THE DIVINE SANCTION OF SOCIAL ORDER: RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS OF THE SOUTHERN SLAVEHOLDERS' WORLD VIEW

Abstract

For the southern slaveholders any social order worthy of the name, and therefore its appropriate social relations, had to be grounded in divine sanction. In this conviction they did not depart radically from their contemporaries in the North and in Europe, or indeed from their predecessors and successors in the Western tradition, but they did differ significantly from others in their views of the appropriate relation of the human to the divine and of the legitimate relations among people. For, during the portentous century in which the western tradition as a whole was repudiating its own long-standing acceptance of unfree labor, especially slave labor, southern slaveholders not merely persisted in the defense of slavery, they purposefully raised it to an abstract model of necessary social order.' The slaveholders cohered as a ruling class on the basis of their ownership of human beings. From an opportunistic reliance upon slaves as the most convenient laborers available during the seventeenth century, they progressed to a commitment to slavery as a social system. Their intellectual hegira led from the acceptance of slavery as a necessary evil to the defense of slavery as a positive good, which ultimately led to a defense of slavery in the abstract-to a defense of slavery as the best possible bulwark against the corrosive and un-Christian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is Professor of History and Director of Women's Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322. Eugene D. Genovese is currently a Guggenheim Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27514.