The Old South: A Psycho-History (review)

Abstract

170CIVIL war history God." Some abolitionists, faced with mob violence, the frustrations of political compromise, and the impurity of the churches, asserted that other forms of authority shared the same sinfulness of slavery. Besides attacking slavery, they rejected violence, institutional religion, and human government and sought new, noncoercive styles in human relationships . Historians less enamored of intellectual history as an explanation for historical developments may question certain of Professor Perry's conclusions . For example, the nonresistants—those who renounced all manifestations of force, including human government—surprisingly justified John Brown's raid, slave revolts, and emancipation through war. They came to this end, argues Perry, not because of the violence of the 1850s but because of the inadequacies in their doctrine. While the ambiguities of the nonresistant doctrine become obvious under Perry's searching analysis, he seems to deny too much the impact of the 1850's. Charles Steam's reaction to bloody Kansas in 1855 and the impact of violence on Henry Wright better account for their "accommodation to violence" than doctrinal loopholes, despite Perry's subtle and not unpersuasive explanations. Here we have a problem in judging evidence, and, not surprisingly, Perry, the intellectual historian, opts for doctrinal shortcomings. No doubt this brief summary does an injustice to the sophistication of Professor Perry's analysis. Perry continues a recent historical trend in antislavery research by treating seriously and sympathetically the ideas, tactics, and goals of the much maligned Garrisonians. He has carefully researched his subject and paid attention to detail, although his use of "radical abolitionism" is vague, as he himself seems to suggest. Because of the complexity of Radical Abolitionism, scholars rather than the general reader will benefit from this important study of anarchism, pacifism , and violence. These topics are timely and suggest the possibility of comparison with radical movements of the 1960's, but Perry is too good a historian to contrive analogies between the abolitionists and contemporary radicals. Nor does he find among the abolitionists an intellectual tradition of American radicalism. Their legacy "is not a set of beliefs passed down to radicals, but a definition of problems which we are still trying to escape." "It remains chilling," he concludes, "to recall in a period of racial strife that some abolitionists predicted that if a racist society ended slavery by war the result had to be new forms of slavery and prolonged violence." Carl R. Osthaus Oakland University The Old South: A Psycho-History. By Earl E. Thorpe. (Durham, N. C: Seeman Printery, 1972. Pp. xii, 313. ) After several traditional forays into the Southern Mind Professor Thorpe sets out to "write from the perspective of the repressed uncon- book reviews171 scious," in a bizarre book about racism, fundamental differences between Negroes and whites, and our society's search for racial harmony. Convinced that a "psychoanalytically oriented history should be much more therapeutic," he charts a course in a Table of Contents that conveys reliably the flavor and sweep of his interests: History, Sigmund Freud and the Old South; Cannibalism, George Fitzhugh and the Mechanism of Introjection; George Fitzhugh and the Mechanism of Repression; The Slaveholder and the Six Faces of the Slave; The Master and Slave; Castration Anxiety in the North and South; Three is a Crowd: the White North Adopts the Black Slave Child; and, in an Epilogue—Psychohistory, the Black Power Movement and Woman's Liberation; Psychohistory in the Wide and Narrow Perspectives of Afro-American History. The pace continues inside, where an exasperating array of opinions, insights and messages tumble together in statements which indicate why this kind of psycho-history is often criticized as trying to have it all ways: "In the present book, the slave is refered to as representing in the unconscious mind of whites many things, such as penis, mother, father, god, feces, devil, death, evil, joy and child" (p. 19). "To the mind of the slave the white man was feces. Feces is many things as money, death, toy, weapon, child and gift. The slave thought of his owner as all of these things, and also as father, mother, devil, god and penis" (p. 113). Some of these statements are useful: a major facet of the slave...