Economics, Society, and History || Specific Purposes and the General past: Slaves and Slavery

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History

Specific Purposes and the General past: Slaves and SlaveryThe Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style by David Brion Davis; The World theSlaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation by Eugene D. Genovese; Industrial Slavery inthe Old South by Robert S. StarobinReview by: Robert BrandfonThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 3, No. 2, Economics, Society, and History(Autumn, 1972), pp. 351-362Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202335 .

Accessed: 08/05/2014 19:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journalof Interdisciplinary History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 19:44:44 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/202335?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Robert Brandfon

Specific Purposes and the General Past: Slaves and Slavery

The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style. By David Brion Davis (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1970) 97 pp. $4.00

The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation. By Eugene D. Genovese (New York, Pantheon, I969) 274 pp. $5.95

Industrial Slavery in the Old South. By Robert S. Starobin (New York, Oxford University Press, 1970) 320 pp. $7.95

Although historical facts are slippery elusive objects characterized by their propensity to take on the shapes commanded by the historian's imagination, history still has to be guided by fact. The problem is to discern the degree of restraint necessary to prevent imagination from replacing fact. Facts must be continuously tested, probed, and seen in other perspectives of time and place; the historical door is forever open to new interpretations by succeeding generations.

More relevant for the books under review, the search for new interpretations has invited the application of other disciplines to history. While this has led to exciting and sometimes enlightening controversy, it has to be used with caution. The utilization of other disciplines, such as sociology and psychology, presents the historian with the tasks of

mastering just the right proportion of these tools so that they may be useful in his own trade. Their limits must also be recognized: These tools are a means to an end, and not ends in themselves.

Important difficulties impede this process. These disciplines have a generating character of their own which continuously threatens to create in the historian a false sense of complacency. Moreover, the scientific precision of their terminology (more apparent than real) and the fresh quality of new insights (again, more apparent than real), in contrast to the misty and uncertain qualities of historical facts, present a

great temptation to use them indiscriminately. Historians should avoid

Robert L. Brandfon is Associate Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of Cotton Kingdom of the New South: A History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Deltafrom Reconstruction to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), and is writing a book on the diplomacy of Far Eastern trade before World War II.



352 | ROBERT BRANDFON

the unconscious substitution of the values of these disciplines for those of their own. Otherwise they destroy the efficacy of these tools, the real purpose of which is to increase their self-awareness.

The three essays that compose Davis' book are the Walter Lyn- wood Fleming Lectures in Southern History given at Louisiana State University in 1969. They represent an application of his earlier work on the conspiratorial themes in American literature to the literature of the slavery conflict. In his article, "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic and Anti-Mormon Literature," Davis analyzed the themes of nativist writers who "sim- plified problems of personal insecurity and adjustment to bewildering social change by trying to unite Americans of diverse political, religious, and economic interests against a common enemy."2 He concluded that the style of nativist literature in the form of the exposure of subversion in American political, social, and economic life "seemed to clarify national values."

Four years later, Hofstadter provided a label for Davis' beliefs- the paranoid style-but he was guarded in his definition of the term. Although the paranoid style had "the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy," Hofstadter claimed he was not using it in "a clinical sense" but was "borrowing a clinical term for other purposes." He was using the term "much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style." What made the paranoid mode of expression a significant phenomenon, according to Hofstadter, was its use "by more or less normal people." Davis agrees and absorbs Hofstadter's further reservation: "Style has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content."3

Armed thus with a label, and freed from wasting time with the truth or falsity of the contents of paranoid expressions, Davis goes on to reason that the paranoid style of expression by both abolitionists and proslavery advocates revealed the true nature of American society. "When abolitionists hit upon the image of a Slave Power conspiracy, they had found a powerful symbol that could stand for all the contra- dictions between appearance and reality in American society... the

I David Brion Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860: A Study in Social Values (Ithaca, I957). 2 Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLVII (i960), 205-224; quote, 214.

3 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York, 1965), 3-5.



