The Scholars Speak
This weekend’s edition of The Scholars Speak features Professor Rebecca Goetz of Rice University. Professor Goetz is one of the finest young scholars on early America, especially Virginia and the important role of religion in English-Indian-African interactionsn – and she’s also one of my favorite persons in the world. Her first book will be out this fall, and she’s already an acclaimed blogger!Here are her answers responding to the state of the field and how Major Problems structures British settlement and colonial development, particularly debates on “patriarchalism” and “paternalism”.
1. What drew you to the study of early America?
When I went to college, I was going to double-major in political science and Spanish, take the foreign service exam, and disappear into the diplomatic service somewhere in Latin America.
Obviously, that isn’t what happened in the end. How I came to be a history and German double major instead is largely the result of a series of accidental discoveries. My first semester I realized I really didn’t like political science. It seemed so divorced from historical context. I loved my history courses though. I took Latin American history and European history, and I loved every minute of those classes. So fine, I would be a history major.
During my sophomore year, I took Jim Leamon’s Colonial New England class, and I think it was the witchcraft that hooked me. We read Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed, one of the early examples of how careful social history could transform our understanding of an event that looked from a distance to be an episode in group insanity. We then read Carol Karlsen’s Devil in the Shape of a Woman, which transformed the explanation for events at Salem in 1692 again, explaining witchcraft accusations through the lens of gender. I was hooked. I loved the competing historical explanations for one of the most inexplicable events in American history. (Since I took that course in the fall of 1997, historians have written yet MORE about Salem, most notably Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare, which put Anglo-Indian violence front and center in the story of Salem, so compelling historical arguments continue to emerge.)
I didn’t think I would be a professional historian until I wrote my senior thesis. My college had a thesis requirement; that is, all students had to produce a piece of substantial original research in order to graduate. My senior thesis focused on the previously unstudied diary of a Revolutionary war soldier named William Dorr. Dorr kept a diary of Benedict Arnold’s ill-fated invasion of Quebec over the winter of 1775-1776. As I got into my research, I was faced with an unpleasant and puzzling discovery: there were several other diaries kept by soldiers during the invasion of Quebec, and they were ALL THE SAME. I was dealing with a sophisticated group of plagiarists. As I worked on the thesis, I struggled to explain why these soldiers’ diaries were alike, even down to the maps they drew. My search for a valid historical explanation led me to several different archives, before I ended up in Revolutionary War pension records. And there the answer presented itself: in the absence of good record keeping on Arnold’s march, survivors later had difficulty obtaining pensions. Providing evidence of service in the form of a diary helped them get money in their old age. I now think the most reasonable explanation for the diaries being exactly the same is that one soldier had kept the diary, and then he shared it with others who copied it as evidence of service on pension applications. Solving this mystery was so stimulating that I decided I wanted to do history professionally.
Of course I went to graduate school thinking I was going to continue working on soldiers’ diaries. That isn’t what happened. Instead I got wrapped up in Hening’s Virginia Statutes, a collection of laws from seventeenth-century Virginia. I began to notice that within these laws, the words “white” and “Christian” and “black” and “heathen” were used interchangeably. I wanted to know why, and I never worked on soldiers’ diaries again.
2. Patriarchalism? Paternalism? The scholarly conversation about the relationship between enslaved people and their owners.
I’m editing Professor Blum’s question a little here. In this post, I’ll address the conversation between Kathleen Brown and Phil Morgan. In the next post, I’ll talk about sectional divisions in early American history—what they mean, and what they don’t mean.
Eugene Genovese published his seminal, and justly famous, history of antebellum slavery Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made in 1974. Genovese used the concept of paternalism to explore the relationship between masters and slaves. For masters, Genovese argued, paternalism was a benevolent ideology that justified enslavement; masters thought of themselves as protectors and caretakers of their enslaved property. By embracing a paternalistic ideology, southern planters also believed they could blunt the increasingly powerful critique of slavery emanating from abolitionists in the north. Paternalism was, though, a site of resistance for enslaved people, who manipulated their masters’ ideological commitment to slavery to gain slightly better conditions. Genovese embraced a Marxist interpretation of slavery, arguing that the south was a closed, precapitalist system. Genovese’s Marxism also led him to focus on slave resistance.
