The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview.

The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview. By Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiii plus 828 pp. $31.99).

The Genoveses' long-anticipated The Mind of the Master Class precisely details selected aspects of antebellum southern intellectual life, particularly theological controversies and southern understandings of the Western historical experience. They survey dozens of southern intellectuals on many topics using both manuscript collections and nineteenth century secular and religious journals. The Genoveses treat individual thinkers as parts of perceived regional patterns of thinking, or, in their words, as aspects of the mind of the "master class" of the South. Southerners, they show, displayed diverse views in interpreting both the Western tradition and Christianity, but generally unified in defenses of slaveholding and southern slave society. Desiring an ordered progress, southerners wanted to reap the material benefits and enjoy the individual freedoms provided by modernity while preserving a stable social order. Slavery became the vehicle for achieving this goal.

The Genoveses' arguments in the book rest on several presuppositions undoubtedly familiar to readers of their previous works. The South, they claim, was a slave society, "a society based upon slave labor." (1) This did not mean that whites thought exclusively about slavery, but it did mean that slavery had a "pervasive influence" on southerners' interests. (1) The master-slave relation "permeated the lives and thought of all who lived in the society it dominated." (11) In addition, southerners, "with large exceptions," shared "a broadly conservative worldview." (5) Southerners, the Genoveses conclude, "were more likely than not to agree on general principles that emphasized family, tradition, and inherited concepts of authority, honor, courage, and duty." (5)

In the first section of the book, the Genoveses examine southern views of modern revolutions. Although southern intellectuals appreciated the destruction of European monarchies, they tended to deplore the radical aspects of the French Revolution and later nineteenth century European revolutions. In attempting to remake traditional societies by promoting ideas of universal natural rights, modern revolutionaries produced social chaos and misunderstood, southerners thought, the "proper relation of the individual to society." (12) "Slaveholders," note the Genoveses, "remained committed to social order at all costs." (53) After the Missouri Crisis of 1819-1821, southerners fully embraced proslavery militancy and indicated that slavery could serve as the bulwark of southern social order. This choice differentiated "the South from the North." (88) Southerners shared a commitment to independent property holding, including property in slaves, as the social basis of republicanism. (118)

In parts two and three, the Genoveses discuss the southern appreciation of history as a source of "moral guidance for nations and for individuals." (125) Southerners perceived a tension between a cyclical view of history derived from their reading of the classics and a linear view of history inherent in Christianity. The cyclical view, by predicting the rise and fall of civilizations, implied a fatalism that southerners resisted in hopes that a stable social order and perhaps divine intervention would allow the South to progress and escape inevitable decline. (156-157) The Genoveses detail the wide range of authors read by southerners and recount debates over important historical events and figures. Southerners developed an "integrated history of society" so that they could better apply the lessons of history to the social question of modernity. (171) This entailed writing social history to explore the influence of common people, women, Native Americans, and other groups. Even though the Genoveses claim that "Southerners immersed themselves in Greek and Roman literature for insight into the human condition, and by no means principally to find support for slavery," they precisely detail in several chapters the ways in which southerners used their study of history to justify white supremacy, racial slavery, and a slave society. (282) In discussing the variety of southern views of medieval Europe, the Genoveses explain southern understandings of chivalry and chivalry's influence on gender roles, honor, and slaveholding. While acknowledging chivalry's inability to protect slaves from abuse, the Genoveses believe that a slaveholding class devoid of such a code of conduct would have been far more brutal. (382)

Part four, the lengthiest and most dense section, concerns religion. The Genoveses' explore the interplay between the concept of religious authority and slavery. Though this section bogs down in detailing endless controversies, a provocative argument emerges. The Genoveses maintain that the antebellum South possessed a diverse, Protestant religious culture. Southern Protestants debated numerous issues: Arminianism vs. Calvinism, the practice of intercommunion, and the proper procedures for baptism, just to name a few. Even liberal theology, in the forms of Unitarianism and spiritualism, made inroads in the South. But despite this diversity, the Genoveses depict southern Protestantism by the 1840s as tolerant of denominational differences and generally orthodox. That is, most southern Protestants held the Bible to be the inerrant authority in religious matters and believed both in the existence of heaven and hell and the doctrine of original sin. Southerners insisted that many northern Protestants, especially abolitionists, had forsaken Christian orthodoxy for extreme religious subjectivism. In numerous antebellum religious debates concerning slavery, southern divines appealed to the Bible, the "Word," for support while abolitionists, after forsaking biblical arguments, turned to the "Spirit" of Christianity for their proof. The Genoveses maintain that "religion became the sine qua non for the South's defense of slavery." (473) Southern divines bound Protestant orthodoxy, in particular the inerrancy of Scripture, to the defense of slavery. Thus, according to the Genoveses, they could not abandon a biblical defense of slavery without forsaking Protestant orthodoxy.

The religious controversies lead the Genoveses in part five to speculate on the underlying causes of secession. Many southern Protestants, they note, recognized that the appeal to the Bible was problematic. One North Carolina Episcopalian pointed out that the Methodists had once opposed slavery based on their interpretation of the Bible. As the Genoveses ask, "What prevented them from doing so again?" (633-634) Southern Protestants responded that the organic slave society stabilized social relations and supported a conservative world view hostile to the excesses of the Protestant Reformation (antinomianism) and modern capitalism (the creation of a "disaffected working class"). (649) By the 1850s, the Genoveses contend, many southerners believed that their society was threatened both from northern abolitionists and southern acceptance of individualism. (674-679) Some intellectuals responded by supporting "Caesarism," the belief that a strong leader and strong state were preferable to social chaos brought by excessive democratization. Such attitudes led to secession as many southerners recognized that their slave society needed the protection of a "modern slaveholding republic" so that the South could "break the historical cycle of glory, decadence, and collapse." (712) The slaveholders' War for Southern Independence failed and their tragic quest for a modern, stable social order predicated on slavery and southern nationalism ended in ruin.

The strength of the book lies in the Genoveses' depth of research and command of the primary sources. The Mind of the Master Class is an important contribution to southern intellectual history and undoubtedly will be read and debated for years to come.

Adam L. Tate

Clayton State University