Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made [Paperback]

Eugene D. Genovese (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 12, 1976

A reevaluation of the master-slave relationship in American history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This weighty book intends to "tell the story of slave life as carefully and accurately as possible." Less given over to theoretical and topical polemic than Genovese's earlier works on Southern slavery, it is by no means a catalogue. It amplifies Genovese's stress on the humanity slaves were able to preserve through de facto accommodations on the part of both slave and master, through the reciprocal play of "elementary human reactions" across class and color lines, and through the slaves' "strong sense of stewardship" for one another. This is a necessary transcendence of many other historians' dehumanizing view of both slaves and slaveholders, and to it Genovese brings his intellectual expansiveness and depth of feeling as he further documents key points featured in The World the Slaveholders Made (1969) and The Red and the Black (1972): the resourcefulness and egalitarianism of many house servants, the protective, responsible character of many black drivers, the prevalence of family stability and the nourishment Christianity afforded against degradation. Some critics will argue persuasively that Genovese has not done justice to southern slavery's deprivation, brutality and murder. As a matter of page-by-page arithmetic, Genovese certainly places more weight on young folks' play by the cabin door than on "evidence of widespread dirt-eating." The question - raised very differently by Fogel and Engerman in Time on the Cross (KR, p. 220), whose econometric inferences crosshatch Genovese's view - is one of method and concept in shaping the evidence. The subject will be pursued in debates, and anyone concerned with human development should read Genovese's book to knowledgeably participate. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

A reevaluation of the master-slave relationship in American history.

Product Details

• Paperback: 864 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 12, 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394716523
• ISBN-13: 978-0394716527
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #149,361 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The last word in documenting slave culture, August 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Paperback)

Genovese's work, while extremely long and, I think pretentious at times in its tone, it is extemely well researched and is currently the last word on slave culture and the interaction between master and slave on southern plantations.

One of his most striking observations that I can still rember reading even after five years is his concept of paternalism and how masters and slaves viewed the concept differently.

Masters felt it was their duty to take care of their "children" the slaves by providing food and certain privilages, like whisky on Christmas and New Years. In return, masters expected obedience, but even more crucually, love in return. Slaves on the other hand saw those "privilages" as rights and would act up if certain privilages were taken away. When emancipation came, Genovese argues, that masters were really quite emotionally hurt when their slaves decided to run away--the masters came to see themselves as the only way that their "children" could survive. The hurt was even more acute when the slaves joined up with the union army to attack the very plantations and masters that took care of them. One can easily see how this feeling of ungratefulness could lead to cruelty and violence in the south following the civil war.

When I was in college a few years back, this book was seen by my professors as _the_ final word on the subject of 19th century slave culture

46 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thorough account of Slavery in America, September 17, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Harrisburg, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Paperback)

"Roll, Jordan, Roll," by Eugene D. Genovese goes into great detail on the subject. While Genovese is hardly an apologist for Southern slaveholders, he fully documents their case, citing numerous sociologists and historians who state that the physical living conditions of most slaves exceeded that of the working poor of Europe (and in many cases America as well). Virginia planters such as the people I descend from tended to treat their slaves better than those on the frontier or people like the ancestors of Edward Ball (Slaves in the Family), who owned enormous rice plantations. Don't get the idea that anyone gets off easy. The hypocracy and cruelty of the slaveholder class is documented in painful detail. The book is at times overly academic, but Genovese quotes extensively from court decisions, slaveholder correspondence and accounts by former slaves and those who fought for their freedom. Whether your interest in the subject is academic or personal, I doubt you will find a more thoroughly documented account of America's most "peculiar" institution.

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tour de Force of American History, July 22, 2006

By 

Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Paperback)

Thorough, nuanced, psychoanalytic and balanced; a tour de force: A prodigious work of American Historical scholarship.

Genovese has done us all a great service and we should be immensely grateful to him for producing this masterpiece on one of the most unpleasant periods of American history.

Even with some of the correctly pointed out shortcoming noted by other reviewers, Roll, Jordan, Roll still deserves a place in the Panthenon of American Historical Scholarship -- along side John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom.

I strongly disagree with other reviewer's that the author's conscious racist bias has somehow seeped in, flawed, colored and otherwise helped frame the context. To the extent this is true at all, it is almost certainly done unconsciously. However, to the author's credit, it must be pointed out that time after time he has drawn a wide berth around the context (one reviewer referred to this as over-contextualizing) just so that the reader can decide for himself what the true nature of the substance is. The scholarship in this volume is so cleanly done that a charge of racist bias frankly is almost incongruous.

For instance in discussing southern paternalism (referenced by an earlier reviewer), the section is prefaced with the following introductory paragraph:

"Cruel, unjust, exploitative, oppressive, slavery bound two peoples together in bitter antagonism while creating an organic relationship so complex and ambivalent that neither could express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other."

The author then goes on to say that:

"Southern paternalism, like every other paternalism, had little to do with Ole Massa's ostensible benevolence, kindness, and good cheer. It grew out of the necessity to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation."

None of this strikes me as the easily recognizable and consciously slanted racist tripe we are all so accustomed to by racist apologist American historians. On the contrary, Genovese appeals to a need for the reader to think more deeply about the broader outlines of the context of this two-way subhuman drama. He asks us to see in fact how slavery entrapped both slave and master into a subhuman form of existence, out of which a normalized dynamics had to, and eventually did evolve, and did so organically. And if there was ever any doubt about the author's position then the following point made in the same section on paternalism should have put such doubts to rest:

"But southern slave society was not merely one more manifestation of some abstraction called racist society. Its history was essentially determined by particular relationships of class power in racial form."

By my way of thinking, this is drawing out and exhibiting the kind of complexity one is unlikely to find in any American history book anywhere, and on any subject -- not to mention on discussions about race and racism. Even the fact that there is an element of Marxist analysis lurking in the background does not bother me because it is appropriate and honestly applied - in the same way that WEB Du Bois applied it in his analysis of Reconstruction (See my review on Amazon.com).

But more importantly, every page and every paragraph in this book is treated with the same incredible depth and scholarly sophistication. Nothing is left to chance; polemics and BS do not have a chance to enter the equation in this manuscript. The analysis throughout is solid, transparent, devastatingly clear and packed with information.

If there is a better book in print, please refer me to it.

Fifty stars.

Reviewer: Herbert L. Calhoun, Ph.D. is the author of the forthcoming " Cultures Shamed, Cultures Denied, and Cultures Erased: The Long-term Impact of Racism on American culture."