The Mind of the Master Class
History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview

The Mind of the Master Class tells of America's greatest historical tragedy.

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

9780521615624, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 17 October 2005

824 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 4.5 cm, 1.162 kg

'[Eugene D. Genovese] enlivened a stagnant field by bringing a Marxist analysis to the sectional conflict.' London Review of Books

The Mind of the Master Class tells of America's greatest historical tragedy. It presents the slaveholders as men and women, a great many of whom were intelligent, honorable, and pious. It asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that proved itself an enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves. The South had formidable proslavery intellectuals who participated fully in transatlantic debates and boldly challenged an ascendant capitalist ('free-labor') society. Blending classical and Christian traditions, they forged a moral and political philosophy designed to sustain conservative principles in history, political economy, social theory, and theology, while translating them into political action. Even those who judge their way of life most harshly have much to learn from their probing moral and political reflections on their times - and ours - beginning with the virtues and failings of their own society and culture.

Part I. Cradled in the Storms of Revolution: 1. 'That Terrible Tragedy'
2. The age of revolution through slaveholding eyes
3. 'The Purest Sons of Freedom'
Entr'Acte: the bonds of slavery
Part II. The Inescapable Past: 4. History as moral and political instruction
5. The slaveholders' quest for a history of the common people
6. World history and the politics of slavery
7. History as the story of freedom
Part III. Ancient Legacies, Medieval Sensibility, Modern Men: 8. In the shadow of antiquity
9. Coming to terms with the Middle Ages
10. The chivalry
11. Chivalric slave masters
12. Chivalric politics: Southern ladies take their stand
Part IV. A Christian People Defend the Faith: 13. A Christian people
14. Unity and diversity among the faithful
15. War over the Good Book
16. Slavery: proceeding from the Lord
17. The Holy Spirit in the word of God
18. Jerusalem and Athens - against Paris
19. Serpent in the garden: liberal theology in the South
20. Theopolitics: golden rule, higher law, and slavery
Coda: St. John of Pottawatamie
Part V. At the Rubicon: 21. Between individualism and corporatism: from the reformation to the war for Southern Independence
22. Past and future Caesars
Epilogue: King Solomon's dilemma.

Subject Areas: Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK]