and Southern History: The Work of Eugene Genovese March 25, 2011 Friday Aaron Burr Hall 219 James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

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James Madison Program Slavery and Southern History: in American Ideals and Institutions The Work of Eugene Genovese A One-Day Conference Cosponsored by the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study

1 James Madison Program Slavery and Southern History: in American Ideals and Institutions The Work of Eugene Genovese A One-Day Conference Cosponsored by the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University Friday March 25, 2011 Aaron Burr Hall 219 James Madison Program In American Ideals and Institutions Princeton University 83 Prospect Avenue Princeton, NJ 08540

3 Presented by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions Cosponsored by the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University Slavery and Southern History: The Work of Eugene Genovese

4 Slavery and Southern History: The Work of Eugene Genovese Was the American Civil War (the War for Southern Independence) a civilizational struggle? In the sectional struggle that cost more than 600,000 American lives, was the wage-labor North or the slaveholding South the historical aberration? Which side had the strongest case that they were fighting to uphold the values of the American Revolution? If the defense of slavery precipitated southern secession, what did the majority of adult southern men and women, who were non-slaveholders, fight for? In what sense was the Civil War (War for Southern Independence) a struggle over conflicting interpretations of the Bible and the meaning of Christian civilization? Was the greatest conflict in United States history in essence a clash between capitalist and noncapitalist systems? How did southern slave society differ from other slaveholding societies? Did the master-slave relation foster a set of beliefs and values that put the antebellum South in, but not of, an expanding, globalizing capitalist system? If the antebellum South existed as a modern, progressive slaveholding republic, what were the essentials of its worldview and its legacy for the United States? Did the antebellum South generate a distinctive conservative tradition and what is the relevance of that tradition to current problems of liberty, justice, and limited government? To discuss these questions so central to our national history, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions presents a conference on the work of Eugene

5 D. Genovese, one of the most influential historians of his generation and the foremost historian of slavery in the antebellum South. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), a monumental work of historical scholarship, remains the most penetrating study ever written of the masterslave relation in the Old South. More recently, Genovese has authored and co-authored (with his late wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese) a remarkable trilogy of books, The Mind of the Master Class (2005), Slavery in White and Black (2008), and Fatal Self-Deception (2011) that has sensitively and painstakingly reconstructed the political thought of southern slaveholders. We are pleased to bring together a distinguished group of scholars to assess Dr. Genovese s contributions to the study of slavery, conservative political thought, and American history. The conference is cosponsored by the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and Princeton University s Center for African American Studies.

6 Conference Schedule 9:45 a.m. Welcome by Robert P. George, Director of the James Madison Program 9:50 a.m. Introduction by Robert L. Paquette, Director of the Alexander Hamilton Institute 10:00 11:45 a.m. EUGENE GENOVESE ON RELIGION AND SLAVERY Chair: Lisa N. Drakeman, James Madison Program, Princeton University Presenter: E. Brooks Holifield, Emory University Respondents: H. Lee Cheek, Athens State University Douglas Ambrose, Hamilton College 1:15 3:00 p.m. EUGENE GENOVESE ON SLAVERY AND THE MASTER-SLAVE RELATIONSHIP Chair: Alan C. Petigny, James Madison Program, Princeton University; University of Florida Presenter: Mark Smith, University of South Carolina Respondents: Robert L. Paquette, Hamilton College Fay A. Yarbrough, University of Oklahoma

7 3:15 4:45 p.m. EUGENE GENOVESE ON THE MEANING OF SOUTHERN CONSERVATISM Chair: Thomas (Tad) Watson Brown, Jr., President, Watson-Brown Foundation Presenter: Mark Malvasi, Randolph-Macon College Respondents: John Shelton Reed, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, David Moltke-Hansen, University of South Carolina Conference Discussants David Chappell, Rothbaum Professor of Modern American History, University of Oklahoma Stacey Horstmann Gatti, Assistant Professor of History, Long Island University Susan E. Hanssen, Garwood Visiting Fellow, James Madison Program; Associate Professor of History, University of Dallas Darren M. Staloff, Professor of History, City College of New York

8 Participants Conference Participants Douglas Ambrose is Professor of History at Hamilton College, where he has taught since He is a charter Fellow of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, NY. His publications include Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South; Of Stations and Relations: Proslavery Christianity in Early National Virginia, in Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery, edited by John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay; Sowing Sentiment: Shaping the Southern Presbyterian Household, , Georgetown Law Journal Volume 90 no. 1 (November 2001); and The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America s Most Elusive Founding Father, a volume he co-edited with Robert W. T. Martin. Professor Ambrose holds a Ph.D. in History from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Thomas (Tad) Watson Brown, Jr. is President of WatsonBrown Foundation, Inc., founded in 1970 and based in Thomson, Georgia, with the mission of improving education in the American South by funding its schools and students, preserving its history, encouraging responsible scholarship, and promoting the memory and values of our spiritual founders. He serves as Chairman of the Georgia College and State University Foundation, and is a Trustee of the Georgia Humanities Council, the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, and the Augusta Museum of History. Mr. Brown is Director of Mercer University Press and a member of the President s Advisory Board at Wofford College in Spartanburg, Virginia. He received his B.A. in History form Florida State University in 1988.

