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PARTISAN REVIEW
struggle their opponents called the War for Southern Independence,
they must seriously contemplate coming to terms with the principles of
the vanquished or themselves be lost. But it would seem closer to the
truth to say that essentially Genovese went up to Cambridge to tell his
audience that they must think about doing the same thing he has been
doing since he became "fascinated with southern history" as an
undergraduate at Brooklyn College: entertain the paradoxical possibility
of seriously considering the positive worth of a society that had once
associated the preservation of liberty with the preservation of a system of
chattel slavery, and later, having been forcibly deprived of the right to
own slaves, had insisted on economic and social policies that at the least
substantially deprived the freed men of the benefits of emancipation and
in many instances virtually re-enslaved them.
Yet to see
The Southern Tradition
as poised on such a simple histori–
cal irony belies its complexity. A rich distillation of the thinking of the
South that is embodied in a series of remarkable studies - including not
only his best-known works,
The World the Slaveholders Made
and
Roll,
Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made,
but also his joint work with
Elizabeth Fox Genovese in
The Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and
Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism
and a large
study-in-progress called
The Mil1d of the Planting Class
-
Genovese's most
recent book has a more personal dimension than any he has heretofore
written. It may be read as being, overtly so in moments and by implica–
tion throughout, the intellectual autobiography of a highly-gifted histo–
rian who has always understood - and understands even more keenly in
the maturity of his career - that the character of the teller of the tale is
an integral part of the tale. More than in his prior work, this is to say,
The Southern Tradition
is marked by Genovese's awareness of his identity
as a self-conscious actor in the drama of the history of the South and its
fateful connection with the history of the American Republic.
Concerned that his "sympathetic" and "respectful" reading of
Southern history may suggest to "people who understand nothing" that
he has himself become a Southern conservative, Genovese draws a dis–
tinction between being a Southerner and being a Southern partisan. If
he has elected to make his home among a people who "across lines of
race, class, and sex are as generous, gracious, courteous, decent - in a
word, civilized - as any people it has ever been my privilege to get to
know," he has, he says, yet remained an outsider. For that matter, he de–
clares, not only has he not become "a member of the southern conser–
vative camp," he has not become a conservative of any stripe. Having
"come out of the Marxist Left," he remains committed to "a lifelong
