Book Review

Canada and the United States

This ambitious and eclectic work attempts to reconcile competing interpretations of the Old South by demonstrating that "corporate individualism," which combined elements of capitalism, bourgeois domesticity, and paternalism, was the ideology around which the southern planter class cohered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. According to Jeffrey Robert Young, the same transatlantic markets in capital and culture that spawned abolitionism also furnished South Carolina and Georgia planters with the reasons and the means to formulate and disseminate an aggressive defense of slavery. Planters cast slavery in familial terms, drawing heavily on bourgeois language of individual rights and domesticity, while at the same time emphasizing the claims of society on the individual and delimiting the rights of subordinate members of households. In a momentous, protracted act of collective self-deception (Young declares at one point that "slaveowners were in deep denial" [p. 174]), slaveholders convinced themselves and most other white southerners that African slavery was a respectable—even an admirable and indispensable—institution, one that protected the rights and promoted the happiness of all individuals according to their race, gender, and station. The ideology of corporate individualism legitimated planter rule in the South and, ultimately, justified the quest for southern independence.

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