9 H. Lee Cheek, Jr. is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Political Science and Religion at Athens State University. His books include Political Philosophy and Cultural Renewal; Calhoun and Popular Rule; Calhoun: Selected Speeches and Writings; Order and Legitimacy; an edition of Calhoun s A Disquisition on Government; a critical edition of W. H. Mallock s The Limits of Pure Democracy; a monograph on Wesleyan theology; and an edition of Francis Graham Wilson s classic study, A Theory of Public Opinion. Professor Cheek s current research includes completing an intellectual biography of Francis Graham Wilson, a study of the American Founding, and a book on Patrick Henry s constitutionalism and political theory. He is Founder and Director of the Wesley Studies Society, and currently serves on the editorial boards of Humanitas, the Political Science Reviewer, and The University Bookman. Professor Cheeks is a Senior Fellow of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and a Fellow of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. He received his Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America.

10 Lisa N. Drakeman is a member of the Advisory Council of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and of the Graduate School Leadership Council, was Co-Chair of Princeton s Religion Department Advisory Council, and has served as a Lecturer in Princeton s Religion Department. Dr. Drakeman devoted her career to the biotech industry and was involved in the development of four FDA approved products for unmet medical needs. She is the retired CEO of Genmab, the company that created and developed Arzerra, a novel cancer therapy for patients with the most common form of leukemia. Dr. Drakeman has received a number of awards and honors, including being named Advocate of the Year by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, Industry Woman of the Year by the Biotechnology Council of New Jersey, and being inducted in the New Jersey High Technology Hall of Fame. She also received the Dr. Sol J. Barer Award for Vision, Innovation and Leadership from BioNJ. Dr. Drakeman received her Ph.D. in the History of American Religion from Princeton University, working under the direction of John Wilson and Al Raboteau. One of her fields of concentration was African American Religion.

11 Robert P. George holds the McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence and is the founding director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is the author of In Defense of Natural Law, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, and The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion and Morality in Crisis, and co-author of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life and Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics. He has served on the President s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served on UNESCO s World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology, of which he continues to be a corresponding member. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. Professor George is a recipient of many honors and awards, including the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Sidney Hook Memorial Award of the National Association of Scholars, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement and the Stanley Kelley, Jr. Teaching Award from Princeton s Department of Politics. He was the 2007 John Dewey Lecturer in the Philosophy of Law at Harvard, the 2008 Judge Guido Calabresi Lecturer in Law and Religion at Yale, the 2008 Sir Malcolm Knox Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, and the 2010 Frank Irvine Lecturer in Law at Cornell University. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he holds a doctorate in philosophy of law from Oxford University.

12 E. Brooks Holifield is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of American Church History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he has taught in the Candler School of Theology since He is the author of seven books, including, most recently, God s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America, which received the Book of the Year Award from the American Academy of Parish Clergy, and Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War, which won the Outler Prize of the American Society of Church History. He has held three sabbatical fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, in addition to sabbatical fellowships from the Pew Endowment, the Louisville Institute, and the Henry Luce III Fellowship Program. In 2010 Professor Holifield was named Emory University s Teacher/Scholar of the Year. He holds a Ph.D. in Church History from Yale University. Mark G. Malvasi joined the faculty of Randolph-Macon College in 1992, where, since 2007, he has been the Isaac Newton Vaughan Professor of History. He is the author or editor of several scholarly books, essays, editorials, and reviews. Among his books are The Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson, and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere, c He is currently completing a study of the southern novelist and essayist Andrew Lytle for ISI Books and is at work on a memoir about his career as a musician entitled Your Secret s Safe with Me. Under the direction of Eugene D. Genovese, he received his B.A. from Hiram College, his M.A. in History from University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.

