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PARTISAN REVIEW
taneous aversions is profoundly unhistorical.
If
revisionism has based
itself on the conviction that things would have been different if only
there had been no abolitionists, it has forgotten that abolitionism was
as definite and irrevocable a factor in the historic situation as was
slavery itself. And, just as abolitionism was inevitable, so too was the
southern reaction against it-a reaction which, as Professor Clement
Eaton has ably shown, steadily drove the free discussion of slavery out
of the South. The extinction of free discussion meant, of course, the
absolute extinction of any hope of abolition through internal reform.
2)
The economic exhaustion argument.
Slavery, it has been
pointed out, was on the skids economically. It was overcapitalized
and inefficient; it immobilized both capital and labor; its one-crop
system was draining the soil of fertility; it stood in the way of indus–
trialization.
As
the South came to realize these facts, a revisionist
might argue, it would have moved to abolish slavery for its own
economic good. As Craven put it, slavery "may have been almost
ready to break down of its own weight."
This argument assumed, of course, that southerners would have
recognized the causes of their economic predicament and taken the
appropriate measures. Yet such an assumption would be plainly con–
trary to history and to experience. From the beginning the South has
always blamed its economic shortcomings, not on its own economic
ruling class and its own inefficient use of resources, but on northern
exploitation. Hard times in the eighteen-fifties produced in the South,
not a reconsideration of the slavery system, but blasts against the
North for the high prices of manufactured goods. The overcapitaliza–
tion of slavery led, not to criticisms of the system, but to increasingly
insistent demands for the reopening of the slave trade. Advanced
southern writers like George Fitzhugh and James D. B. DeBow were
even arguing that slavery was adapted to industrialism. When Hinton
R. Helper did advance before the Civil War an early version of
Craven's argument, asserting that emancipation was necessary to
save the southern economy, the South burned his book. Nothing in
the historical record suggests that the southern ruling class was prepar–
ing to deviate from its traditional pattern of self-exculpation long
enough to take such a drastic step as the abolition of slavery.
3)
Compensated emancipation.
Abraham Lincoln made repeated
proposals of compensated emancipation. In his annual message to
