| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese. The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 828. Cloth $70.00, paper $29.00.
This is a powerful study about powerful people. The book's length (792 pages divvied up among five parts and twenty-two chapters), its prose (muscular and pointed), its evidence (dauntingly impressive), its erudition (relentless), even its cover (biblical), all are intended to persuade readers of a central point, one captured by William H. Holcombe in 1861: "The whole Southern mind with an unparalleled unanimity regards the institution of slavery as righteous and just, ordained of God, and to be perpetuated by man" (p. 496). A Swedenborgian, Holcombe would be among the last to deny the diversity of southern thought, but the Natchez intellectual, like Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, saw the mental forest for the trees, insisting on the essential unity of the slaveholding mind.	1
The study is an elegant and persuasive unraveling of "the mind-set of people who feared that the advantages of capitalism and individualism were threatening to extract too high a price" (p. 3). To get to grips with that worldview, the authors offer deeply thoughtful discussions of the southern elite's attitudes toward pride, courage, duty, honor, chivalry, religion, slavery, freedom, capitalism, revolution, and theology and place the slaveholders in the broadest possible contexts. We learn what they thought about the Middle Ages and antiquity, how they understood the transatlantic revolutionary movements of 1789–1848, and what they thought of non-European cultures, too.	2
Fear was very much a key. Yes, the slaveholders were fiercely confident men, but they were careful readers of the past because they presided over a society increasingly out of step with modernity. "With few exceptions," we are told, "Southerners pronounced themselves simultaneously progressive and conservative" (p. 225), but the emphasis throughout is on conservatism. Threats loomed everywhere, most obviously to the north but also within. Theological liberalism and market capitalism slowly snaked their way into southern slaveholding society, even more than the authors concede.	. . .

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