The Paternal Institution

...Be that as it may, the house servants, usually mulattoes, were more secure and, if sold, were more likely to be traded with their spouses and children...

...Elkins, in addition to his comparative and economic analyses, discussed the South's "peculiar institution" from the perspective of personal character...

...And because any genuine rendering of the black experience must also deal with the whites, Genovese makes a point of presenting the slaveholders "not as monsters but as human beings with solid virtues of their own...

...It might be guessed that betrayal would prompt a much stronger feeling than courage...

...Actually, the sources cited to prove a greater degree of miscegenation in the city should be balanced against internal evidence indicating its prevalence in rural surroundings...

...Paternalism's insistence upon mutual obligations . . . implicitly recognized the slaves' humanity...

...They saw plantation wives and children, and lower-class whites, deferring to the owners...

...Genovese maintains, against Fogel and Engerman, that the plantatation system, built on traditional attitudes, succeeded only because it existed in a capitalist world market...

...Where Phillips saw the faithful slave as ennobled by his loyalty to his master, Stampp sees him as suspect for his disloyalty to his fellow slaves...

...Kenneth Stampp's 1956 investigation, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, was, in the words of the late David Potter, "the first to treat slavery primarily in terms of what it meant to the slave...

...Genovese, of course, is not the first white historian to attempt the reconstruction of this black universe, yet it should be pointed out that scholars really began making the effort only recently...

...He then goes on to deny that a feeling of guilt was involved: White Southerners "felt guilt about everything...

...Degeneration, Genovese suggests, took place afterward, in the black ghettos of the North...

...For decades, the standard work on the subject was American Negro Slavery, written in 1918 on the very heels of Jim Crow legislation by a Southerner, Ulrich B. Phillips...

...Genovese finds "no evidence" that black masculinity was undermined by slavery...

...Where Phillips stressed the constructive value of plantation life as a means for inducting the African into the religion, the agricultural skills, the disciplines, culture and social institutions of Western Europe, Stampp condemns this life for its static effect in denying to the Negro access to the learning, the family stability, or the human opportunity of which it made him a witness...

...she detested it...

...My own opinion - somewhere between those of the academic historians and my layman friend's - is that while Roll, Jordan, Roll is unquestionably innovative and monumental, it is also open to criticism of various kinds...

...Genovese adds complexity to the debate, giving us an account that, in comparison with Phillips and Stampp, is richer in evidence, more sophisticated analytically and more knowledgeable about human relations...

...It stands on its own scholarship, and can already be called a landmark in the social history of slavery...

...Until the age of eight the single chore required of them was taking care of one another, which "built a sense of black community and minimized the necessity for contact with parents...

...He also asserts that the owners' characterization of blacks as lazy was merely a replay of a time-honored ruling-class posture toward the poor...

...As for the slaves, Genovese describes them more sympathetically here than he did in The Political Economy of Slavery...

...Whereas the masters of the ante-bellum South viewed Christianity as an instrument of social control, the blacks responded to its emphasis on individual dignity and worth...

...It was reaffirmed last year by R. W. Fogel and S. L. Engerman in Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, though Genovese attacked this position nine years earlier in The Political Economy of Slavery...

...The slaves rejected white ministers for black preachers, whose reliance on tone, gesture and rhythm tapped the emotionalism of congregations, bringing to Christianity from Africa "a life-affirming faith that stressed shame and minimized guilt...

...In this way, paternalism transformed "elements of personal dependency into a sense of collective weakness...

...Privacy was thus a value more respected in the quarters than in the Big House...

...In any case, the slaves of Roll, Jordan, Roll, ironically enough, appear considerably less human than their fallible masters...

...He concluded that the quasi-feudal institutions of church and state protected the slave in South America, whereas an unrestricted capitalistic system offered no safeguards to the bondsmen of North America...

...He defends, too, the reputation of the quarter of a million free Negroes in the South, whose condition varied from full citizenship in some states to legal dependency in others...

...Building on the research of the Latin American historian Frank Tannenbaum, Elkins asked why slavery took different forms in the United States and Brazil...

...Genovese laments that the leadership qualities of these men, and of the black preachers, experts in the art of compromise, were not called upon after emancipation...

...As a matter of fact, he believes black women worked at building the self-esteem of black men, thus achieving "a closer approximation to a healthy sexual equality than was possible for whites...

...This, Genovese maintains, was the cement of the slave society...

...He enjoyed going to the blacks' Christmas ball...

...Planters even went so far as to discourage their male rivals - white overseers and other lower-class white men - from liaisons with black women...

...He is even more emphatic about the survival of black men...

...But neither had the planters internalized the idea...

...That the cotton economy functioned as well as it did was in many respects the result of the abilities of black overseers and drivers-the first group often carrying on for absentee owners, the second pushing their fellow slaves to labor, yet mediating between the black and white worlds, upholding order as humanely as possible...

...Still, it was possible to grow up believing that the master was kind and fatherly, simply to discover later that he was harsh, unfeeling and demanding...

...Altogether, this burdenless early existence reinforced their acceptance of paternalism...

