The world the slaveholders made : two essays in interpretation by Genovese Eugene D. 1930-2012

Author:Genovese, Eugene D., 1930-2012
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fitzhugh, George, 1806-1881, Slavery, Esclavage, Historia Geral (Escravidao), Sklaverei, Historia Geral (Escravidao), Sklaverei, Slavery
Publisher: New York : Vintage Books
Published: 1971-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

evidence of rebelliousness toward authority? He asks, puzzles, and then offers an astonishing answer: The yeomen had absorbed the aristocratic ideals of those above them. 25

The njen who led the Confederacy were frontier-bred parvenus, but somehow the old aristocracies lingered on and helped shape the new ruling class: "But, by an irony of circumstance, as their power declined, the general influence of these aristocracies was in some fashion increased/' 26 No social process within the South accounts for this curiosity, except that which encouraged the Southerners to a fantasy life. Basically, the Yankee did it. His attack on slavery united the South in a romantic pose, separated it from reality, and caused it to look to its old gentlemen to provide a standard. The Yankee created the South, the ideological content of which was a romantic reaction to the outsider's impertinences.

That conflict, as has been said before me, was inevitable. And not only for the reasons known to every reader of American history, but finally and fundamentally for the reason that it is not the nature of the human animal in the mass willingly to suffer difference—that he sees in it always a challenge to his universal illusion of being the chosen son of heaven, and so an intolerable affront to his ego, to be put down at any cost in treasure and blood. 27

These pages of The Mind of the South, which Stampp calls the best introduction to the Old South, 28 betray a pathetic fascination with the romance of aristocracy. C. Vann Woodward alone seems to have discerned their true character and to have treated them with open contempt. 29 For Cash the planters could not have been an aristocracy because too many of them were not really genteel but acquisitive, vulgar, mean, foul-mouthed, and perhaps even unwashed. But, we may ask, what aristocracy ever arose from any other kind of men? W. E. B. Du Bois, who never suffered from a petty-bourgeois view of the upper classes, had no trouble with the parvenu planters, whom he called the "cursing, whoring, brawling gamblers" who dominated the South's ruling class in the

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