Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (review)

Abstract

Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in Old South. By Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 232. Paper, $26.99.)Reviewed by Staughton LyndIn first paragraph of their Introduction, authors say they have been led to a conclusion some readers will find unpalatable. What is that conclusion? It is that paternalism of slaveholders before Civil War was a belief system entertained in good faith. Employers of slave labor, it is contended, sincerely considered Christian to be the most humane, compassionate, and generous of social systems (1).But if by unpalatable is meant untrue, why would any reader doubt this central conclusion? Most perpetrators of evil throughout history sincerely have believed that they were doing good. Surely more interesting question is whether southern slavery was in fact a humane social system. Indeed title of this volume makes plain that authors themselves concede that paternalism slaveholding employers ascribed to themselves amounted, at least in part, to self-deception.I do not make these comments as a condescending outsider to phenomena described by Genovese and Fox-Genovese. My mother-inlaw was a Howard of Virginia who passed on family traditions about white women who went to slave cabins when a child was ill. She also told of a relative, Edward Coles, secretary to James Madison and later governor of Illinois, who traveled with his across Ohio River, and how, when he told that they were free, they asked if they might stay nearby. Fatal Self-Deception presents a number of similar instances.1Also, my father grew up in Louisville and, despite all his life singing songs and telling jokes that I came to consider racist, was unfailingly kind to African Americans he encountered. In both respects he closely resembled another white man from Upper South, Abraham Lincoln.Moreover, Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese are not only distinguished American historians to have questioned mainstream narrative about slave South and Civil War. William Appleman Williams denounced Lincoln's refusal to let South depart in peace, claimed that an independent southern nation might have abolished slavery on its own initiative, and implausibly presented Earl of Shaftesbury as an exemplar of communal values.However, there is a problem. Although assuming posture of describing an ideology rather than facts on ground, authors of this book say in second paragraph of their Introduction that The westward movement of planter households . . . strengthened relations between masters and slaves (1). Really? This is not a description of an ideology but an allegation of fact. Economic historian Gene Dattel writes of internal migration into new cotton states - Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas that for the hardship was manifest and separation of slave families devastating. Dattel offers examples of more and less paternalistic behavior by settlers in the western reaches of cotton country. John Steele, a Virginia planter, at first urged his brother to provide warm clothing for his back home. Eventually Steele's paternalism succumbed to 'cotton fever' as he frantically pressed his brother to sell property in Richmond in exchange for 'two Negroes. . . . They would sell here for 1000 or 1,200 . . . [per slave] this year.' Steele's personal obligations extended only to his personal slave, George, whose family he felt bound to hold together. At other extreme was Wade Hampton family of South Carolina, among largest slaveholders in antebellum South. Genovese and FoxGenovese say of Wade Hampton II that he managed his nine hundred competently (36) and of Wade Hampton III that he appealed for white-black friendship (122). They say nothing about patriarch, Wade Hampton I, who helped to put down German Coast slave uprising of 1811. …