SLAVES AND SLAVERY 1 353

image of the Slave Power provided a means of conceptualizing and

attacking all the threatening illusions of American life" (30-3I). Likewise, Southerners viewed abolitionists not as part of a monolithic power, but as "more akin to the later image of the anarchist or interna- tionalist Jew," an infiltrator, sly and devious whose subversion lay not in open formal attack but in the recruitment of fellow travelers. "No image," Davis concludes, "could better express the sense of being iso- lated by bewildering shifts in cultural styles and ideology, or the frus- trations of an essentially rural, mechanically oriented society when confronted by the verbal sophistication of the urban world" (51). The

paranoid style of expression, Davis holds, exposed Americans North and South to the agonizing uncertainties of the period. "Both sides

practiced a form of ideological diagnosis that was a way of defining norms and thus of coming to terms with a basic problem of liberalism... the threat of diversity and environmental conditioning could be exor- cised through projection to a negative reference group" (58-59). The

polarization of views on slavery thus caused Americans to use the slavery issue "as the primary symbol for defining the values and roles that would constitute their social identity" (59).

In the third essay, "The Slave Power and the Great American Enemy," Davis takes up three themes of the small group of Northern intellectuals who conceptualized the slave power (by which they meant a slavocracy, a group of extremist Southern expansionists whose conspiratorial intent was to direct the American Government into extend- ing slavery into the territories, Mexico, and Central America) and brought it to the attention of the American public. These themes give us clues about "the deeper fears and inner needs of Northern society" (64). They were, first, the belief that a monolithic force had imposed itself upon the rational progression of history. Second, that the slave power impeded America's mission to save the world. The third theme, and to me the most engagingly familiar, stemmed from the first two. This was the necessity for moral purification. The roots of these ideas hark back to a combination of the Puritan jeremiad and tub-thumping revealed religion. "The call for internal purification was a way of rejecting the prevailing political consensus, particularly its capacity for expedient compromise and its lack of moral commitment... it would be the means for renovating the national conscience" (80). Davis makes us aware of the usefulness of the Enemy in defining the national mission. For the people of the mid-nineteenth century, the Slave Power mode of expression put into focus social purpose and identity. The paranoid




style for Davis becomes a positive good. He concludes: "There is something almost providential in the way that the paranoid style, for all its irrationality, finally evoked significant numbers of Americans to perceive the evil of an institution which had long been intertwined with the promise of American life" (85).

There are two basic reasons why these essays will be read eagerly by those seeking simple formulas to unravel the past. The first is their obvious relevance. Just as Davis argues that "one can easily interchange many paragraphs of anti-masonic, anti-catholic and anti-slavery writers with only a few substitutions of words" (I2), one can easily do the same for present-day sermons in press and pulpit calling for the purification of our society as the necessary first step toward ending the war in Vietnam, preventing the destruction of our environment by indiscriminate pollution of air and water, or halting the population explosion by legalizing contraception and abortion. "The call for internal purification as a way of rejecting the prevailing political consensus, particularly its capacity for expedient compromise and its lack of moral commitment," is as familiar to us as it was to those a century ago.

There is nothing wrong with relevance. The question is how much should the historian permit it to shape his analysis. Davis is heavily influenced by the "team models" described in Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London, I969) and uses this psychological speculation concerning subjective frustration to conclude "that rapid mobility often makes men self-consciously aware of aspects of role-playing which are taken for granted in tradition oriented societies" (27). Without getting involved about the rights and wrongs of this speculation, one must be wary of applying a model meant for a

specific purpose to the general past. The indiscriminate use of a "clinical" term like paranoia is disturbing. I am surprised that the criticism directed at Hofstadter has not been more vocal. Paranoia is a psychological term used to describe specific forms of individual or group behavior. Wrenching it from its original context and applying it broadside to undefined masses makes its meaning superficial. Davis as much as admits this when he tells us that "we all have our paranoid moments"

(16). The psychoanalytic treatments of the abolitionists used heavily by

other historians, most notably Donald, have a common end.4 They seek an explanation of behavior patterns that serve to relegate antislavery

4 David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (New York, I956).



SLAVES AND SLAVERY | 355

arguments to subordinate and unimportant positions. Zinn recently put the Donald thesis to rest by simply questioning the proof for the nexus between the alleged inability of men like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to cope with the bustle of industrialization and their espousal of immediate abolition. Zinn asked: "Can we not reasonably assume that when an evil is severe enough it will stimulate thinking, feeling people ... to act against it? This kind of commonsense explanation for the emergence of radical agitation emphasizes that something is wrong with society. The psychological explanations... emphasize that something is wrong with the agitator."5 Davis' thesis is more elusive. He compounds the socio-psychological ideas of Donald (the world was too confusingly evil for the agitators, North and South; that is why they agitated) with the idea that the paranoid mode of expression exposed the confusion and made Americans aware of their identity. The end result is to lump both proslavery and abolitionist sentiment into the same neurotic camp.

