Scarborough, William Kauffman. Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South

International Social Science Review, Fall-Winter, 2004 by John Herbert Roper

Scarborough, William Kauffman. Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. xviii 521 pp. Cloth, $39.95.

When a conservative Mississippian wins a lifetime-achievement award named in honor of black novelist Richard Wright, it is obvious that an unusual author is at work. When that same author is close friends with Marxist analysts Eugene Dominick Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and he has written a book disputing most of what his friends say, then the author and his work become still more intriguing. When the work in question took more than two decades of research in virtually every southern state and it stands as a career statement as much as anything else, then the author and his work merit attention. In fact, this is an epochal book that compels attention even and especially if a reader cannot agree with some of William Kauffman Scarborough's conclusions.

What he has done is to look very systematically at the planter elite--that is, those planters who owned at least 250 slaves. Earlier studies, following the Confederacy's own categories, have classified the elite as those planters having at least twenty slaves, and this distinction still seems useful in distinguishing planters from farmers who owned slaves, but it seems far too broad a net for a description of a ruling elite. Scarborough came to the designation himself after a career of research in the primary holdings; among other things, his tables of elite planters and his exacting count of their holdings are worth the price of admission to Masters of the Big House. In his always clean and often graceful narrative, Scarborough documents their concerns and methods, and above all else makes clear the sense of a common cause that they shared as a class. He insists that the preeminent cause held in common is a rock-fibbed commitment to slave labor. Above all, he says emphatically and repeats often that Southern slavery was grounded in assumptions of racial superiority and marked by racist abuses.

Scarborough notes correctly that his friends the Genoveses have established a "pre-capitalist" explanation of the elite planters in which such men are described as motivated by honor and tradition, almost-tribal family loyalties and highly personalistic local duties and responsibilities and privileges, and a profound sense of a class in which wealth is based on land and control of labor through a paternalistic set of relationships, all of which make them "pre-bourgeois" and "pre-capitalist," or in an oft-quoted line, "The South was in but not of the bourgeois world" (Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, p. 55). By contrast, a number of scholars have used neo-classical economics theories to show that the elite planters were, in fact, capitalists interested in maximizing profit by adapting new techniques as appropriate, by diversifying their holdings in wealth, by applying a self-interested logic to their management of their labor and their use of their land, and by entering almost gleefully into the full spirit of capitalist competition to lower costs of production and to raise their own share of the international markets, all borne out by this perspective in the remarkable returns on investment recorded for elite cotton planters in the decade of the 1850s when the price of cotton did not improve significantly but the margin of profit did. Most important of many such studies are those of James Oakes and Jane Turner Censer. Oakes is quoted to good effect in his argument to say, "Southern slave society emerged within rather than apart from the liberal capitalist world" (Oakes, The Ruling Race, pp. xii-xiii, quoted on p. 408).

In order to join this ongoing debate, Scarborough understands that he must first define what he means to say by the obviously controversial term "capitalism." As he notes, his friends the Genoveses and others, following Max Weber and Karl Marx, define capitalism in such a way that slave labor cannot be part of capitalism. Marx is quite clear that the agrarian slave system of the American South was anti-capitalist because of its organization of labor, but Weber is more blunt: "Exact calculation--the basis of everything else--is only possible on the basis of free labour" (Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans, by Talcott Parsons, p. 22). Scarborough simply disagrees and says, "I submit that capitalism is simply an economic system in which individuals invest capital, from whatever source and by whatever labor system derived, with the hope and expectation of generating additional capital" (p. 407).

By this standard, Scarborough offers abundant evidence that the elite slaveholders in this era were capitalists little different in their motivations, aspirations, and techniques than "their free-state counterparts" (p. 407). He gives many specific examples of language and actions that spring from capitalist assumptions and values, as he has defined the term "political economy." Planters buy slaves when the price per slave drops, and they treat land in much the same way: they do not hold onto slaves or land if the value drops. Furthermore, as elite planters expand their holdings dramatically, stretching across state lines with little of the storied southern passion for "placeness," they vary their investments far beyond the familiar land and labor, trading in New York and London stock exchanges much as do their "free-state counterparts."