The Ruling Race

James Oakes. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.

James Oakes argues that in order to understand slavery it is necessary not only to understand the experience of the enslaved, but also of those who enslaved them. The slaveholding class he describes differs from the commonly accepted image of a conservative, stable gentry ruling over plantations—he notes that while most slaves lived on large plantations, most slaveowners were not plantation masters—they were small or middling owners of far fewer slaves. They were also far more attuned to the dynamic capitalist market and the aggressive, confident democratic American political culture than the conservative plantation aristocracy which dominate the periphery along the Chesapeake, Carolina Lowcountry, Gulf coast, southern Louisiana, and near Natchez in the Mississippi Delta.

This slaveholding class was overlooked in most historical studies because they were less visible—the most conservative, larger slaveholders held larger numbers of slaves and they also dominated the production of intellectual arguments in favor of slavery. What Oakes demonstrates is that many of the “positive good” arguments which historians have studied were produced by this conservative minority, who were also opposed to the continued expansion and development of the Southern economy and the South as a geographic entity.

This is a work of social history, so in making his argument, Oakes relied heavily on census data for a representative sampling (10 counties) of slaveholders. He supplemented this information with excerpts from letters, journals, and periodicals—although he cautions in the Introduction that these must be read with caution and a healthy dose of skepticism; he argues that historians had accepted these slaveholder accounts much less critically than they had the testimonies and narratives of former slaves.

Oakes is wrote this book at a time when Eugene Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll held a dominating place in the historiography of the slaveholding class. Oakes is respectful but not deferential to Genovese, whom he credits with delineating much of the current understanding of the planter class, including the concept of “paternalism.” But Oakes disagrees with the nature of how the slaveholding class fulfilled and lived up to the paternal ideal. Oakes’ slaveholders are much more dynamic, much more market-oriented, and far less traditionalist than the grand old paternalists Genovese described (and increasingly empathized with as his politics shifted to the right).

Oakes is telling a story which is very much of the 19th century; it would be interesting, however, to compare his picture of upwardly-mobile middling slaveholders to more Northern-focused studies of the Market Revolution and the development of Jacksonian democracy.

In many ways, this book is both a good example of the strengths of social history when applied to an appropriate subject—in this case, a social and economic class with easily defined parameters—as well as an illustration of the ultimate shortcomings of the field which led to its demise as the cutting edge of the profession. The book reveals a lot but leaves the reader wondering how the world Oakes describes fits into the larger picture of American culture at large.

Furthermore, while this is a study of slaveholders, the complete absence of non-slaveholding white Southerners leaves Oakes without an “other” to contrast with. I would have appreciated a better sense of how typical—or not—the slaveholding class was compared to the broader Southern society.

Out of the House of Bondage

Thavolia Glymph. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Glymph argues that the myth of Southern womanhood—the ideal of the gentle, loving, kind-hearted lady of plantation myth—bore little relation to the reality. White mistresses were stern, often brutal, taskmasters who directed the work of black female domestic servants in plantation households. The idealized portrait was a product of the mythologized, idealized Old South; it’s purpose was both to legitimize paternalism, and to mask the reality of the plantation household as a place of work, a public as well as private space.

The bulk of her primary sources are slave narratives and memoirs, as well as letters and diaries by white mistresses. Glymph reads both with a critical and discerning eye, knowing that slave narratives were often recorded under some degree of duress; and the diaries and recollections of mistresses often betrayed an inability to regard slave women as fully human, as women with their own independent needs and desires.

Glymph acknowledges her debt to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who identified the role that paternalism played in creating the myth of the generous, empathetic mistress who cared for her slaves as part of the household. However, Glymph feels that most historians have accepted the idea that mistresses were essentially passive figures who suffered as women, rather than ruled as white women.

Given that this study concerns a world of women, contained within the household which was ideologically considered a place of domesticity and refuge from the public sphere (even though it was a place of coercive labor), it would be interesting to compare it to the works of E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm she references in the Introduction. The parallels she briefly notes between her world of determinedly resistant domestic servants, and Hobsbawm’s Revolutionaries, for example, suggest a very different conceptual frame for the book which follows.

The transformation she describes ends in a relatively limited time frame; it would be interesting to tie this study to a more focused examination of relations between white female employers and black female domestic servants in the 20th century. The linkage is briefly considered in the Epilogue, but for the most part this study ends at the dawn of Jim Crow.