Surely Davis would not disagree that there was a difference between abolitionists and the defenders of slavery: The former were right and the latter were wrong. In the same way, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked: "It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women."6 Why is it instructive for the historian to speculate on the psychological reasons for the views of masses of people, especially when there is no convincing way to put them on the couch? What insights can we gain about the slavery conflict from this approach? Davis never answers these questions because he has reversed the impor- tance of psychological insight. He has let it become the end rather than the means for judgment.

Davis' use of psychological tools has an ulterior purpose. Like Hofstadter, Donald, Kenneth Stampp, and Daniel Boorstin-to name a few-he is a child of the Progressive-New Deal consensus philosophy

5 Howard Zinn, The Politics of History (Boston, I970), 162. Zinn's critique has not deterred Donald from applying the same pattern to the proslavery argument. The proslavery writers of the I84os and i85os, he claims, were celebrating a bygone age: "they raised their voices to plead for the restoration of community ... Like so many other movements in nineteenth century American history, then, the proslavery argument should no longer be considered a freakish aberration but as part of a general, though diverse, search for social stability in a rapidly changing world." David Donald, "The Proslavery Argument Reconsidered," Journal of Southern History, XXXVII (1971), I7-I8. 6 Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 26i U.S. 525.




(we have all been assimilated into one big, white, Christian coalition). Like these other historians, he seeks the Rosetta Stone that will unlock the American National Character. For him, psychological categoriza- tion does the trick. Yet the violence of the past decade has revealed clearly that assimilation and consensus are myths bearing no resemblance to the facts of the American past and that fundamental irreconcilable differences have always existed in American society. To search after the leveling elements of these differences adds to the myth and serves to obscure the reality of our past. Sober second thoughts about this book leave us perplexed.

Genovese's book is another example of theory feverishly applied to historical fact with its resulting misleading conclusions. Genovese's approach is neither sociological nor psychological. Indeed, his condem- nation of Wilbur Cash's guiltomania theme in Southern history (The Mind of the South [New York, I941]) is one of the highpoints of the book. But if he attacks the disease of guiltomania, "which threatens to reach epidemic proportions among historians" (I43), and bemoans the "partiality and one-sidedness of the viewpoint that creates distortions" (145), he too, is liable to the same charge. Genovese, as is well known, is deeply infused with Marxian philosophy. He readily avows that the double purpose of the two long essays that comprise this book is "to advance the discussion of the comparative history of slavery, and to defend the claims for the superiority of the Marxian interpretation of history" (ix). Genovese thus sees history as something to be used. In the essay, "The American Slave Systems in World Perspective," he takes up the first of these purposes. Beginning with the maxim that mani- festations of class rule determined race relations, e.g. "that barbarism stemmed much more from an attitude of rich to poor, lord to peasant, bourgeois to human commodity than from an attitude of white to non-white" (15-I6), Genovese explores the relationships between the New World slave systems and the economic and social conditions of their respective European metropolises.

Because slavery was an archaic mode of production, it is a paradox, he argues, that Britain and Holland, the most advanced capitalist countries of the seventeenth century, should have "spawned" slavery. Slavery being natural to the capitalist system, however, the intentions of the colonial slaveholding classes were "antithetical to those of the metropolitan bourgeoisie" (26), which was a shopkeeper as opposed to a landed capitalist class. This difference was resolved by abolition, which, in turn, came about only because the planter classes in the



SLAVES AND SLAVERY [ 357

Caribbean were essentially absentee and thus could be easily absorbed by the metropolitan shopkeeper bourgeoisie. (Abolitionist and hu- manistic pressures, in Genovese's world are, of course, disregarded.) "Only in the southern United States did the slaveholders break free and follow their own course" (ibid.).