...On the one hand, he contends that slaveholders simply could not view their property as inanimate or even subhuman, only as inferior...

...The argument that slavery was a genuinely profitable venture, comparable to Northern industrialism, was initially advanced by A. H. Conrad and J. R. Meyer in 1957...

...Yet within the relationship, blacks "drew their own lines, asserted rights and preserved their self-respect...

...It does sound like guilt...

...One wonders whether these disparate portraits result from the nature of the sources, a previous literature that denigrated blacks or a bit of paternalism on the author's part...

...Furthermore, appreciating the protection afforded by the system, each slave identified with and exalted his particular master, thereby dealing a crucial blow to potential black solidarity...

...A plantation mistress wrote to a friend: "I dread to go home and have to take care of our servants again...

...Although Genovese has found no case of white women being sexually violated by male servants, "black girls and young women ran the risk of being forced or tempted into intimacies by their masters, and especially by their masters' sons...

...Rather, as they presided over a system that was "a halfway house between peasant and factory cultures," they tried to preserve an aristocratic way of life for themselves, while instilling shop discipline into rural workers attuned to the rhythms of nature...

...Still, blacks accepted the paternalistic relationship...

...The intimacy of the Big House showed the phenomenon at its best and, as love turned into lust, at its worst...

...This seemingly arbitrary division may be due to his surprising assertion that interracial sex "primarily occurred outside the plantation heartland," in the towns and cities where white males outnumbered white females, and black females outnumbered black males - although "white women of all classes had black lovers and sometimes husbands in all parts of the South...

...In Roll, Jordan, Roll, he is concerned with "the centrality of class relations as manifested in paternalism...

...Self-deception abounded...

...Malcolm X used to talk about the "house niggers" and the "field Negroes," adding about the latter: "Remember, they were the masses...

...It is estimated that between 13-20 per cent of the Afro-American population had white ancestry in 1860, compared to 75 per cent today...

...Although planters had the right to interfere with slave families (a power conceded by the black preacher, who concluded the marriage ceremony with: "Till death or buckra part you"), they normally recognized the social and economic wisdom of marital stability in the quarters...

...Roll, Jordan, Roll attempts to absolve the slave personality from this charge and to give it dimensions of its own...

...Most important to the message of Roll, Jordan, Roll, associations between the white slaveholders and the house servants clearly illustrated the workings of paternalism...

...Once Caesar received his due, Genovese remarks, God summoned forth "a militant defense of the freedom of the spirit and the autonomy of the personality...

...The best example was the mammy, who "had absorbed the paternalist ethos and accepted her place in a system of reciprocal obligations defined from above...

...Husband and wife together "felt the need to preserve as much delicacy as possible in their love-making and protect their children from seeing more than they should...

...In his Preface, Genovese declares: "Many years of studying the astonishing effort of black people to live decently as human beings even in slavery has convinced me that no theoretical advance suggested in their experience could ever deserve as much attention as that demanded by their demonstration of the beauty and power of the human spirit under conditions of extreme oppression...

...15.00 Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, San Francisco State University To a friend of mine, a psychoanalyst who wanted to know more about family life in the American South, I recommended Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll...

...These same women, however, could become dependent on their slaves to the point of helplessness...

...Moreover, Genovese feels compelled to return to an argument that ran through his earlier work but is out of place here...

...This, notes Genovese, required of a slave "the courage to admit having been taken...

...Instead of holding them responsible for the retardation of industrialism, he now concludes that they toiled according to "their own labor theory of value...

...Given the acknowledged one-sidedness of interracial sexual relations in the rural South, a master's wife typically had a harsher attitude toward slaves than did her husband - and particularly toward his slaves...

...Elkins' contention that a capitalistic spirit pervaded the South has endured, too, having become the major tenet of the so-called cliometric revolution in scholarship...

...He affirms the preeminence of class over race in the ante-bellum South (slave revolts he labels "class war under the most unfavorable conditions"), a claim that is unproven and will probably remain so until we know more about the lower-class whites who were held in check by paternalism, and about the dynamics of social relations after emancipation, when the paternalistic system was crippled...

...Such behavior, Genovese adds, was accentuated by the African "shame culture," which already gave blacks a feeling of inadequacy...

...Fraught with internal contradictions-kindness existed with cruelty, affection with hatred, harmony with violence - it was nonetheless ultimately beneficent because complementary and ameliorating...

...This willingness to generalize about the world the slaves made and to idealize its black inhabitants stands in marked contrast to Genovese's depiction of the wide range of attitudes and behavior he attributes to the slaveholders...

...And while the sexual codes brought from Africa were not attuned to the Judeo-Christian tradition, it would be false to say slaves were promiscuous...

...Since Genovese has earned the reputation of a controversial theoretician (a self-proclaimed Marxist, he was a cause celebre at Rutgers in 1964 when he called for a Vietcong victory), a reader suspects there must be an argument lurking somewhere beneath all of the prose...

...One woman, Mary Boykin Chestnut, observed: "Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody's household but her own...

...It is striking," Potter continued, "that where Stampp coincides with Phillips in all the elements he recognizes, he differs from Phillips on almost every question of emphasis or degree...