The Half Has Never Been Told

Edward E. Baptist. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Edward Baptist argues that while the historiography of slavery has evolved, and larger discussions of slavery in American cultural life has shifted away from earlier explanations which either apologized for or even defended slavery; or condemned it as an aberration in American history—the notion that slavery was a fundamentally backward, economically inefficient system has persisted.

This is a fundamental misconception of the role slavery played in American development. Rather, the plantation slave economy that developed in the wake of the explosive growth of cotton growing in the southern United States was integral to American economic expansion—to the contrary, it both drove and financed it.

Baptist relies heavily on WPA Slave narratives, which he reads carefully in order to account for the bias imposed by white-dominated institutional and cultural assumptions. He also looks at economic and census data in order to support his argument for the centrality of cotton in the growth of American capitalism.

Baptist seems to be pushing back against the entirety of the literature on slavery. He doesn’t seem to have any particular argument with any specific thrust of the historiographic tradition, whether Edmund Morgan or Eugene Genovese. Rather, he claims that previous considerations of American slavery all operated under the same basic, flawed, assumption.

This book could be connected to studies about the industrial labor movement as well as studies of 20th century sharecropping and migrant labor. Also, his assertion that John Calhoun’s invention of substantive due process was later used by Gilded Age capitalists is an intriguing idea.

His assertion that, as we noted in discussion, “the half has never been told” is more convincing when focused on the degree to which movement and displacement was an integral part of slavery; less so when he implies that the linkage between slavery and the capitalist development of the USA has never been acknowledged. Despite this overreach, Baptist does suggest that slavery studies will look different in the future if we begin with the assumption that this brutal system of labor extraction was always central to the development of America’s political economy.

Finally, the writing here is superb, far above what most academic writers are capable of. The book is structured imaginatively, inspired by a Ralph Ellison essay that in turned borrowed imagery from Swift's Gulliver's Travels in order to declare that American history had been metaphorically written on the body of African-Americans. This provided the structure of the book; Baptist's impassioned, deeply felt, and keenly observed prose style fleshes that structure out.

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America's Jubilee

Andrew Burstein. America's Jubilee: How A Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

Burstein first follows the path taken by the Marquis de Lafayette during his extensive tour of the United States in 1824 and 1825. This famous trip found the aged French hero of the Revolution greeted by adoring crowds, former colleagues and soldiers who had served under him, visiting politicians and legislators, being feted and honored, and also being reunited with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The meaning of this trip to Americans--a chance to see the last living general of the Revolution, and an opportunity to witness one of the last living links to that founding struggle on the eve of their nation's 50th year anniversary--would be amplified and reinforced in the months to come as the country prepared to celebrate its "Jubilee".

Burstein then "travels" around the United States of 1826 in a similar roving fashion, but does so mostly to examine the lives and reflections of a diverse group of Americans, some of whom were obscure in their own time, others--such as William Wirt--who were important people, names of consequence, in their own era but have since largely been forgotten.

The result is a book which is more episodic than deeply thematic, and which truly seems to be more a work of portraiture than deep analysis--but that is not a complaint. Burnstein's research takes him from New Orleans to Cincinnati to rural Massachusetts and into Canada. His selection of Americans is eclectic, and he has done excellent work bringing them alive and finding broader meaning and resonance in their disparate stories.

The way in which the narrative returns to the "famous" by finishing with the infamous passings of Jefferson and Adams on the very day of the Jubilee--and an extended consideration of the ways in which the two approached aging and their reconciliation--is effective. This book won't challenge any existing historical arguments, because it isn't really making one. But it brings a particular moment in American history alive, in a way which allows the reader to grasp the texture of life, the mental world of the second generation of Americans, with impressive clarity.

The Elusive Republic

Drew R. McCoy. The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America.
University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

One aspect of 18th and 19th century America which is somewhat foreign to modern readers is the concept of "political economy". The idea that politics and economics are two distinct spheres of activity and expertise is so deeply embedded in modern discourse, and so near-universally accepted at face value, it takes a bit of a conceptual leap for 21st century readers to appreciate that for early Americans, the distinction between the two simply didn't exist.

One important condition which dictated the earlier understanding of a political economy was the ideology of Republicanism and the demands it placed on citizens and office holders. The Republican ideology was concerned with the overall development of society, not merely the legal and constitutional order. In order to reconstruct that mentality, McCoy begins with a discussion of the concepts of social decay and corruptions, which obsessed Enlightenment-era thinkers and statesmen. These notions were bound up in natural science as understood at the time, and posited a natural life-cycle for nations and societies. So much of the Republican ideology was based on the desire to avoid corruption and also to delay the "aging" of a society towards old age and decadence.

