Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 15: Eugene Genovese and a Lost Cause whopper

Eugene Genovese was a star "New Left" historian in the 1960s. His specialty was Southern history and the study of slavery. Over time, he came to admire the slaveowners and their pretensions at civilization. He still does solid historical work and is taken seriously. But his reactionary perspective weighs heavily on his writing.

In A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (1998), he gives a slick variation on one of the favorite arguments of Lost Cause pseudohistory, the notion that without all that abolitionists agitation and the war, slavery would have died out on its own. That was not at all the perspective of the leaders of the Confederacy in real time. They were fighting to defend slavery as an eternal bulwark of white Christian civilization.

In an example of how the fantasy Lost Cause picture of the Confederacy provided an ideological structure for segregation, one can still here the argument that without all those "outside agitators" coming down from the North and Martin Luther King stirring up all that trouble, that segregation would have faded out, as well.

Genovese's version of that howler about slavery runs like this. In this short book, he describes various proposals to make at least cosmetic changes to the slavery laws. As it became increasingly obvious that the Confederacy would collapse, the "reformers" proposed various schemes to even abolish slavery while substituting some form of compulsory servitude without the form of chattel slavery. Genovese writes:

As a matter of high probability, the new order envisioned by the reformers would not easily have been able to resist the penetration of Northern capital and, with it, the political colonization of the South. An independent Confederacy, bent on maintaining political and military power in an environment of nation-states embedded in a world market, could hardly have avoided the path of rapid industrialization and full-fledged capitalist development. Those who believe that a Southern Confederacy would have had to emancipate its slaves before long are probably right, but the kind of emancipation that Confederates were most likely to consider, in contradistinction to that which would have created a genuinely free labor system, promised to turn the South into a second-rate power. One way or the other, the slaveholders, however metamorphosed into a new class, faced a decline in their class power and an end to their dreams of an alternate road to modernity. At best, they faced the prospect of thriving economically as individuals who served as clients of Northern capital and who were subject to their cultural hegemony. We need not be surprised that they resisted the social restructuring toward which their Christian consciences beckoned them.

Counterfactual historical speculations like that are very useful in bolstering abstract ideologies that depend on ignoring or falsifying basic relevant facts. Including ones like this one that seems to be pretty much concocted out of the ideological air to begin with.

A couple of things really strike me about this scenario. One is that it really is a repetition of the notion that slavery would just have benignly faded away in relatively fast order under the normal development of the American economy. In the real antebellum US, the free-labor capitalism of the North was in intense competition with the slave-labor capitalism of the South. And the South was being very aggressive in using every means at their disposal to defend and expand the slavery system. The Southern slaveowners were a long way from deciding to put the slavery system out to pasture. They were moving aggressively in the other direction.

What's maybe even more striking is Genovese is largely describing what happened in the postwar South after the defeat of Reconstruction as though it's an alternative scenario to what happened. With the combination of sharecropping, heavy use of African-Americans for prison labor gangs, the legal and social restrictions of the segregation system, and inadequate public education, the white South actually did keep many former slaves and their descendants in a kind of peonage. And the South even today shows major effects of the lack of capital investment in the decades after the Civil War and through much of the 20th Century. It's a very odd counterfactual scenario.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, eugene genovese, slavery