Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 7: More on history and moral conflict

Eugene Genovese is one of the best-known historians of the Civil War. Back in the 1960s, he was regarded as a Marxist historian and considered one of the up-and-coming young scholars of what was then called the New Left. He became more and more conservative over the years to the point that he has become an advocate for the supposedly constructive values of the slaveholding planter class.

I've often wondering how that particular transformation came about. Contrary to Rush Limbaugh-Glenn Beck political theory, in which liberalism, communism, Marxism, fascism, socialism and Nazism are all pretty much the same thing, it is a real change of viewpoint to go from being a Marxist historian to an apologist for the antebellum American planter class.

After reading this article of his from 1968, "Abolitionist" New York Review of Books 09/26/1968 issue, I wonder is some of that direction wasn't already becoming apparent even then. His essay is a review of two books by a left-leaning author, Staughton Lynd: Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution and Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. In that essay, he writes (it appears that the word "reactionaries" in the second sentence was intended to be ironic, but in light of his later development I'm not so sure):

Lynd sees the special contribution of Abolitionism to radicalism as the extension of the right of revolution, understood as a majority movement, to the right of anyone on grounds of conscience, to break the law. The reactionaries among us may be permitted some questions as to how one man's conscience may justify this right and not another's; once again we need not ask for evidence for "self-evident truths." Let us grant that "good citizens" have a right to overthrow an oppressive regime; but if we are to speak of such a "right," what shall we do with the right of self-defense? Officials of the state and men of property, who must also have hearts with intuitive knowledge of the good, surely have a right to shoot down those who threaten them. If we have a right to break any law that outrages our conscience, do not those who feel the need for the protection of that law or of the legal system in general have the right to take their own measures? It does not occur to Lynd that even fascists may be men of strong principle, love of humanity, and clear conscience.

For those who regard the existing order as intolerable and barbarous, revolution may legitimately appear as a necessity and a duty, but he who chooses revolutionary confrontations or defies the law cannot easily pretend that he is not appealing to force. There is only one justification for a civilized man's doing either: the existence of irreconcilable antagonisms, each of which has its claims and neither of which can or will be compromised. When, for example, slaves rose in revolt, they advanced simultaneously their claims to individual freedom and, with varying degrees of consciousness, a notion of a just social order; when the slaveholders moved to crush them, they advanced simultaneously the claims of property and a commitment to the existing arrangement as the foundation of the only social order they could see as just. The interests of the two were irreconcilable. But this view cannot appeal to the heart or the intuition of the common man; it can only appeal to a developing social consciousness based not on some abstract common sense but on that sense of duty and responsibility to humanity which can only be defined in a specific time and place through disciplined, collective ideological and political effort. [my emphasis]

That last sentence is cryptic. He seems to be saying that the "common man", a phrase of which, earlier in the review, "the words sound strange since the passing of Henry Wallace", could only be convinced that the interests of the slaveowners and the slaves were irreconcilable if, well, somebody had promoted an ideology that said that effectively enough. Or something. It's not at all clear.

But those two paragraphs contain other ideas that are also puzzling, though not as hard to render comprehensible as that one. It's perfectly sensible to observe of the master class and the slave class, "The interests of the two were irreconcilable."

But what does that exactly mean? In the context of the slave system, the master class as such could not go on existing if the slaves achieved their interest in no longer being slaves and no longer being menaced by the system of chattel slavery. Still, being a member of the master class was not their only identity, not even their only class identity. The planter class was very much part of the American capitalist system; Anthony Kaye in a recent article provides a brief description of the various ways in which the Southern plantations operated as capitalist enterprises in a network of capitalist business relationships ("The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World", The Journal of Southern History Aug 2009) Kaye writes, "The long debate about whether the Old South was an anachronistic, seignorial society or a variant on modern capitalism is approaching a consensus around the latter."

Compensated emancipation was definitely a feasible option for ending slavery. That would have meant the planters would have gone from having capitalist enterprises depending on slave labor to capitalist enterprises depending on free labor, which is what in fact happened after the Civil War. If the process had come through compensated emancipation, the planters would not have simply lost the enormous amounts of capital they had invested in their human property, the slaves. And the slaveholding South would not have been decimated by the destruction of the war.

The slaveholders weren't interested in that option, for the most part. But compared to the alternative, it would certainly have been in their interest to make a peaceful conversion from being a wealthy master class to wealthy members of the rest of the capitalist class without slaves.

What's striking in Geneovese's formulation in the 1968 article is that he is arguing that the slaveowners had an equally valid moral viewpoint in using force against emancipation as the slaves had in fighting for it. This brings us back to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s point in the April 5 post that "there are certain essential issues on which it is necessary for the historian to have a position if he is to understand the great conflicts of history."

In this context, it's not reassuring to see Genovese noting, "even fascists may be men of strong principle, love of humanity, and clear conscience." Whether Lost Cause partisans would appreciate the implied comparison to the slaveowners is hard to guess.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south