Slavery, Secession, and Southern History. (Book Reviews).

Slavery, Secession, and Southern History. Edited by Robert Louis Paquette and Louis A. Ferleger. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Pp. [xx], 229. Paper, $18.50, ISBN 0-8139-1952-5; cloth, $49.50, ISBN 0-8139-1951-7.)

In an interview appended to this anthology of essays in his honor, Eugene D. Genovese explains that his "lifelong ambition" has been to write "a comprehensive book on the slaveholders" (p. 207). This undertaking, still in process, will be entitled The Mind of the Master Class and will be completed in collaboration with his spouse, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. His early work focused on these slaveholders and the way their outlook was rooted in a plantation-based society. Initially concerned to understand how the Old South's material foundations shaped its conflict with the free labor North, Genovese now plans to give greater emphasis to cultural and religious differences. His more recent published work points in this direction. Though never an easy scholar to pigeonhole, Genovese now might best be described as an intellectual historian.

In the prime of his career, however, Genovese embarked on a "detour" into social history that ended up taking a decade and resulted in "the longest book by far that I have written" (p. 207). That book, of course, is Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), which most historians regard as by far his most important contribution, a superb and hugely influential assessment of the realities of slavery and the perceptions of the slaves themselves. Genovese thus made his definitive statement about life in the quarters long before he was ready to bring to fruition his work on life in the big house. Writing Roll, Jordan, Roll brought him back to his original task, he explains, by obliging him to confront the importance of religion, both for the slaves and the masters (and for himself).

Whether in his early essays on historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips or in his more recent work on James Henley Thornwell and other theologians of the Old South, Genovese identifies an intellectual heritage worthy of respect. He demands that modern egalitarians pay attention to defenses of an organic, hierarchical society, and that modern secularists confront their blindness to original sin. The historian must, of course, try to find out how well thought squares with practice. Roll, Jordan, Roll made the mental world of the slaves come alive because it was solidly grounded in social reality. Notwithstanding the enormous impact of his venture into social history and a few tantalizing probes pointing toward a parallel, socially grounded history of the white South (see especially his justly admired essays "Yeoman Farmers in a Slaveholders' Democracy" and "The Political Crisis of Social History," both originally written in the mid-1970s and conveniently available in the collection co-authored with his spouse, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism [New York, 1983]), Genovese now appears most engaged when focused on the mental acrobatics of the Old South's thinkers and admirers.

The essays in this volume reflect Genovese's priorities. Most deal either with aspects of Old South thought or with his fruitful detour into the history of slavery. The former are represented by Douglas Ambrose, who writes about two of the master's special friends, Thornwell and Henry Hughes; by Clyde N. Wilson, who may be counted on to defend John C. Calhoun's "brilliant insight and high statesmanship" (p. 97); by Drew Gilpin Faust, whose scathing critique of Civil War diarist Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston exposes "a class that was trying to enjoy its noblesse without acknowledging its oblige" (p. 138); and by Thavolia Glymph, who shows that Mary Boykin Chesnut not only expunged insights from her famous memoir that reflected poorly on white women but also included embroidered episodes that betray a hardened "contempt for black women" (p. 146). The essays on slavery include a brief assessment of Genovese's writing on the subject by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman; a provocative reminder by David Brion Davis of the way that human enslavement in some ways paralleled the domestication of animals; a spirited brief on behalf of the slave driver by Robert L. Paquette (one of Genovese's students); and some characteristically erudite pyrotechnics by Peter Coclanis (with nearly as many words of notes as text) to explain why the task system took root in South Carolina's Lowcountry. Two essays dovetail with Genovese's turn toward literary history: Mark G. Malvasi (another Genovese student) discusses Allen Tate's bittersweet epitaph for the Old South in his only novel, The Fathers (New York, 1938); and Louis A. Ferleger and Richard H. Steckel use modern anthropometric data to dispute William Faulkner's stereotype of scrawny, undersized white southerners. For the contributors, as for Genovese, the political history of the Old South is off-limits; the word "secession" in the title of this collection does not preview anything about the political crisis that led to war.

Nothing can diminish Genovese's achievement in Roll, Jordan, Roll. There are reasons, however, to wonder whether his current approach to studying the master class and the white South will result in anything of comparable gravity.

DANIEL W. CROFTS
The College of New Jersey