Genovese’s emphasis on paternalism has continued, though without the Marxist imprimatur, in more recent antebellum historiography (for example, Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul: Inside the Antebellum Slave Market). Historians of early American slavery also read paternalism back into the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and I think that’s the conversation between Brown and Morgan. What isn’t clear to me from this discussion is the difference between patriarchalism and paternalism. Brown skates around this definitional issue on page 51, and I think her project is less about describing a transition from patriarchalism to paternalism and more about exploring how her “anxious patriarchs” tried to define their relationship with their dependents, whether those dependents were enslaved people, members of their family, or poor white planters. In the end, she sees paternalism as “one face of patriarchy” (58). Morgan’s piece echoes Genovese, I think, in the way that it emphasizes planters’ belief in reciprocal obligations between masters and slaves. Morgan urges readers to see that the planters’ worldview was real, though deeply flawed, and that it changed over the course of the eighteenth century—the greatest contribution of paternalism/patriarchalism might have been that it encouraged white unity. (As an aside, I will say my favorite recent work on eighteenth-century slavery and slaveowning is Rhys Isaac’s Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom.)
If I had been putting this reader together, I don’t think I would have chosen to focus on the debate over patriarchalism/paternalism. I think that the relationship between master and enslaved is largely tapped out, regardless of however a scholar chooses to address it semantically. (I also don’t find it terribly interesting.) Fundamentally, the relationship between enslaver and enslaved was about power, and the power of white planters over black slaves was maintained by violence. Morgan doesn’t shy away from this; as he writes, “…their [planters’] authority ultimately rested on force” (58). And so it did. I think what gets lost in the conversation over how to describe planter authority and how planters themselves saw their authority is how deeply violent this society was. One need only reread the documents in the collection from William Byrd’s diary or Olaudah Equiano’s recollections to realize how force and the threat of force supported the exploitative system of slavery. In this way I think the debate about paternalism is a bit of a red herring; it draws attention away from the violence inherent in the system.
I also think this contributes to some of the flaws in the ways historians have studied colonial slavery. One of the critiques I’ve made elsewhere of Phil Morgan’s work is that it completely overlooks the experience of enslaved Indians. (This isn’t really Morgan’s fault: he was writing a synthetic history, and a magisterial one at that, and since few historians had at that point written about Indian enslavement, how could he include it?) Since the 1998 publication of Morgan’s book, historians have delved deeply into the enslavement of Indians in the early American south. Alan Gallay argues in his 2003 book The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717, that the Carolina colony was a net exporter of enslaved people (Indians) during that period. He estimates that the numbers of enslaved Indians sent to the Caribbean run in the tens of thousands (perhaps as many as 55,000). The Indian slave trade in the south ripped native communities apart and institutionalized terrible violence, as Robbie Ethridge’s 2010 book From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715 makes clear. I think the history of Indian enslavement is a lost history, and one that can’t be conveniently slotted into old modes of thinking about slavery (i.e., the paternalism/patriarchalism debate).
Indian enslavement has been edited out of history. As an example of what I mean, turn to page 36 and reread the excerpt from Edward Waterhouse’s 1622 pamphlet “A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia.” If you were to read the whole thing (which you may do on Early English Books Online as the spirit moves you) you would see that several paragraphs later, Waterhouse justifies the enslavement of Indians: “…Because the Indians, who before were used as friends, may now most justly be compelled to servitude and drudgery, and supply the roome of men that labour, whereby even the meanest of the Plantation may imploy themselves more entirely in their Arts and Occupations, which are more generous, whilest Savages performe their inferiour workes of digging in mynes, and the like, of whome also some may be sent for the service of the Summer Islands [Bermuda].” (Waterhouse, 25-26)
(see part 2, and quiz clues on Sunday)
My first reaction to Professor Goetz’s points is that perhaps the fundamental question is not patriarchy versus paternalism, but rather over contact versus control. The VA statues differentiating slavery from indentured servitude, for instance, all are trying to control contact, as much as they are trying to exert and establish control. If contact is the order of the day, then we have to see power as something that is historically developed. It’s not the case that British just came over with power. They developed it, legalized it, and then had to main it. That’s what I try to focus on in class discussions – contact vis-a-vis control, and I think Major Problems will need to be changed to reflect that.