Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Swamps.

Reviewed by

Eugene D. Genovese Atlanta, Georgia

In Them Dark Days, William Dusinberre, a superior historical craftsman, provides a deeply researched, acutely analyzed, powerfully written study of the antebellum plantations on the rice coast that should take its place among our most significant studies of Southern slavery. He focuses on three leading families - the Manigaults, Butlers, and Allstons - and limns portraits of male and female slaveholders, overseers, and slaves. Dusinberre breathes a fiery passion against the horrors and raw injustice to which black people were condemned, and his accounts of the suffering of the slaves are heart-rending and unforgettable. In one of his more restrained moments, he writes, "The stunting of human potential, no less than the profligate waste of human life itself, exacted a dismal toll in Gowrie's swamps." There are pages throughout this book that rank among the most eloquent indictments of slavery ever penned by an historian.

Them Dark Days contains much fresh and excellent work on the economics and technology of the rice industry and other subjects, but its greatest strength lies in its treatment of the human dimension of all such matters. Thus, in describing the exquisite sweetness of life that big profits made possible for the planter elite, Dusinberre never loses sight of the human and social costs. His account of slave mortality, for example, makes especially grim reading. Thus Dusinberre tells of the low-country planters' taste for family portraits and of their efforts to employ the best artists to paint them. But he also tells of how the slaves took their revenge on masters who celebrated their own white families while they broke up the families of their black slaves. During the War, when the Yankee troops arrived, the slaves nailed the portraits to the walls of their cabins, gave them away, let them rot outside in the rain. Charles Manigault groaned that they thus showed "their hatred of their former master & all of his family."

Dusinberre, in describing slavery on the rice coast and the depth and extent of black suffering, intends a contribution to the interpretation of Southern slave society in relation to world capitalist development. He views slavery as a variant of capitalism and views the slaveholders as essentially capitalists. That is, he rejects the notion that slavery, while embedded in the world market and subject to its cultural as well as economic exigencies, simultaneously projected an alternative social system presided over by men who, however acquisitive and "capitalistic," breathed an anti-bourgeois ethos. Although I take the other side, I have no wish to slight his valuable contributions to this debate. For on this matter and the related matter of "paternalism," Dusinberre has important things to say, which would have to be evaluated point by point in a lengthy essay.

Despite the generally high level on which he proceeds, he invites some confusion by displaying a taste for terminological quibbling, and even for an occasional cheap shot. Thus he sneers, "Life was not the static, unchanging routine of some fabled 'organic society.' "I doubt that those who speak of an "organic society" intend the romantic reading Dusinberre implies. And I do wonder what nitwit ever suggested that an "organic society" - however defined - could be static and unchanging? In any case, Dusinberre's "planter capitalists" were, it seems, influenced by "the ideals of the South Carolina gentry," whose model was the British landlords. Dusinberre tells us that those British landlords were capitalistic enough in their own way, and, as one who, in the first instance, learned about them from Marx's Capital, he will get no argument from me. But he will get an argument over his cavalier dismissal of the significance - psychological, social, ideological, and material - of the ramifications of the direct ownership of human labor, in contradistinction to control of the labor-power of free workers. When Dusinberre gets through qualifying the capitalist nature of "the slavery version of capitalism," he makes clear that the system was something special, however labeled or defined. In short, we return to square one: We still have to meet the challenge to evaluate what was special, indeed unique, to Southern slave society.

Dusinberre clearly regards the slaveholders' indictment of capitalism and projection of an alternate social system and ethos as largely rationalization, if not hypocrisy. "Callousness, not paternalist benevolence," he writes, "was the hallmark of many American masters' relation to their slaves." There is much truth in that assertion, but not enough. The coupling of paternalist with benevolence is a sleight of hand, and Dusinberre might wish to consider the painstaking discussions of "benevolence" offered by the politically influential proslavery theologians in their onslaught agaInst the liberal theologians of New England.

For Dusinberre, economic advantage determined the planters' interest in their slaves. He thereby misses the point. The defenders of slavery did not deny the force of economic interest in their concern for their slaves. Rather, they argued that, in contrast to the exigencies of the free-labor system, the organic nature of the master-slave relation brought economic interest into harmony with their professed Christian ethics. At the least - and this is no small achievement Dusinberre demonstrates how readily favorable economic conditions could drive even planters with a sense of common decency into callousness and measures that defied any sense of decency. Dusinberre provides a good discussion of the planters' impressive participation in the public life of their state and city, but he virtually ignores their cultural life their education, religion, reading - much as he ignores the efforts of the evangelicals, including those within the Episcopal Church, to shape the ethos. And his choice of families suggests that he has not so much described the normal as one end of a spectrum, for he notes that other planters went to much greater lengths to care for their slaves, and he notes the frequent complaints of some planters that others "spoiled" their slaves.

Notwithstanding my caveats or those which others might file, the essentials of Dusinberre's indictment retain their force. The ultimate horror of slavery lay in the assignment to individuals of maximum power over others - a degree of power that cannot safely be assigned to any man. Whatever atrocities might result in fact would result. And they would result on a scale that exposed as futile every attempt to justify slavery as merely one form of an inevitable and divinely ordained social stratification, every form of which necessarily generates abuses of some kind.

Every reviewer is entitled to mutter about the secondary annoyances in a strong book. Dusinberre has his own biases and moments of weakness, and I may as well file a few of my own complaints. As an admirer of the chivalric tradition, I applaud Dusinberre's gallant defense of Frances Kemble against her critics but must confess to finding it a bit much. Referring to Pierce Butler, Dusinberre gives the impression that most low-country planters took a hostile view of plantation chapels, but much other evidence contradicts this assertion. And it is especially distressing to see a fine writer like Dusinberre clutter his prose with the anachronisms - and barbarisms - demanded by our temporarily reigning feminist ideologues. That we must suffer "layperson" and "businessperson" is bad enough. Too much is when we get "gender" when Dusinberre clearly means "sex." He surely knows the difference and knows that the assimilation of "sex" to "gender" is an ideological swindle.

I fear that I have reacted to Dusinberre's explicit and implicit criticism of my own work - criticism, by the way, expressed graciously and, for the most part, constructively - by filling a short review with quarrels and complaints. So let me end where I began: Whatever the weaknesses of this impressive, indeed powerful, book, it deserves widespread reading and careful discussion. Them Dark Days will, I believe, take its place among the most important studies of Southern slavery we have and are likely to get.