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.

Liberty and Power

Harry L. Watson. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. (Updated edition)
Hill and Wang, 1990 and 2006.

This updated edition of Watson's influential synthesis history of the politics of Jacksonian era traces the roots of the Second Party System to social anxieties generated by the rise of the Market Revolution, within the context of the republican tradition bequeathed to the Early Republic by the Revolution. Republicanism, as understood by early Americans, posited a fundamental--even existential--conflict between "liberty" and "power" in which the latter was an implacable foe of the former.

As the afterword to this updated edition acknowledges, this simple formulation contains some premises which subsequently merited reconsideration. There has been much debate on the degree to which republicanism was a genuinely felt and coherent ideology in the early Republic. The concept of the Market Revolution has been challenged both by those who believe that America was already a fundamentally capitalist society from the colonial period forward, and those who argue that there was no "revolution" but rather a gradual, continuous evolution which either predated, postdated, or overlapped the generally accepted periodization.

These are not insignificant questions, but Watson concludes that while research subsequent to the 1990 publication of his work has often raised important and thought-provoking challenges to his guiding assumptions, the essentials of his argument are still valid. Therefore, his argument needs to be accepted within that framework.

The end of the War of 1812 removed two existential threats to American sovereignty--the British presence in the West; and their support for the Indian nations who lived there. This freedom allowed Americans to turn their attention towards the settlement and development of the trans-Allegheny west, but it also removed the pressures which had subtly reinforced the tendency to distrust and fear partisan divisions within society. The specter of "corruption" and "interest" which orthodox republicanism accepted as fatal to republican societies would begin to flourish seemingly everywhere in the rush to move west and participate in an increasingly diverse national economy where local economic production was increasingly directed towards distant markets.

The ongoing collapse of traditional community ties of reciprocity and mutual regard created a mood of anxiety and fear which manifested itself in different ways depending on circumstance, time, and place. In this regard, Watson considers such phenomena as Anti-Masonry, labor agitation, and the Second Great Awakening as being related to the same stresses and challenges which the Second Party System ultimately evolved to manage.

Because in the end, Watson argues that we should listen to Americans of the Jacksonian era when they tell us what they were trying to accomplish. We should be skeptical of arguments which discount the policies and beliefs over which Democrats and Whigs fought over as being unworthy of the effort and energy expended merely because the interests in question weren't always clearly defined; or that there were deeper processes at work which they were not fully aware of underlying the dynamic of their political system. Rather, Watson argues that while often the rhetoric and practices of the Second Party System don't always sync up with direct linkages to immediately obvious social pressures, a deeper analysis finds a consistent pattern in which not only did party politics address the ways in which these underlying anxieties were articulated, but also the political leadership were self-consciously seeking to ally the stresses of society not by denying or suppressing them, but by channeling them into engagement with a national, two-party system.

The glaring exception, of course, was slavery--one issue which was starkly geographical and for which the two-party system could not ultimately defuse. But despite that moral failing--and despite the fact that the Second Party System itself would not survive the ultimate national reckoning with that sin--the basic parameters of politics which was established in the Jacksonian age would survive, and continue to shape the American political system.