Causes of the American Civil War

Eugene Genovese was born in Brooklyn in 1930. Genovese earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooklyn College in 1953, and his doctorate at Columbia University in 1959. Genovese makes his permanent home in Atlanta in the heart of the American South that is the focus of his writing.

Eugene Genovese is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rochester. Genovese is a former president of the Organization of American Historians. Roll, Jordan, Roll won the Bancroft Prize for Genovese in 1974. Genovese is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Center of the Behavioral Sciences. Genovese taught at several universities before becoming established at the University of Rochester. He has been visiting professor at many more universities (some of the nation's most renowned institutions of higher education) since assuming his various positions at the University of Rochester.

Genovese contends that one must recognize and study the diversity of the slave community in the pre-Civil War American South in order to understand the relationship between the institution of slavery and the Civil War.

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d this state of affairs to the fact that paternalism, by demanding mutual obligations, duties, responsibilities, and rights for master and slave, implicitly recognized the humanity of the slave. Genovese contended that a paternal order creates a collective weakness among the slave population by undermining their solidarity as a group, linking them instead as individuals with their masters. The paternalistic order in the American South generated a tendency among slaves "to identify with a particular community through identification with its master; it reduced the possibilities for their identification with each other as a class." Paternalism in "any historical setting defines relations of superordination and subordination. Its strength as a prevailing ethos increases as members of the community accept . . . these relations as legitimate." Genovese held that paternalism in the American South "recognized the slaves' humanity--not only their free will but the very talent and ability without which their acceptance of a doctrine of reciprocal obligations would have made no sense." In this context, slaves in the American South understood paternalism as a system that argued against the contentions of the masters
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2319
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)