Excerpt from “The Excuse of Paternalism in the Antebellum South: Ideology or Practice”

INTRODUCTION: The following is excerpted from “The Excuse of Paternalism in the Antebellum South” by Josh Cole.  It describes the skewed view of paternalism to justify the institution.  Cole examines the idea as described by Historian Eugene Genovese.  What is paternalism? What are the holes in this idea that Cole also provides?  (In the full article he provides many more counter arguments based on evidence from accounts of enslaved people.)

Slavery was a major economic contributor to slaveholders in the antebellum South. Their livelihood depended on it, and slaves were exploited as much as possible in order to benefit their white masters. Abolitionists, mostly in the North, viewed the institution of slavery as a non-Christian practice that took advantage of a less fortunate group of people simply because of their skin color. They thought that the small amount of slaveholders present in the South treated their slaves inhumanely and committed atrocities that had no place in the states. Historian Eugene Genovese re-examined the master-slave relationship a few decades ago. He agreed with past historians that slavery was a cruel institution that treated the slaves unfairly. However, he believed that extreme forms of mistreatment were very minor. Genovese introduced slave-owner “paternalism,” not a good, painless, or benign slavery, but a slavery in which masters took personal interest in the lives of their slaves.^[1]

Genovese believes that paternalism “brought white and black together and welded them into one people with genuine elements of affection and intimacy.”^[2] It was a compromise between master and slave–the master would provide for the slave as long as the slave produced for him.  This sense of paternalism that Genovese mentions was a self-justifying ideology and, with a few exceptions, not a very visible practice in the slaveholding South. The institution of slavery was meant to fully exploit the slaves, while the ideology allowed whites to exercise their “superior” status with relatively no guilty conscience. Compromise involved the participation of both master and slave, and most slaves in the South did not agree to this pact. They did everything in their power to defy the master’s authority due to their own brutal conditions and treatment by whites.

The ideology of paternalism meant that the masters took care of their slaves because they were personally attached to them. Genovese believes that this was especially true because slaves were given an abundant supply of food by their masters, and they retained a plentiful, if not nutritionally, balanced diet. Also, he points out that medical care on the plantations exceeded that of Southern whites, and slaves were relatively healthy under the care of their worried masters.^[3]   Masters closely governed the nature of slave life on their plantations; this was a central feature to Genovese’s paternalism. He states that slaves had many outside contacts with whites that extended far beyond the exploitation of labor.

Further Reading

Full article can be found in the journal Historia (volume 15, 2006) published by Easter Illinois University.