Volume 30, Number 5 · March 31, 1983
Portrait of a Bounder
By Eugene D. Genovese
James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery
by Drew Faust
Louisiana State University Press, 407 pp., $27.50
Antebellum South Carolina was different from the rest of the South. Else-where in the lower South and in Virginia the slaveholders held effective power, exercised impressive hegemony, and determined policy in all matters that concerned the foundation of their property rights in human beings, but they had to struggle constantly to maintain their power under democratic constitutions in states rent by class antagonisms and shifting alliances. Only in South Carolina did the slaveholders, and more specifically the 'political class' based on the big planters, come close to maintaining the naked class dictatorship of Leninist theory and myth.
Review, 3460 words
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