Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South

by Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Slaveholders were preoccupied with presenting slavery as a benign, paternalistic institution in which the planter took care of his family, and slaves were content with their fate. In this book, Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese discuss how slaveholders perpetuated and rationalized this romanticized version of life on the plantation. Slaveholders' paternalism had little to do with ostensible benevolence, kindness, and good cheer. It grew out of the necessity to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation. At the same time, this book also advocates the examination of masters' relations with white plantation laborers and servants a largely unstudied subject. Southerners drew on the work of British and European socialists to conclude that all labor, white and black, suffered de facto slavery, and they championed the South's Christian slavery as the most humane and compassionate of social systems, ancient and modern."

Genres: History, American History

Kindle Edition

First published October 24, 2011

About the author

Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He has been noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His work Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the Left and Marxism, and embraced traditionalist conservatism.

Reviews

[David Nichols · Rating 3 out of 5]

One is tempted, in reviewing this book, simply to write “Ulrich B. Phillips lives! But with better notes and more classical references.” The authors' thesis, which will not surprise readers familiar with their previous work, is that when antebellum masters called slavery a benevolent, Christian, paternalistic social system, they “said what they meant and meant what they said” (p. 1). Slavery, as paternalist editors and planters conceived it, was anchored in a “neo-Aristotelian doctrine” of familial interdependence (3), which obliged masters to define slaves as part of their extended family and to covet their love and affection – not because masters were sentimental, but because love turned slaves into organic extensions of themselves. (The Genovesi might have made this argument easier to swallow if they had noted that love is also what Winston Smith's torturers demanded of him in 1984, or Crassus demanded of his slaves in the movie SPARTACUS). Masters thus shook the hands of slaves, a courtesy they wouldn't have extended to white workmen; exchanged (if they were female) small gifts of knitted wear and garden produce with slave women; gave slaves Sundays off and end-of-year holidays, which was not the case with most nineteenth-century peasants; tolerated petty theft; occasionally praised slaves' craftsmanship or mechanical ingenuity; went to black herbalists and dentists when they were sick; expressed grief, possibly genuine, when slaves died; and believed, or rather forced themselves to believe, that slaves felt the same way about fallen masters. Masters also persuaded themselves that slavery was a protective institution, that free blacks were prone to vagrancy and crime and subject to violence and discrimination, that the colony of Liberia was a failure (though, the authors note, this view was exaggerated and runaways did just fine in Canada [103-105]), and that if they were freed African-American slaves would suffer the same fate as Native Americans: extinction. There were clear instances, however, when masters' self-deception broke down, notably when economic exigency obliged masters to break up and sell slave families (something they wouldn't have done with their own children), or when they contemplated the prospect of a revolt, which they insisted their bondsmen would never contemplate but which they constantly feared and anticipated.

The Genovesi are not interested in presenting a picture of slavery “as it was,” but rather as it existed in the minds of white Southerners. Unfortunately, as one reviewer noted, they don't always qualify their observations about master-slave relations by reminding readers that “this was the perception, not the reality.” Also, the authors present what one might call a “synchronic analysis,” one which draws examples from throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and one which isn't always sensitive to the changes in Southern whites' mindsets that followed the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the cotton boom, and the rise of American abolitionism. One final problem with this book is that it doesn't seem interested in participating in modern scholarly conversations about slavery; instead, the authors want to re-fight old battles they started in the 1970s. This isn't surprising, given that Fox-Genovese was dead and Genovese in his dotage when the book was written, but it does limit its usefulness to historians and students, the two groups likeliest to read the book carefully and not simply dismiss it out-of-hand as an apology for slavery.

[Drew Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Slavery in White and Black focuses on the idea of "slavery in the abstract" and its discussion and use in the antebellum South, this volume focuses on paternalism (defined broadly to include the relations between masters and servants, the idea of the plantation household including slaves and immediate family, the common notion of "our family, white and black," views of loyalty and service, care and support, etc.) and its relation to the South's social and economic systems prior to the War. "Decades of study have led us to a conclusion that some readers will find unpalatable: In most respects, Southern slaveholders said what they meant and meant what they said. Notwithstanding self-serving rhetoric, the slaveholders did believe themselves to be defending the ramparts of Christianity, constitutional republicanism, and social order against northern and European apostasy, secularism, and social and political radicalism. . . Concluding that all labor, white and black, suffered de facto slavery or something akin to it, they proudly identified 'Christian slavery' as the most human, compassionate, and generous of social systems."

Similar to Slavery in White and Black, this volume is impressively researched and thoroughly documented from original sources, and it too felt like an appendix to a larger work.

[Wendelle]

This book places us within the mindset of the slaveholders to such an overbearing level as to elicit sympathy. This book shows the lengths and sophistications to which the slaveholders justified and internalized their ownership, control, abuse of slaves. It contains excerpts supposedly showing how slaveowners cry when slaves show hostile behavior and 'have' to suffer the consequence of a whipping, or that slaveholders worked hard for their inheritance because as overseers they had to do each of the work slaves do. There's all these sophisticated sophistry paternalist philosophers/intellectuals employed to show slaves are actually better off with them-- all very comforting coddlings to slaveholders that did NOT reflect actual relative situations of slaves, and constituted a conclusion that was reached without consulting slaves, whose desperate attempts to escape failed to alert slaveholders to the deceptiveness of their beliefs. Then they're surprised when slaves don't believe they are all (inferior) members of a loving Christian planter family! CrY mE a RiVeR

[Matthew McDonough · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tough read.