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.
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