Elkins vs. McPherson: Comparing Slavery and Civil War Histories

Introduction and Historiographical Approaches

Before examining the agreements and disagreements between the two authors discussed in this paper, it is worth considering how each one introduces his subject, since the approach each takes provides an important clue to his thinking. In his book Slavery, Stanley Elkins insists that the same moral arguments — right or wrong — have existed for as long as slavery has been both a cruel reality and a historical and economic fact of American life. "It continues to be the same debate," he writes (Elkins, 1968, 1); all the sources historians and journalists use to explore the history of slavery "have now been mined and re-mined" (Elkins, 2). A reader might wonder, then, why a historian would delve into a subject already so thoroughly examined. Elkins' introduction sets up a challenge for him to deliver a book that does not simply repeat what others have already written — an interesting rhetorical choice.

Elkins spends many pages cataloguing the scholarship previously done on slavery and offering brief critiques of the more notable works. Just about "anything" written about slavery during antebellum times had "a strong moral bias" (Elkins, 4), he remarks. Elkins fills page after page of his opening chapter, "An Introduction: Slavery as a Problem in Historiography," listing works that have been published on the subject.

James McPherson's book is more focused on the Civil War than on slavery per se, but in the chapters that open his discussion of slavery, he sets the stage by detailing not so much the moral issue as the attitudes of Southerners. He does not allude to the existing scholarship on the topic. Instead, he discusses the South's reluctance to accept Northern values on many levels, not just on the question of slavery. The "voices" of those who wanted industrial development in the South "were drowned out" by those who viewed the business and merchandising ethic of the North as a "form of vulgar Yankee materialism" (McPherson, 1982, 30–31). In other words, so long as slaves worked the land and performed the hard labor in the fields, the South would preserve its economy as it wished. McPherson notes on page 33 that slavery was "not only a system of labor exploitation, it was a method of racial control." The two authors do not disagree on these basic facts, but they are clearly writing from different angles.

What influence did the church have on America during the slavery era? McPherson writes that Protestantism in the North (McPherson, 16) had produced reform movements within its structure during the first third of the nineteenth century, pushing for "the purification of society" from the evils of drunkenness, prostitution, and ignorance — "and above all, slavery." Roman Catholic values, McPherson explains, were more conservative than Protestant ones. The Catholic Church "opposed the ferment of reform" that Protestants carried into the streets. In McPherson's reading, the Catholics — guided by the authority of Rome — were not inclined to join the antislavery cause.

Religion and the Church's Influence on Slavery

On pages 40–41, McPherson discusses the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival led in the North, which asserted that "All Americans were accountable for the sin of slavery so long as one American held slaves" (McPherson, 40). In the famous publication The Liberator (January 1831), the antislavery editorial declared: "I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No! No! I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — and I WILL BE HEARD" (McPherson, 41).

Elkins' narrative diverges sharply from McPherson's on the subject of church influence. Elkins does not mention the Second Great Awakening at all. He makes it sound as though churches had virtually no institutional influence on the question of slavery. On page 28 he writes, "The church had fallen into a thousand parts." The Anglican Church was "all that remained in the South of vested ecclesiastical authority" in the early 1800s. Even the Congregational Church in New England, once "a powerful state establishment," had been "deprived of its last secular supports early in the century." Elkins does admit that "Religious vitality everywhere was overwhelming," but argues that this vitality did not translate into institutional power. Rather than serving as a source of "organized social power" (Elkins, 28), the church had "undergone a relentless process of fragmentation." People were religious, Elkins argues, but they sought "individual satisfaction" rather than building institutional structures. He further examines (Elkins, 150) the Transcendentalists' deeply cynical view of the church: "the church as an institution was corrupt." On the role of religion, then, the two authors could scarcely be further apart.

Elkins explains that Southerners had "a paternal affection of the good master for his blacks" and that there were "warm sentiments" in Southern society for the "faithful slave" (Elkins, 61). However, on page 57 he reports a case in which a Virginia judge in 1827 declined to punish a master who had cruelly battered his slave. Slaves had no legal rights, and masters could therefore exercise total control over their lives. Elkins does assert that a master could not kill his slave unless the slave was a runaway. McPherson disagrees on this point, writing that the master could "even kill with little fear of being held legally responsible" (McPherson, 34). McPherson adds that the master had "almost unlimited power to punish without sanction of the courts" and that "virtually all avenues of recourse for the slave, all lines of communication to society, originated and ended with the master."

Slaves did retain some autonomy over their own lives, according to McPherson (McPherson, 34). Leaders within slave communities "often became eloquent preachers" at gatherings of slaves during church services — some authorized, some not. Slaves also created music, most notably Negro spirituals, and some slave families "provided an impressive example of survival in the face of adversity" (34). Elkins, by contrast, implies that slaves had very little autonomy: "The master must have absolute power over the slave's body, and the law was developing in such a way as to give it to him at every crucial point" (Elkins, 49).