Eugene Genovese on Slavery

October 25th, 2006

Eugene Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll stands as a major Marxist analysis of slavery in the United States. He analyzes many dimensions of slavery, including the role of religion among slaves and the development of paternalism in the US. Genovese sees slaves and their masters as closely linked, each shaping the other. He argues, “the slaves, as an objective social class, laid the foundations for a separate black national culture while enormously enriching American culture as a whole” (p. xv).

Genovese removed from the manuscript of Roll Jordan Roll revised versions of three addresses originally delivered as the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History at Louisiana State University and later published them separately as From Rebellion to Revolution. His thesis is that prior to the French and Haitian revolutions slave revolts were isolationist or restorationist in character but in the late eighteenth century they transformed into revolutionary movements aiming to end the slave system, adopting the ideology of freedom and equality espoused by the French revolution and other rebellions. In addition, Genovese examines the various factors that affected slave revolts and guerrilla warfare, aiding or hindering them in different parts of the hemisphere, paying close attention to the reasons why the US south had relatively few rebellions.

Genovese argues slave revolts in pre-capitalist societies did not have the end of the slave system as a whole as their goal but rather had had more limited aims, such as making their masters treat them better, achieving freedom only for those in revolt, or restoring an older social system modeled on African social systems. For example, maroon colonies typically imitated African social systems familiar to African-born slaves rather than creating wholly new social systems. They did not seek to overthrow the slave system but instead to withdraw from society and restore an older social order. Some even had their own slaves and made peace treaties allying with colonial powers, agreeing to return runaway slaves to their masters.

The Haitian revolution was the turning point. After Haiti isolationist revolts were phased out and replaced by revolutionary revolts, although a few isolationist revolts occurred after Haiti and some revolutionary revolts occurred before Haiti. Genovese views both the original creation of the Atlantic slave trade and the later transformation of slave revolts into revolutionary movements as a product of the decline of the old seigniorial mode of production and the rise of capitalism. He claims the revolutionary slave rebellions that arose in the late eighteenth century were the most radical wing of the bourgeois democratic revolutionary wave which swept the world at the end of the 18th century.