Dost Thou Believe on the Son of God?

This is a rich book, full of my favorite type of literary/historical/ cultural/political/ religious analysis. It reads more like a collection of essays than a "single thesis" book, so I won't attempt to capture the whole book in a post or two. But I will post a few choice excerpts.

I'll begin with a rather lengthy chunk of Chapter 2: The Burden of Southern History and the Presence of Eternity within Time. In this section, Wood summarizes Eugene Genovese's nontraditional, but in my view right on target, analysis of the South. The "traditional" view in this reading is that the North was good and right and the South was bad and wrong and the War was all about slavery and racism.

Genovese's perspective helps show why we Southerners can hate and love our "heritage" all at the same time. Since this excerpt is so long, I'll make it longer by inserting a few observations/ explanations in "{}" brackets.

Genovese dissents from [the] standard liberal reading of both national and regional history {i.e., North = good and righteous; South = racist and reactionary}. What he discovered in the South's ablest thinkers is an argument that he first learned from Vilfredo Pareto {19th century Italian economist who should be better known! -- try Googling "Pareto optimality"} and that his Marxism {Genovese was a Marxist though he later moved far to the right} would never refute: human society is unavoidably hierarchical. Like the Marx whom they never knew, the slaveholding aristocrats and divines argued, with considerable cogency, that every society is inevitably stratified, that the laboring classes (whether white or black) will always be subordinated to the master classes, and yet that the masters are themselves accountable to God in their responsibility for the householders and servants and workers in their care. Here people are related to each other personally and not by the cash-nexus. {Keep reading -- I know at this point you're about to gag.}

To these tradition-loving Southerners, elitism was not a bad but a good thing. They acknowledged the superiority of some kinds of talent and effort and education over others. They believed in the ideal of noblesse oblige. They held that the weak must be protected by the strong, the poor by the wealthy rather than leaving them at the mercy of the market forces that would surely devour them {"justice and mercy", anyone?}. Thus did the slaveholders see themselves not as oppressors but as protectors and guardians of their slaves. They spoke of their chattels as members of "our family, white and black." "They described their ownership of slaves as a 'duty' and a 'burden,'" Genovese notes, "and were convinced that without the protection they offered the blacks would, literally, be exterminated in a marketplace in which they could not compete. David Hundley of Alabama was at once crystal clear and acidly ironic in putting the slaveholders' case:

It may be that the older order of things, the old relationship between landowner and villein, protected the latter from many hardships to which the nominal freemen of the nineteenth century are subjected by the blessed influences of free competition and the practical workings of the good old charitable and praiseworthy English maxim: "Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost."

Genovese argues that it was not only Southern vices but also Southern virtues that enabled the region to practice compulsory bondage. The slave-sanctioning theologians -- in fact, most of the slaveholders themselves -- were not monsters of self-interest but men of good will. {Every good 21st century American should re-read that last sentence two or three times!} It is not their gross sins, Genovese reveals, but their subtle self-contradictions that remain most significant. Setting out to be a traditionalist and humane society, the South became, uwittingly, a modernist and inhumane culture. For the South gradually embraced the most fundamental modern premise: the notion that everything can be commodified, even human life itself. To offset the ruthless capitalist urge that animated its life, the Southern conservative tradition proposed an allegedly benign paternalism. The aristocrat theologians of the South called on slaveholders to treat their slaves humanely, lest God be provoked to wrath. They urged masters to give their slaves the right to marry and thus to keep their families intact. They even argued that a benevolent Christian slavery was a means of evangelism, offering "the South [its] best hope for the vital work of preparation for the Kingdom." Slaves were held in trust, the theologians insisted. They were not to be brutalized as beasts, but treated as brothers and sisters in the eyes of the Lord, even if not in social and political fact. Richard Fuller, a Baptist minister from South Carolina, sternly warned slaveholders: "The Bible informs us what man is; and among such beings, irresponsible power is a trust too easily and too frequently abused."

Yet abuse was inevitable, and not only because slave owners had inherited the universal human proclivity for inhumane treatment of our own kind. Abuse was sure to come because the desire for a paternalistic protection of slaves could not survive in the new modern setting "of expanding capitalism, industrialization, bourgeois individualism, and Enlightenment liberalism." Southern slaves were not, in fact, sheltered serfs but private property. Despite many firm enjoinders to treat slaves according to the Golden Rule, the slave states removed nearly every humanizing amenity from slave life. As Genovese observes, they passed laws actually prohibiting slave literacy, lest perhaps, in learning to read, slaves might scan Scripture no less than abolitionist tracts. Georgia even prohibited slave ownership of paper and writing instruments. Most of these same Southern states refused also to recognize slave marriages, thus making it easy to break up slave families for the sake of profitable sales. Hence the poignant confession of John S. Wise, writing his postwar account of old Virginia life in The End of an Era, a rueful testimony that Genovese sums up succinctly: "The mere sight of [a slave auction] should have told Southerners that slavery was wrong." Abraham Lincoln was far more acerbic, as in this scorching response to Frederick Augustus Ross's Slavery Ordained of God (1857): "Nonsense! . . . Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it is good for the lambs!!!"

The heart of Genovese's accomplishment is to have uncovered the tragic irony underlying the entire Southern slave system. It was a complex three-pronged business. The aristocratic slaveholders sought to build a Christian republic that would retrieve the finest ideals not only of ancient Greece and Rome but also of medieval Europe. At least in this first regard, Allen Tate read them aright. Their cultural vision enabled them acutely to foresee, in the second place, that a triumphant market economy would eventually consume modern society itself, subjecting all spiritual traditions and moral values to commercial forces. As an alternative to such heartless Enlightenment economic individualism, Southern aristocrats sought to create an organic society built on radical mutual dependence, a high sense of personal and familiar honor, and a chivalric code of manners -- the entire enterprise being undergirded by the allegedly benign paternalism of master-slave relations. Tate made accurate judgments on this second score as well. Yet he misread the third and fatal quality of the Old South: its high cultural aims clashed with the economic means of achieving them. However much the South's aristocratic thinkers sought to liken their kind of slavery to medieval serfdom, the fact remained that the slave-plantations were the creation of the modern market system, the "young finance-capitalist economy" that we have heard Tate mistakenly attributing to the Reformation. This system was not driven by the much-touted mutuality of slave and master relations, Genovese demonstrates, but by the ruthless capitalist law of supply and demand, especially the demand "for human labor and the commodities which it produced." Thus was the South's venerable cultural ideal of a humane society tragically undermined by an economic system that was itself the product of the modern capitalistic culture that the Southern gentry abominated.

Not much else to say here; Genovese pretty much nailed it. I do find it extraordinarily ironic that modern leftist anti-corporate and anti-market sentiment (think Michael Moore for the extreme version) has so much in common with the pre-Civil War South in its understanding of the world. So the next time my lefty friends start in on Wal-Mart, I'll politely note that I'm surprised to hear them using the arguments of the Old South slaveholders and Southern partisan theologians. States' rights, anyone?