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Legitimating Slavery in the Old South: The Effect of Political Institutions on Ideology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Richard J. Ellis
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Extract

“Hegemony” has become a fashionable catchword in a number of intellectual circles. One encounters it among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, even (or, perhaps, especially) literary critics. Many a frustrated radical finds it a useful explanation for the quiescence of the masses. Marxist scholars frequently see it as a liberating departure from Marx's economic reductionism. More mainstream social scientists often detect little harm in it, since the notion that people are not ruled by force alone, but also by ideas, seems highly congruent with what they have learned from Max Weber and Talcott Parsons.

Type
Research Note
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Fall 1991 , pp. 340 - 351
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

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19. Ibid., p. 10.

20. James H. Hammond of South Carolina, for instance, argued that because “free labor is cheaper than slave labor…we must, therefore, content ourselves with…the consoling reflection, that what is lost to us is gained to humanity” (Stampp, Kenneth M., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South [New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1956], p. 383)Google Scholar.

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29. Nott, Alabama's most prominent proslavery ideologue, was the leading exponent of the ethnological justification of slavery. “Niggerology,” as Nott liked to describe his field of study, attempted to establish scientifically that blacks were a separate and inferior species. At the same time, Nott celebrated the Declaration of Independence as “the chart by which the Anglo-Saxon race sails” (Fredrickson, Black Image, pp. 78–82). The logic was compelling: if all people are created equal, science must be set the unsavory task of proving that those who are enslaved are not people.

30. Thornton, Politics and Power, pp. 204–27.

31. Fredrickson, Black Image, p. 61.

32. In addition to the paternal ideologists already listed above, one could add the names of Abel Upshur, James H. Thornwell, Thomas Cooper, Christopher G. Memminger, Duff Green, David Gavin, George McDuffie, and Alfred Huger.

33. Roark, James L., Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 16Google Scholar. Also see Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, p. 330.

34. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, esp. part 3.

35. Thornton, Politics and Power, pp. 11–12. The county judge, who served ex officio as the fifth member and chairman, was made popularly elected in 1850. At the same time, the election of circuit judges was also given to the people (ibid., pp. 12, 59).

36. Chandler, Julian A. C., The History of Suffrage in Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1901), p. 22Google Scholar. Also see Pole, J. R., “Representation and Authority in Virginia from the Revolution to Reform,” in Paths to the American Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 36–37, 40Google Scholar.

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38. Ibid., pp. 39–40.

39. See, e.g., Swindler, William F., Government by the People: Theory and Reality in Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), p. 34Google Scholar; Bruce, Rhetoric of Conservatism, p. xv; Sydnor, Southern Sectionalism, pp. 286–87; and Jordan, Daniel P., Political Leadership in Jefferson's Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), p. 214Google Scholar.

40. Sydnor, Southern Sectionalism, pp. 288–89.

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43. Thornton, Politics and Power, pp. 62, 66.

44. Ibid., pp. 15, 17, 33, 43.

45. Ibid., p. 223.

46. Bruce, Rhetoric of Conservatism, p. xiv. Also see Upton, Anthony F., “The Road to Power in Virginia in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 62 (07 1954): esp. pp. 278–79Google Scholar.

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49. Ibid., pp. 95–97.

50. Ibid., p. 98.

51. Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought, p. 191.

52. Fitzhugh, George, Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters, ed. Woodward, C. Vann (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960Google Scholar; originally published 1857). Ironically, Fitzhugh dedicated Cannibals All to Governor Wise, a gesture that dramatically symbolized the increasingly shrill voice of paternalism trying desperately to win the ear of the Herrenvolk ideologist in power.

53. Greenberg, “Representation and Isolation,” p. 740.

54. See Faust, Hammond, pp. 349, 353.

55. See, e.g., Schultz, Nationalism and Sectionalism, pp. 3–25; Greenberg, “Revolutionary Ideology”; and Taylor, Rosser Howard, “The Gentry of Ante-Bellum South Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 17 (04 1940): 114–31Google Scholar.

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57. Green, Constitutional Development, p. 262.

58. Channing, Stephen A., Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970)Google Scholar.

59. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, esp. ch. 9.

60. See Roark, Masters Without Slaves, esp. pp. 21–23.

61. Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955)Google Scholar, part 4.

62. Roark, Masters Without Slaves, p. 24.