Who Deluded Whom? Eugene Genovese and Planter Self-Deception

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). Steven Hahn, ‘From Radical to Right-Wing: The Legacy of Eugene Genovese’, The New Republic, October 2, 2012. For its influence on scholars of American slavery who do not necessarily share Genovese's particular political commitments, see the discussion of paternalism in Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). The other two books in the series are Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Enrico Del Lago, ‘Hegemony by another Name’, Reviews in American History 34, no. 3 (2006), 331–40. Jim Livingston, ‘`Marxism' and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Work of Eugene D. Genovese’, Radical Historical Review 88 (2004), 133-53. Still valuable as a guide to Marxism in slavery in the 1970s is Richard H. King, ‘Marxism and the Slave South: A Review Essay’, American Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1977), 117–31. Genovese's statement showing he had moved right was announced, with commentary from left-oriented historians, is in ‘The Crimes of Communism: What Did You Know and When Did You Know It?’, Dissent (Summer, 1994), 371–88. The best model for what the Genoveses were attempting to do in regard to Southern thinking is probably the work of Perry Miller. See Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939). For a succinct survey of American historians and modern conservatism, see the article and forum in Kim Phillips-Fein, ‘Conservatism: A State of the Field’, Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (2011) 723–73. Phillips-Fein and the forum contributors are resolutely focused on conservatism as a twentieth-century development. Robert Paquette, a student of Genovese and co-founder of the conservative-inclined Alexander Hamilton Institute, comes to mind as a major historian of slavery who is on the political right. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977); Michael O'Brien, Conjunctures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World, 1820-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). Peter Kolchin, ‘Complicating the Big Picture: Robin Blackburn's The American Crucible’, Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 4 (2012), 611–18; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011); Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). The key text is Ira Berlin, ‘Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America’, American Historical Review 85, no. 1 (1980), 44–78. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 284–96; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter's Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons: Liberty or Death (New York: Edward W. Blyden Press, 1981), 41. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). For a persuasive argument that the argument over slavery had been won by abolitionists even before abolitionism started, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For a contemporary proof that slavery is wrong, see Richard Mervyn Hare, ‘What Is Wrong with Slavery?’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (1979), 103–21. Additional informationNotes on contributorsTrevor BurnardTrevor Burnard is Professor and Head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, VIC, Australia.