Slavery in White and Black
Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order

This book asks to what extent Southern slaveholders believed the doctrine that enslavement was the best possible condition for all labor.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (Author), Eugene D. Genovese (Author)

9780521897006, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 October 2008

332 pages
24.2 x 16.4 x 2.6 cm, 0.7 kg

'By forcing us to confront the historical ubiquity of slavery and the revolutionary novelty of wage labour, the Genoveses invite us to see the Civil War as a struggle over capitalism at least as much as a struggle over slavery.' London Review of Books

Southern slaveholders proudly pronounced themselves orthodox Christians, who accepted responsibility for the welfare of the people who worked for them. They proclaimed that their slaves enjoyed a better and more secure life than any laboring class in the world. Now, did it not follow that the lives of laborers of all races across the world would be immeasurably improved by their enslavement? In the Old South but in no other slave society a doctrine emerged among leading clergymen, politicians, and intellectuals - 'Slavery in the Abstract', which declared enslavement the best possible condition for all labor regardless of race. They joined the Socialists, whom they studied, in believing that the free-labor system, wracked by worsening class warfare, was collapsing. A vital question: to what extent did the people of the several social classes of the South accept so extreme a doctrine? That question lies at the heart of this book.

1. The impending collapse of capitalism
2. Hewers of wood, drawers of water
3. Travelers to the south, southerners abroad
4. The squaring of circles
5. The appeal to social theory
6. Perceptions and realities.

Subject Areas: Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], History of the Americas [HBJK]