-sloppy, and generally disgustingly self-interested, self-righteous, and self-glorifying claims to speak out against the oppressors of labor. The New Left not only went into this fight without any values, but also without any weapons--after, excluding those few who left the academy in order to remain consistent with their ideological claims, the majority was never interested in a fight to begin with--most of them had taken enough beatings in highschool, and all they really wanted from their new radicalism were tenured positions from which they could take their petty revenge upon the children whose cheerleader mothers and jock fathers had made them feel so insecure to begin with. Quickly, the New Left back-peddled, as tenure allowed these workers' radicals to join country clubs and drive luxury vehicles: "there's no reason for us to actually have to fight," they suggested; "afterall, you merely believe in your ideological principles, and we believe that there's no such thing as truth, so we don't mind if the Old Left peddles the OLD CAUSE, for we don't think they're anymore "untrue" in their ideals than we are in our own--as everyone is. But nihilism is rather unpleasant to face-up to in oneself, and plus, it's gotten a bad rap amongst the conservative alumni who endow our tenured seats and save us places at the club for Sunday brunch, so you all just keep at your little class consciousness spiel; as for us, we've invented a new Radicalism--the radical defense of me, me, me-ism, which we are going to dub 'identity politics'; it really works out much better for us than that old class nonsense anyhow, especially since none of us has ever labored outside they doors of private educational institutions. But this 'me-ism'--I mean 'identity politics' really has a lot to offer me NOW, while all that socialist talk demanded patience and spoke of the future." Genovese did not buy into the "me-ism" politics of the New Left or the nihilism which naturally emerged in its hypocritical wake. He may vote different; he might go to Mass. But excluding largely semantic alterations and reasonable concessions toward those who demonstrate the South's rather "modern" economic efficiency, he has spent the last 50 years continually strengthening his position that the southern slaveholders represented a novel class in human society; created a novel culture quite unlike those of Europe, the Northeast, and the slave economies of Latin America; and were the only slaveholding ruling class in the modern world to forge a cultural dominance over a region in which they were an overwhelming minority--a cultural dominance that would allow them to not only break away from the Union in order to construct a separate state to govern the national separation that had long been a practical fact, but they did so with the majority of non-slaveholding southern whites following behind them in defiance of those northerners whom they believed were beating a trail hard and fast toward a society in which anomie, family-disfunction, and despair would only be thinly vailed by the smokescreen of material abundance an narcotic abandon.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It greatly added to my knowledge and understanding of the ante-bellum South and why secession and the Civil War occurred. Most of the history of this era I have read was written from a Northern point of view and showed little understanding of the Southern attitudes portrayed in this book. This book helped me to understand how fundamental the differences between North and South were.
The volume of research cited in the book is imposing. The footnotes comprise one-third of the 718 pages of text. After the text are 80 pages of supplementary references on topics from Addison and Cato to Women and the Classics. The research notes provided a wealth of primary sources documenting the very active intellectual life of the South.
The intellectual life in the South centered around the fact that is was a slave holding, agrarian, republican society. Much of Southern intellectual life was an attempt to justify slavery and define how to administer their duties as slave masters in accordance with historical and Christian standards. There is a discussion of Abramic slavery, slavery as practiced by Abraham. The South saw itself as a different and better place and some Southern writers recommended slavery for the workers of the North. The authors' last book Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order developed that theme further.
The section on religion in Southern intellectual life is approximately one-third of the book. The South was a country of small towns and villages and the church was the primary social activity. The Southerners made great use of the Bible to justify slavery. They often cited the fact that Jews and other peoples in the Bible owned slaves and there was no criticism of slavery in the Bible. Southerners tried to justify African slavery with the curse of Noah and referred to Africans as "The sons of Ham". Southern theologians strongly criticized the Northern Transcendentalists and Unitarians. The authors make the statement that the Southerners showed they were correct and the Northern theologians wrong on this question. That is a strong statement but the authors also referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression.
The chapter on John Brown's raid on the Harper's Ferry armory showed the importance of that event in the development of the sectional hatreds that led to the Civil War. John Brown, contrary to his public statements, intended to start a slave uprising when he took over the armory. After he was arrested the fact that he was financed by Northern abolitionists became public knowledge. In the North John Brown became a hero and was compared to Jesus. The Southerners saw this incident as proof that Northern abolitionists intended to promote slave uprisings that would lead to the slaughter of white Southerners. The authors write that for many Southerners Harper's Ferry and its aftermath put them in the frame of mind to reject Lincoln's election more firmly than they might have done. The North and the South during this time were two societies who didn't know each other and increasingly didn't like each other. At the time of Lincoln's election the North and the South were two countries sharing one government After secession Abraham Lincoln and other Northerners thought that Union sentiment in the South would lead to reconciliation before any conflict. Reading this book made it clear that peaceful reunion was never a real possibility.

Drawing on thousands of primary sources, decades of rigorous research, and the combined intellectual efforts of the formidable husband-wife Genovese team, *Mind of the Master Class* is a truly seminal work, the latest in an ongoing effort on the part of Civil War historians to demonstrate the mendacity of the old canard that the antebellum South had no mind. Fox-Genovese and Genovese contend that the Southern slaveholding elite *did* have a mind, a mind that looked to classical antiquity, medieval history, prior political revolutions and biblical theology as guideposts in sustaining its slaveholding way of life, a mind that provided robust intellectual engagement with its abolitionist critics in the North. The authors' goal is simple: they seek to present "the slaveholders as men and women, a great many of whom were intelligent, honorable, and pious" and ask "how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that proved itself an enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves." (i)

The book is engaging, well-researched, well-written and utterly panoramic in its grasp of its topic of choice. Fox-Genovese and Genovese demonstrate a commanding use of sources throughout and cite copiously, if not excessively, in making their case. In spite of its ample positive qualities, MotMC is not without its flaws. The authors appear to have allowed their professed admiration for the Southerners to cross over into favoritism on several occasions. They all but argue that the slaveholders had a much better case from the Bible than did the abolitionists, sometimes failing to critique proslavery biblical arguments with the same intensity they turned on the abolitionist ones. Nevertheless, the alarming strength of the biblical case for slavery is something that is too often disregarded by complacent modern-day Christians who seldom have to deal with a serious challenge on the matter, and the authors deserve credit for reminding their readers of the gravity of that debate.

*Mind of the Master Class* is an authentically transcendent work with far-reaching implications for issues facing Americans and Christians today. A must-read for anyone interested in the history of the antebellum South.

I was very disappointed by this book. The closest description I can give is that it resembles the copious notes of a dedicated, frighteningly self-satisfied student. At over 800 pages (including the index) it is a mind-boggling, hopelessly boring list of quotes and footnotes. These "research notes" have been arbitrarily divided into categories with high-sounding titles, such as "The Holy Spirit in the Word of God", and "Between Individualism and Corporatism: From the Reformation to the War for Southern Independence". These manufactured divisions do not disquise the fact that the same source material is cited over and over and over again. The book would be very useful to a reader who is researching the world view of the antebellum South. But if the reader is expecting a book that presents this world view in an intelligent and well-organized fashion, I believe he or she will be as disappointed as I was.