In the French colonies, the nature of the slave system was regulated by class, specifically by the link between the metropolitan bourgeoisie and the colonial planters. But, following the Marxian philosophy of repulsion and attraction of capital7 (or the inevitable falling out among thieves), the Girondist bourgeosie were undermined by their paradoxi- cal moral values (natural, according to Marxian philosophy, to the bourgeois class). Thus, according to Genovese, they "drew the line: slavery and the slave trade, yes, for they were good for business; dis- crimination against the gens de couleur, no, for it was not good for business and violated the rights of man" (45). The ensuing class conflict between the bourgeoisie and planters over race undermined the au- thority of the planter class on the islands, causing turmoil and insurrec- tion. Following a single theory, the vast complexities of the past, dimly seen at best, become easy to follow.

As for the "Iberian variant," both Spain and Portugal were in the seigneurial stage at the time of colonization. Unlike the Anglo- French experience, the Iberian slave colonies did not engender a rise of bourgeois capitalism in the metropolitan, but, paradoxically, strength- ened the power of the seigneurial classes. "For Spain and Portugal colonialism in general and plantation slavery in particular provided the economic surplus necessary for the stability of a ruling class that remained essentially seigneurial" (51). This result is, of course, explained by the conflict of the class struggle between the seigneurial and the bourgeoisie, whose interests were served by the absolute monarch. However, the throne, by internationalizing the economy through colonization, also internationalized the bourgeoisie, causing the "si- phoning off of accumulated wealth by the bourgeois powers to the north" (53). Thus did seigneuralism maintain itself and retard Iberian industrialization until the twentieth century. Indeed, according to the Genovesean thesis, the outcome was never in doubt. Although Anglo- French slavery was an outgrowth of precapitalist modes of production, the Iberian variant was merely "an extension of the essentially seigneurial socioeconomic system of the metropolis" (55). The black slave labor 7 Karl Marx, Capital. Vol. I: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (New York, 1967), 625.



358 j ROBERT BRANDFON

that we find in Cuba and Brazil had begun "on the Peninsula itself as the chief means of securing a labor force for the estates of the con- quering Christian nobles" (54-55).

The description of the Cuban slave system and its class alignments is muddled. This stems, in part, from Genovese's attempt to capsule 200 years in a few pages, but mostly because his knowledge of Cuban history, like his knowledge of the history of this entire first essay, is essentially secondhand. His application of Marxist philosophy is strained and unconvincing. But this does not deter him from maintaining con- sistently that the penetration of bourgeois foreign capital into Cuba produced "a new class of capitalist slaveholders for whom slavery was an economic expedient" (70), and, in this maturation of a Cuban bourgeoisie (the slaveholders are transformed into bourgeoisie), Cuba was placed "well on its way to a comprador status ofjunior partnership with American capitalism" (71). (The Indian and Chinese servants of European mercantile houses would have been startled that the title of comprador put them on a partnership level with their Western masters, who would have been equally astonished).

The slave systems of Brazil and the Old South follow similar patterns. They are at the mercy of world capitalism; they cannot escape it. As a result, they are themselves slaves to the ideological effects of the bourgeois' world view. In Genovese's words, "At the base of this ideological dependency lay the economic mechanisms of the world market, which made all slaveholding countries economic satellites of a foreign metropolis" (102).

The inevitable and all-pervasive penetration of the conspiracy of bourgeoisie values is essential in understanding the Genovesean Weltanschauung. Without this central idea-which is the reason for the first essay-one cannot comprehend the reason why Genovese believes that a minor intellectual figure such as George Fitzhugh of Virginia was so important and worth over Ioo pages of close analysis in his second essay. We are familiar with Fitzhugh as more than another apologist for slavery. He assumed with others (particularly antebellum southern industrialists) that capitalism was supported by the exploitation of labor and, therefore, that it was perfectly logical that all labor was slave in fact and should so be. For Genovese, Fitzhugh, as no other slave apologist, recognized the danger of the penetration of bourgeois values to the slave holding society, and that these bourgeois values would inevitably destroy the slaveholders' world (as Genovese claims they had done in the Caribbean). Just so long as the slave societies of the Western



SLAVES AND SLAVERY | 359

hemisphere were part of the world market, they were subject "to the withering pressure of cosmopolitanism." Thus, the destruction of capitalism was, according to the Genovesean-Fitzhugh theory, a question of freedom. "The struggle was irreconcilable: the bourgeois Carthage must perish; the world-wide system of economic interdepen- dence must be crushed; capitalism, in short, must everywhere be up- rooted. Only then could a new philosophy emerge" ( 58). No wonder Genovese looks upon Fitzhugh "as an old friend" (II9); "the task of rescuing him from detractors became something of a private mission" (ibid.). If the destruction of capitalism-of bourgeois values-was the "Logical Outcome of the Slaveholders Philosophy" as this essay is entitled, Fitzhugh is a spokesman for Genovese's values, for what Marxist does not look forward to the same end?