...On the other hand, he says, the "masters desperately needed the gratitude of their slaves in order to define themselves as moral human beings...

...Owing to their sexual vulnerability, he states, black women "paid a higher price than the white women or the men, white and black," but he asserts that "the black women seem to have protected their independence better than the white...

...Contributing to their "collective pride and identity" was the buoyant power of religion...

...Roll, Jordan, Roll is original and provocative...

...Yet for all the contradictions and human destructiveness contained in the paternalistic ethos, Genovese reports that slave families were remarkably stable and strong, a conclusion echoed in John Blassingame's less thoroughly researched The Slave Community (1972...

...Urban life may have moved at a "faster pace," as Genovese alleges, but it is hard to believe it operated in a "looser manner" than countryside existence...

...The South's paternalism dictated not only white over black but man over woman...

...Slaves in the ante-bellum South had healthier childhoods than their lower-class counterparts in contemporaneous peasant and industrial societies...

...The promiscuity within the Big House apparently fostered neurotic-ism among white mistresses...

...Into their teens slaves frequently slept in the same room and occasionally in the same bed as their owners...

...During the next four years they had light duties...

...his explanation of the masters motives for adopting it is confusing...

...After he had been at the book for a week or two, he observed: "It's awfully polemical and it's too long, but it's filled with fascinating details...

...I saw this reaction as a revealing counterpoint to the rave reviews the study has received from the professional fraternity...

...Existing evidence cannot sustain the charge of widespread marital infidelity, which may in fact largely reflect perceptions of post-bellum conditions of social disorganization...

...But everything in this respect equals nothing...

...and, drawing an analogy between Jews in concentration camps and blacks in slavery, he asserted that the powerlessness of the slaves produced "Sambos" - individuals who were childlike, irresponsible, lazy, and wholly dependent on the white masters...

...Consequently, a paternalistic relationship was logical...

...Perhaps the most controversial study to emerge in the interim was Stanley Elkins' Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959...

...Stampp portrayed paternalism as an entirely one-sided relationship, "in most cases merely a kind of leisure-class family indulgence of its domestics...

...Black boys and girls not only wore coarse dresses but ate at a trough...

...Although the finding that race relations were better in Brazil than in the United States has since been qualified, Elkins' comparative approach has endured, and Roll, Jordan, Roll makes its own contribution to the method by frequently if unsystematically contrasting Southern slaves with European serfs and peasants, and with workers in the northern U.S...

...The admixture produced neither escapism (Heaven was not holding a promise of pie in the sky by and by) nor millenarianism (utopia could not be created on earth), but a religion of resistance and of joy...

...But Genovese contends that the masters had to legitimize slavery through a rationalization - they had to believe that the blacks needed their owners' care and protection-and argues that this rationalization "constituted a moral victory for the slaves themselves...

...In Roll, Jordan, Roll, he challenges it again, albeit with less vehemence...

...There were, to be sure, evident injustices...

...Not surprisingly, the Protestant concept of work as a duty or calling had little meaning to the slaves...

...But Genovese points to the bonds between the two, not the least of which were family ties...

...In 1969, with The World the Slaveholders Made, he confronted the masters much less personally, arguing that "slavery must be understood primarily as a class question and only secondarily as a race or narrowly economic question...

...Of all the blacks, Genovese is most attracted to those slaves who worked in the Big House on the plantation...

...Reportedly the volume was twice the current length when it reached the publisher, and even in its present abbreviated form it verges on the unmanageable...

...An effort is required to find it, but indeed there is: Roll, Jordan, Roll, better on the second reading than the first, is dedicated to the proposition that an ethos of paternalism molded "the world the slaves made...

...Nor was "Afro-Christianity" purely a European derivative...

...Genovese later comments: "Almost every slaveholder claimed to trust his own slaves but to fear his neighbor's...

...The dresses that black boys and girls on the plantations wore until they were 12 often did not cover their genitals...

...Far from being poverty-stricken and crime-ridden, he declares, they held "an honorable and useful place in the Southern economy...

...The very "self-image" of the slaveholder rested on his regard for his charges as both a duty and a burden, as well as his professed belief that, after all, man had always enslaved his fellow man...

...and like paternalism, religion was susceptible to interpretation...

...Genovese insists that blacks weathered the experience of slavery with psyches intact...

...Despite his reputation as a Marxist, however, Genovese's most pressing concern here is psychological, not economic...

...Where Phillips felt that, on the whole, masters were decent, slaves contented and living conditions wholesome, Stampp regards harshness, misery and exploitation as predominant...

...Genovese's case for the existence of paternalism is persuasive...

...When white children started off to school, some blacks became body servants to former playmates ("I had to walk alongside de horse to carry his books...

...Genovese, unfortunately, discusses domestic relations quite separately from miscegenation...

...Not only has he slaved in the primary sources, he has, as well, in the years separating his book from Stampp's, been the beneficiary of a vast literature that raised new questions and employed new techniques...

...The slaves absolutely required faith "if they were to resist being transformed into the Sambos they had been programed to become...

...Fortunately, Genovese's reputation will not hinge on his consideration of these unresolved issues...