The Slaveholders' Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860

In The Slaveholders' Dilemma, Eugene D. Genovese explores the efforts of American slaveholders to reconcile the intellectual dilemma in which they found themselves as supporters of freedom but defenders of slavery. In the American South slaveholders perceived themselves as thoroughly modern, moral men who protected human progress against the perversions of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Surprisingly, they also accepted the widespread idea that freedom generated the economic, s...