But Genovese cannot be wholly comfortable with Fitzhugh, who was, after all, an advocate of slavery and a champion of a precapitalist order. Marxism looks forward, not backward. The way to ease out of this dilemma is to take up the role of detached scholar, to argue that despite the brutal implications of Fitzhugh's logic, he must be praised for being a realist, for perceiving the threat of the bourgeois world to the slave system. "Let us waste no more time poking fun at Fitzhugh for the grandest miscalculation imaginable [e.g., a conservative coalition between Northern capitalists and Southern slaveholders]. What else could he have thought?" (232) Slaveholders did not appreciate Fitzhugh, only a marginal few understood him. "Confronted with the logic and ultimate meaning of the notions they had come to take for granted, they blanched; sometimes, they howled with rage" (131). But the truth prevailed! "In the end, he more than any other man saw the direction in which his world was moving and perceived what was needed to bring it safely to its destination" (13 I).

The heavy-handed use of Fitzhugh to prove the Genovesean Weltanschauung causes Genovese to share the guilt of those historians whom he condemns earlier as being "partial and one sided to the point of distortion," to undermine his assumed mantle of scholarship. For example, he characterizes Fitzhugh's solution to "exclusive agriculture" as brilliantly "to meet all reasonable objections" (206). But after a description of what amounts to a rather blase balance of local industry with agriculture, we are told that Fitzhugh "had to stake all on the wildest of dreams" (ibid.). What kind ofjudgment is it that describes Fitzhugh's commonplace description of the English exploitation of Ireland as "one of his most brilliant passages"? (i68). Again, one does



360 j ROBERT BRANDFON

not have to be a Philistine to realize that somehow there is a difference between Lincoln and Fitzhugh, or Lincoln and Goldwater (2I5-2I6).

Genovese is aware that historians will storm his treatment of Fitzhugh. He makes this clear in his "Acknowledgements." Indeed, I think he rather welcomes it, for the louder the opposition, the more he will be convinced that like Fitzhugh, he is the harbinger of reality; the

triumph of Marxism is inevitable. My criticism of Genovese's work is that by his attachment to Marxian philosophy, he has distorted the benefits that can be gained from comparative history in our knowledge of slavery. Likewise, he has distorted our view of Fitzhugh by granting him a larger role in the history of American intellectualism than he properly deserves. Were we to take away Genovese's Weltan- schauung from Fitzhugh there would be no reason not to reassign him to the role given to him by Louis Hartz and C. Vann Woodward- "The most logical reactionary in the South," "sui generis," and a second-rate spokesman for the more nihilistic stream of southern

thinking. When we come to the late Starobin's Industrial Slavery in the Old

South, we are on firmer ground. Of the three, it is the best book. Starobin has made use of an enormous body of sources. His views have been guided by facts and, although aware of psychological and Marxian themes and sympathetic to the latter, he does not permit these to cloud his judgment or to provide us with conclusions that are at best specu- lations.

Although only 5 per cent of the slave labor force was used in Southern industry (industry being very broadly defined as nonagricul- tural pursuits), Starobin argues convincingly: "The wide use of industrial slaves by state and federal agencies suggests not only the centrality of industrial slavery to the southern economy but also the extent of southern control of the national political structure" (33). The facts

presented largely bear out these conclusions and thus make the book a

necessity for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the antebellum South and the sectional conflict.

