Southern Cross - Review

National Review, August 9, 1999 by Forrest McDonald

Mr. McDonald, a professor of history at the University of Alabama, is writing a history of states' rights.

A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South, by Eugene D. Genovese (Georgia, 176 pp., $24.95)

Eugene Genovese has a firmer understanding of American slavery than any other living historian, and he has a rare capacity for conveying immense portions of that understanding in a minimum of words. It will therefore not surprise his admirers to learn that this superb little book of essays packs the weight of a lengthy tome.

Unlike other scholars, Genovese is convinced that the mass of southerners felt no guilt concerning ownership of slaves, accepting it as a fact of life, as ubiquitous in history, and above all as sanctioned by the Bible. Many, however, agonized about their inability to behave toward their slaves in accordance with the standards of humanity described in Scripture, whether Abrahamic or Christian. Their concern was not, as one might suppose, physical abuse or exploitation; they thought that abuse was rare, and they genuinely believed that northern workers were more mercilessly exploited without the cradle-to- grave security of the plantation system.

Rather, the evils that southerners saw as inherent in American slavery were two. The first was a legal system that prohibited teaching slaves to read, which ran directly counter to the masters' pious Protestantism. The other was what sorely vexed northern readers of Uncle Tom's Cabin: the destruction of families, the separation of husbands and wives and of parents and children by selling them "down the river."

Many slaveowners did, to be sure, ignore the law and educate their slaves. Moreover, during the 1850s a number of reform-minded slaveowners proposed laws placing slaves beyond seizure for debt, fixing slaves to the land regardless of their owners' fortunes, and giving legal recognition to the sanctity of slave families. But, as Genovese points out, efforts to enforce Biblical standards would necessarily have effected a social revolution. For example, legalizing and protecting slave marriages would have granted the right of contract to slaves and thereby destroyed the masters' patriarchical control. This they could not face, and many, fearing God's judgment of their stewardship, saw that judgment in the Civil War.

Genovese does not dismiss the slaveowners' plight-and it is a measure of his astuteness as a historian that, though abhorring slavery, he can see the institution from the owners' point of view-but he can muster no forgiveness for their instituting Jim Crow after emancipation. They had staunchly rejected as contrary to the Bible the Enlightenment's theory of polygenesis, the notion that blacks were a separate species, which some northern Democrats had embraced to justify supporting the party of slavery (Stephen A. Douglas: "I positively deny that the black man is my brother or any kin to me whatever").

Yet after Reconstruction, southern whites turned their backs on the Biblical teaching they had long espoused, embracing in its stead racist "mission to govern" doctrines that were just then spreading over the Western world. The result was to reduce freedmen to circumstances in some cases harsher even than they had known under slavery.

Genovese delivers his usual performance of erudition and heart.