The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview
Cambridge University Press, 12/22/2005
EAN 9780521850650, ISBN10: 0521850657
Hardcover, 824 pages, 23.5 x 15.9 x 4.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
The Mind of the Master Class tells of America's greatest historical tragedy. It presents the slaveholders as men and women, a great many of whom were intelligent, honorable, and pious. It asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that proved itself an enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves. The South had formidable proslavery intellectuals who participated fully in transatlantic debates and boldly challenged an ascendant capitalist ('free-labor') society. Blending classical and Christian traditions, they forged a moral and political philosophy designed to sustain conservative principles in history, political economy, social theory, and theology, while translating them into political action. Even those who judge their way of life most harshly have much to learn from their probing moral and political reflections on their times - and ours - beginning with the virtues and failings of their own society and culture.
Part I. Cradled in the Storms of Revolution
1. 'That Terrible Tragedy'
2. The age of revolution through slaveholding eyes
3. 'The Purest Sons of Freedom'
Entr'Acte
the bonds of slavery
Part II. The Inescapable Past
4. History as moral and political instruction
5. The slaveholders' quest for a history of the common people
6. World history and the politics of slavery
7. History as the story of freedom
Part III. Ancient Legacies, Medieval Sensibility, Modern Men
8. In the shadow of antiquity
9. Coming to terms with the Middle Ages
10. The chivalry
11. Chivalric slave masters
12. Chivalric politics
Southern ladies take their stand
Part IV. A Christian People Defend the Faith
13. A Christian people
14. Unity and diversity among the faithful
15. War over the Good Book
16. Slavery
proceeding from the Lord
17. The Holy Spirit in the word of God
18. Jerusalem and Athens - against Paris
19. Serpent in the garden
liberal theology in the South
20. Theopolitics
golden rule, higher law, and slavery
Coda
St. John of Pottawatamie
Part V. At the Rubicon
21. Between individualism and corporatism
from the reformation to the war for Southern Independence
22. Past and future Caesars
Epilogue
King Solomon's dilemma.