Starobin's facts challenge a number of conclusions persistently held both by contemporaries and by sympathetic southern historians. Admittedly, agricultural labor had its own forms of brutality, but industrial labor, working with crude technology and inexperienced management, verged on the nightmarish. These "natural" causes were not alone responsible for the conditions. When owners rented out their slaves to employers, which was generally the manner by which



SLAVES AND SLAVERY [ 361

slaves were used in industry, they lost control over the slaves' welfare. More than free white workers, who could and did quit, slave workers were helpless before the employer's compelling urge for profits; the slave property was not his to care for-only to exploit. The slave owner was thus placed in a difficult moral position, especially when there was a surplus of slaves for hire. If an owner were too particular about his slave's welfare and set limits that would impair the contractor's ability to exploit them for profit, the contract would be voided, and the slaves returned to the owner, who was then denied his income. As southern industry gained momentum, the profits from industrial slavery became more pronounced. Increasingly, owners with slaves on their hands, whom they could not, for ideological reasons, free, found themselves at the mercy of industrial contractors.

Starobin disputes the "infantile" concept of slave acquiescence made famous by Stanley Elkins. He acknowledges the difficulties of ascertaining the thoughts and feelings of the slaves because of an obvious lack of records. At the same time, "the records also clearly indicate that no enterprise, industry, occupation, or region repressed slave resistance entirely" (76). Indeed, he concludes that worker "discontent remained one of the most perplexing problems faced by industrial employers" (ibid.). Employer control was a system of rewards and punishments. Business records clearly reveal that, like the occasional Christmas recesses, insignificant and random wage bonuses were not designed to put slaves on the road to freedom, but to get them to work harder, and to weaken their incentive to escape. Another form of control was the use of slave managers whose purpose was to create divisions within the work force. It was never the intention for example, for the employers of Simon Gray, the celebrated Mississippi River boatman, to set him on the road to freedom by granting him important managerial responsibilities.

Logically, it would follow that free white labor would be sought to rid employers of the problem of control. Starobin's evidence shows the reverse to be true. White labor was too tumultuous. Every employer wants stability, whether it be in his labor force or his profits. The trend in southern industry was to use increasingly larger amounts of slave labor as the antebellum era came to an end. Slave hiring increased, but this did not mean that a wage labor system was being adopted. On the contrary, the dramatic increase in hiring slaves revealed the increas- ing profits to owners by renting their slaves. In this way, nonslave owners were permitted the advantages of slave labor without the finan-



362 1 ROBERT BRANDFON

cial burdens of ownership. From these facts Starobin makes clear "how an allegedly rigid institution-slavery-could adapt to the needs of southern society" (I35).

Only when Starobin deals with the profitability and efficiency of industrial slavery is he led astray by the labor theory of value. Profit- ability, for example, in textiles, an industry that played an important role in southern visions of economic independence, was not dependent wholly on low labor costs. It is true that the textile industry is particularly labor intensive, but profit margins are determined by other factors, e.g., luck and skill in cotton buying, commission merchants, and merchandizing and marketing forces. Productivity in factory labor, especially in textiles, cannot be measured by racial or class characteris- tics, but on the degree of rationality of management, and outside forces. The landscape of the southern textile industry is strewn with bankrupt mills, most of whom paid lower wages than the mills that survived and

profited. Starobin is led astray by statements of southern employers who, with high labor costs, likewise held something close to the labor theory of value.

This is, however, but a minor criticism which does not detract from the thrust of Starobin's well-documented, if familiar, conclusions, e.g., that slavery was not dying out or about to expire with time. Protests by white labor were not proletarian uprisings against slavery, but were protests against the increased use of slavery in certain skilled crafts. As Starobin notes: "White artisans did not seek to abolish slavery altogether, only to exclude Negroes from certain trades... the net effect of most protests by white artisans was thus not to weaken slavery but to entrench it more firmly in southern society" (212-2I3). More ominous was the threat of slavery in the territories and the nexus between the use of slaves in western gold mines and railroad building to the economic welfare of the South. Starobin's study of industrial slavery, more particularly the hiring-out system upon which it was based, reveals that southerners wanted expansion for reasons other than cotton agriculture. The increased value of slave labor in the West would mean greater prices for slaves in the South. Rather than slavery withering on the vine, Starobin shows that it had a greater potential for industrial growth and expansion than historians generally acknowledge. One leaves this book reconfirmed in the view that southerners, convinced that their monopoly of slave labor was essential for their future, were thus compelled to fight against abolition and union or surrender their birthright.



Documents

Economics, Society, and History || Specific Purposes and the General past: Slaves and Slavery