Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837

Abstract

Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837. By Jeffrey Robert Young. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. xii, 336. $49.95.) Domesticating Slavery is a study born of frustration with what the author considers the shortcomings of an older, binary framework and the failure of more recent work to dissolve and redirect it. In his introduction, Jeffrey Robert Young despairs of the interpretative dichotomy that stresses either the slaveholders' paternalism or their capitalistic tendencies. Recent work has not ventured beyond the historiographical inertia of the paternalist/capitalist debate, contends Young, because the slaveholding class fails to fit neatly within either existing school of interpretation (4, 5). Young attempts to redress these shortcomings by proposing a paradigm-styled corporate individualism-whereby imbibed deeply from a well of bourgeois domesticity even as they extended their idealized conception of family to include their black (5, 6). Influenced by market capitalism and print culture that disseminated bourgeois humanitarian sentiment, southern slaveholders retained their organic, paternalist worldview but supplemented it with a recognition that their slaves retained individual human potential for growth and moral action of their own (9). In six meticulously researched chapters, Young traces the evolution of the slaveholders' mentality from the end of the seventeenth century through the late 1830s. Young begins by showing that colonial masters perceived slaves as bestial and exhibited no qualms when it came to their exploitation. Worries loomed, though: planters remained suspicious of British imperial efforts to proselytize slaves and fretted over the possibility that the mother country would undermine their local authority. The Revolution and its aftermath were something of a turning point. In response to a growing critique of slavery from Britain and the North-a critique facilitated by a market that carried religious and cultural ideas as well as economic commodities-slaveholders came to defend their institution less as a necessary evil than as a positive good. Informed by revolutionary democracy and republicanism and ostensibly new ideas stressing individualism, mutual consent, and morality, slaveholders articulated a defense of their institution by expressing the desirability of and possibility for slaves' moral improvement as individuals within the context of organic conservatism. By the 1820s, this argument had cohered and was being bolstered by political developments that encouraged slaveholding sectional identity. Here, Young persuasively pushes back the timeframe for the beginnings of the proslavery ideology and the origins of southern sectional consciousness. Young does not believe that slaveholders' defense of slavery was hypocritical. Rather, he sees masters as deluded men whose consumption of print culture and romantic novels allowed them to humanize their institution and retreat from its obvious evils. The hundreds of tracts published by slavery's apologists indicated masters' deep denial about the reality of their slaves' condition (174). Thus, masters mouthed humanitarianism but did little to act on it; they penned vigorous defenses of servitude without confronting the problems in their society. In this way, slaveholders embraced humanitarianism, articulated their defense of southern slavery and, in the process, became increasingly sectional in their consciousness. This is an important and bracing book with a lot to recommend it. Young deftly weaves political and cultural history to give a textured analytical narrative with admirable temporal breadth. …