Very nice essay by Walter Johnson -Common-place: Re-readings: Roll, Jordan, Roll. Eugene Genovese, the historian of slavery in question, is one of those odd American figures, like Sydney Hook, who advanced, by a somnabulistic logic, from left to right without ever seeming to notice where he was heading - which is why he can consort with Confederate revivalists today without a qualm.

Johnson is sharp about two of Genovese's controverted themes in Roll, Jordon, Roll - paternalism and hegemony. Here's a quote:

"The notion of slaveholders fabricating themselves for an audience of their own slaves in a kind of Hegelian dialectic is an extraordinarily powerful one, and it illuminates countless aspects of American slavery. It does not, however, quite capture the quicksilver slipperiness with which slaveholders could reformulate the nominally beneficent promises of paternalism into self-serving regrets, reactionary nostalgia, and flat-out threats. Can it be mere coincidence that so many examples of planters expressing ostensibly "paternalist" sentiments refer to slaves who have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing?"

I'd like to quote more, since the theme of paternalism is endlessly suggestive of the rhetorical structure to which the American ruling class seems to instinctively turn when it is justifying its position. Johnson doesn't mention the obvious similarity between the rhetoric of factory owners in New England and the slaveholding class, although they obviously emerge at the same time. This isn't to equate the two, that persistant trope of Southern apologists - it is merely to point out that the rhetorical apparatus can be applied to quite different objects.