Jekyll and Hyde
FBI CH. 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy Varying Viewpoints: What Was the True Nature of Slavery? Page 357
By the early twentieth century, the predictable accounts of slavery written by partisans of the North or South had receded in favor of a romantic vision of the Old South conveyed through popular literature, myth, and increasingly, scholarship. This vision was validated by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips in his book American Negro Society (1918). He argued that slavery was a dying economic institution, unprofitable to the slaveowner and an obstacle to the economic development of the South as a whole, he contended that slavery was rather a benign institution and that the planters, treated their chattels with kindly paternalism. No such definitive conclusion has yet been reached in the disputes over slave treatment. Frank Tannenbaum argues that slavery was more humane in Latin America than in America. Stanley Elkins went so far to compare slavery to the Nazi concentration camps. More recently, scholars such as Eugene Genovese have said that slavery embraced a strange form of paternalism, a system that reflected not the benevolence of southern slave owners, but their need to control and coax work out of their slaves. The revised conceptions of the master-slave relationship also spilled over into the debate of slave personality. Historians such as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Jacqueline Jones, and Catherine Clinton have focused on the ways in which slavery differed from men and women. Scholarship over slavery continues to grow. Many scholars believe that the ways of slavery developed and varied in different places and times.
By the early twentieth century, the predictable accounts of slavery written by partisans of the North or South had receded in favor of a romantic vision of the Old South conveyed through popular literature, myth, and increasingly, scholarship. This vision was validated by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips in his book American Negro Society (1918). He argued that slavery was a dying economic institution, unprofitable to the slaveowner and an obstacle to the economic development of the South as a whole, he contended that slavery was rather a benign institution and that the planters, treated their chattels with kindly paternalism. No such definitive conclusion has yet been reached in the disputes over slave treatment. Frank Tannenbaum argues that slavery was more humane in Latin America than in America. Stanley Elkins went so far to compare slavery to the Nazi concentration camps. More recently, scholars such as Eugene Genovese have said that slavery embraced a strange form of paternalism, a system that reflected not the benevolence of southern slave owners, but their need to control and coax work out of their slaves. The revised conceptions of the master-slave relationship also spilled over into the debate of slave personality. Historians such as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Jacqueline Jones, and Catherine Clinton have focused on the ways in which slavery differed from men and women. Scholarship over slavery continues to grow. Many scholars believe that the ways of slavery developed and varied in different places and times.