Roll, Jordan, Roll

Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World Slaves Made (1974) is a non-fiction book by American historian Eugene D. Genovese. The book examines American slavery through the lenses of paternalism and social hegemony. The winner of the Bancroft Prize, Roll, Jordan, Roll was named "the best book ever written on slavery in the United States" by Michael Kazin of The New York Review of Books.

Genovese's primary thesis is that the antebellum American South was a deeply paternalistic society. Based in Medieval thought, paternalism is broadly defined as a practice by which authority figures restrict the freedom of subordinates theoretically with the subordinates' best interests in mind. Although this ethos was deeply embedded in the Old South as early as the colonial era, slaves and slaveholders became more conscious of it during the 1830s. Slaveholders' desire to frame themselves as slaves' protectors intensified at this time in response to growing efforts by abolitionists to end slavery.

These efforts included a public renunciation of cruelty that lay in direct contradiction to the actual practices of slaveholders and the concept of slavery in general. Genovese also writes that slaveholders often "boasted of the physical or intellectual prowess of one or more of [their] blacks, much as the strictest father might boast of the prowess of a favored child." They considered it "a duty and a burden" to provide food, clothes, and shelter to their slaves, framing the issue in humanitarian terms, as if to say that they, as slaveholders, were the only ones with the charity and generosity of spirit to give black Americans the comfort and stability they were incapable of achieving on their own. Of slaves who fled this abusive relationship, the slaveholders said they felt "betrayed." Even after the Civil War, when slaves were free to leave their masters' plantations, slaveholders continued to describe slaves who sought freedom in terms of betrayal. Genovese writes that slaveholders "desperately needed the gratitude of their slaves in order to define themselves as moral human beings."



Genovese goes on to say that slaveholders ingratiated themselves into the existing familial units of slaves by framing the entire population of a plantation as a "single family black and white." While slaves certainly feared the whip and other instruments of physical abuse, a special terror was reserved for the prospect of being sold and separated from one's family. This also reflects the degree to which the broader slave trade economy worked in concert with slaveholders' paternal ethos. Without the looming threat of being sold to another planter, the entire construct of the paternalistic South would have crumbled.

From the slaves' perspective, Genovese argues that they participated in its paternalistic situation—albeit against their will—because it allowed them space in an unjust system where "they drew their own lines, asserted rights, and preserved their self-respect." He adds that it allowed slaves to develop "a powerful defense against dehumanization." Genovese finds evidence of this in the ways that slaves' converted one another to Christianity. Religion enabled slaves "to achieve spiritual freedom, retain faith in earthly deliverance, instill a spirit of pride and love in each other, and make peace with a political reality within which revolutionary solutions no longer had much prospect."

Amid this construct, individual acts of resistance worked only to strengthen the authority of the slaveholding class. Acts of rebellion, small and large—from feigning illness to maiming or murdering one's master—were framed as consequences of individual problems between master and slave, rather than as exposing problems with the practice of slavery in general. Furthermore, Genovese argues that these individual acts of rebellion sucked oxygen out of a broader collective revolt staged by slaves that never materialized. Of slave revolts or a comparative lack thereof, Genovese writes, "In the United States, those prospects [of revolting], minimal during the eighteenth century, declined toward zero during the nineteenth. The slaves of the old South should not have to answer for their failure to mount more frequent and effective revolts; they should be honored for having tried at all under the most discouraging circumstances." Genovese also points out that in Haiti, for instance, which staged the biggest and most successful slave revolt in history, planters literally worked their slaves to death and then replaced them, rather than providing a modicum of food and other resources that allowed for a more long-term relationship between slave and master.



Despite slaveholders' conception of themselves as fair, and despite slaves' participation in this lie to maintain a measure of dignity, Genovese has no illusions about the ferocity and brutality of any system of slavery, and in particular that of the antebellum South. Regardless of whether most slaveholders were aware of it, these paternal codes were specifically tailored to perpetuate a system of massive exploitation and cruelty. While Genovese allows that many planters may have sincerely believed in the goodness of their intentions, the system they built was one of daily atrocities and widespread dehumanization.