Therefore, corruption wasn't only caused by bad actors or abuse of power; it was also the result of an unbalanced economy which failed to provide a rough equality for all citizens; an equality which, it was generally accepted, was best provided through widespread land ownership by independent farmers practicing self-sufficiency, home manufacture of necessities, and only a very limited involvement in the market for manufactured goods which were not "luxuries" as defined at the time.

The commercial revolution which early America experienced (along with the British) therefore challenged Republican notions, as it provided numerous opportunities for ordinary citizens to be tempted to engage in "corrupting" economic practices, even as it created the conditions for an increase in speculative business and a more diversified economy.

Throughout the Federalist years, the Jeffersonians perceived threats to the Republic from the Hamiltonian agenda, but once the election of 1800 gave them control over the national government, their own beliefs were constantly challenged by the ways in which the global economy refused to behave in ways republican theory said they should. Most notably, American independence did not translate to fully free trade for American exports, which hurt the US economy but also threatened to create an agricultural surplus which would deprive farmers of the necessary incentive for continued labor and diligence. Or, worse, would create the conditions favorable for large-scale manufacturing and the wage-earning poor who provided the labor for that.

Over the years, through the Madison administration and beyond, the Jeffersonian vision changed to adopt to new situations. Thomas Jefferson himself never moved beyond his agrarian ideal more than absolutely necessary (as he understood it); more problematic was his refusal to reckon with slavery and its cost to his republican ideal. James Madison, on the other hand, was able to consider different ways in which society would need to adjust in order to maintain republican principles even as changing conditions, the inevitable peopling of the vast but finite lands to the west, and the equally inevitable growth of the manufacturing sector, all worked in tandem to change the world in ways that the republicans of the Revolutionary era had considered crucial and necessary.

The Wages of Whiteness

David R. Roediger. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
Verso, 1991, 2007 (Second Edition)

Roediger addresses one glaring shortcoming of a purely materialist interpretation of nineteenth-century working class racism from a Marxist perspective. This study examines the shortcomings of regarding such racism as being primarily either a reaction to perceived job competition or an ideological device used to divide the working class on behalf of the rising capitalist class. Roediger argues that the former ignores the degree to which "whiteness" was a key element of white labor's image of itself, and the latter for denying the agency with which the white working class often defined itself explicitly as "white."

It is the latter point which is more important here. Roediger acknowledges that there was certainly a "pre-history" of whiteness as a self-conscious identity prior to the antebellum period, but the colonial era was also marked by a great deal of deference and social hierarchy along with the degradation of indentured servitude to mitigate against "whiteness" becoming a fully-developed, positively-asserted identity. Borrowing from W.E.B. DuBois, Roediger argues that the Revolution asked questions of older assumptions about social and economic relations even as it provided a new language for citizens to frame themselves within. Nothing new there, except that DuBois argued strongly that too often Americans try to separate race and class as distinct categories. Roediger seeks to show that DuBois was right--they were intimately intertwined in America and cannot be easily separated.

The real rise of the self-consciously "white" working class took place in the antebellum period, as white workers found their own status as independent artisans being degraded and denied. Blacks--defined in the public square as being truly degraded due to their inability to throw off the chains of slavery, were unfit for Republican citizenship--and lower-class whites soon found them a useful "other" to measure themselves against. In the crudest possible terms, working class whites could become poor and destitute, but they could never be black. Their whiteness, then, became a key part of their identity.

Nobody in antebellum America more desperately cherished this lifeline from "wage slavery" than the Irish, who suffered from discrimination and economic marginalization at the hands of "native" whites to a much greater degree than any other European immigrant group. The Irish ultimately chose whiteness over solidarity with the free blacks they often lived in close proximity with. As Roediger notes, the notion of job competition is probably highly overstated, as in reality the Irish had very little trouble pushing blacks aside for the menial labor jobs they were competing for. It wasn't the competition they were fighting against, it was the notion that they were doing "nigger work". One way to combat that was to exclude blacks altogether.

The Civil War undermined the antebellum commitment to overt white supremacy among the white working class, but ultimately old habits of thought and the failure of the Republican Party to craft a new coalition of northern whites and southern blacks doomed the possibilities of Reconstruction race relations and beyond.