13 David Moltke-Hansen is General Editor of the forthcoming five-volume selected writings of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. He is currently director of the project to produce a digital edition and bibliography of preeminent antebellum southern writer William Gilmore Simms. He also is editor, with Mark W. Smith, of Cambridge Studies on the American South. After thirty years developing and overseeing historical and regional programs, collections, and institutions, in Charleston, Chapel Hill, and Philadelphia, he retired in 2007 to write and edit. His focus is southern intellectual and cultural history, identities, and experience. He is at work on two related books for the Johns Hopkins and Cambridge University presses. Robert L. Paquette is co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York. From 1994 until 2011, he held the Publius Virgilius Rogers Professorship in American History at Hamilton College. He has published dozens of books and articles on the history of slavery. His Sugar Is Made with Blood won the Elsa Goveia Prize, given every three years by the Association of Caribbean Historians for the best book in Caribbean history. More recently, his essay Of Facts and Fables: New Light on the Denmark Vesey Affair (co-authored with Douglas Egerton) won the Malcolm C. Clark Award, given by the South Carolina Historical Society. He has co-edited (with Stanley Engerman) The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion; (with Louis A. Ferleger) Slavery, Secession, and Southern History; (with Stanley Engerman and Seymour Drescher) Slavery; (with Mark M. Smith) The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2010);

14 and, with Rebecca J. Fox, Unbought Grace : An Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Reader. He is currently working on A Grand Carnage, a study of the largest slave insurrection in United States history and, with Douglas Egerton, Court of Death: A Documentary History of the Denmark Vesey Affair. In 2005, the University of Rochester invited him to return to his alma mater to receive the Mary Young Award for distinguished achievement. From 2006 to 2008, Professor Paquette served on the Scholars Council of the Jack Miller Center. In 2008 he was appointed to the advisory board of the Cobb Forum on Southern Jurisprudence and Intellectual Thought of the Watson-Brown Foundation. That same year President George W. Bush forwarded his nomination to the Senate for a seat on the National Council on the Humanities. He received his Ph.D. with honors in 1982 from the University of Rochester. Alan C. Petigny, is Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University and Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida, where he has taught since He is the author of The Permissive Society: America, , published by Cambridge University Press in He has written articles and review essays for such publications as the Journal of Social History, the Mailer Review, Reviews in American History, American Heritage Magazine, Historically Speaking, The Woodson Review, and the Canadian Review of American Studies. He has previously held fellowships at both Princeton and Rutgers University and, on two occasions, he has been a visiting Professor at Korea University. In his year at Princeton, Professor Petigny is focusing on his next book that examines the intersection among race, religion, and

15 politics in America during the late sixties and early seventies. Before becoming an academic, he worked as a policy analyst for the U.S. Congress s Joint Economic Committee. He was also an award-winning reporter for a public radio station based in Tampa, Florida, contributing material to both Florida Public Radio and National Public Radio. He holds an M.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Brown University. John Shelton Reed is William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he was director of the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science for twelve years and helped to found the university s Center for the Study of the American South. The eighteen books he has written or edited include 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South, and (most recently) Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue, both written with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed. His articles have appeared in professional and popular periodicals ranging from Science to Southern Living, and he was founding co-editor of the quarterly Southern Cultures. In 2010 he was a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and he is currently Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971.

16 Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He is author of Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South; Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South; Listening to Nineteenth-Century America; How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses; Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History; and Camille, 1969: Histories of a Hurricane, a book detailing recovery from Hurricane Katrina. His edited books include The Old South; Hearing History: A Reader; Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt; Writing the American Past; and, with Robert Paquette, The Handbook of Slavery in the Americas. He is currently at work on a sensory history of the American Civil War, tentatively entitled When War Makes Sense: A Sensory History of America s Greatest Conflict, under contract with Oxford University Press. Professor Smith has served as the William E. Hewit Distinguished Professor at the University of Northern Colorado, as Guest Editor for a forum on the history of the senses for the Journal of American History, and as the General Editor of the four-volume Slavery in North America: from the Colonial Period to Emancipation. He is the General Editor of the Southern Classics Series (University of South Carolina Press), co-editor of Studies in International Slavery (Liverpool University Press), co-editor of Cambridge University Press series, Studies on the American South, and General Editor of the University of Illinois Press Studies in Sensory History. He is the current President of The Historical Society. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina.

17 Fay A. Yarbrough is Associate Professor of United States History at the University of Oklahoma. She teaches courses on nineteenth-century American history, including a new offering titled the Nineteenth-Century Black Experience. She is author of several articles, as well as the book Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century, and co-editor of Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, , forthcoming with the University of South Carolina Press. Professor Yarbrough is currently researching a project that examines the impact of the American Civil War on the Choctaw Indian Nation. She received her doctorate in American history from Emory University under the direction of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

18 Notes

19 Notes

20 James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions Princeton University 83 Prospect Avenue Princeton, NJ

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