Ulrich B. Phillips, the Bequeather of Southern History: A Claimant Looks into the Partnership
By the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips was considered the leading authority on slave historiography. Exhaustive and detailed, his approach was considered thorough, systematic, and resourceful, and to later readers as inappropriate, apologetic, and outright racist. Disguised under a complex scheme of documents, plantation records, letters, and diaries, his ideas created a narrative in which masters and slaves symbiotically inhabited a single cultural space in the South and slavery was necessary to maintain the delicate balance between the races. For decades, these beliefs were considered mainstream, and it would take a new generation of scholars to effectively challenge them.
From the beginning, Phillips views attracted many detractors as well as many supporters, but it was not until the 1960s, when scholars addressed his work from a more critical perspective, this represented an improvement over his contemporaries, who seemed more interested either in confirming his authority or in dethroning him as the king of Southern history, as if the future of the whole “section” depended on it, especially in a time when the identity of the South was still an open wound and the battle for civil rights was about to explode.
Beyond politics and military power, it is clear that before and after the American Civil War — perhaps even until this very day — there has been a racial fight for the essence of the South, a conflict with one side trying to maintain its old glories and the other struggling to be at the heart of history without having to give away its soul. So, it’s possible to think about the relationship that has existed between these two warring factions and try to find some sense in Phillips’ theories. Or, after almost a century, we can think twice about them and recognize, this time with a different mindset, the multiple obstacles that faced those who decided to rewrite two hundred years of American history.
Richard Wright always wanted to speak out, to paraphrase the truth. He did not pander to whites and wanted them to understand the impossible situation in which they put black people, and his 1928 essay Inheritors of Slavery was not an exception. For him, the real difference between white poor and slaves was a matter of freedom: freedom of choosing your own destiny, freedom of enjoying the vast beauty of the Southern landscape, and, above all, freedom of thought: “Whenever a slave felt compelled to action by any kind of inspiration, slaves wouldn’t ask themselves ‘Can we do it?’ but ‘Will they let us do it?’” Under these circumstances, the “black folk” lived dull lives that were being painted as charming, idyllic, and romantic by the movies, radio, newspapers, and even the church, even though they were constantly “full of fear of the Lords of the Land, bowing and grinning when they met white faces, toiling from sun to sun, living in unpainted wooden shacks that sit casually and insecurely upon the red clay.” Notwithstanding, they also belonged to the land they worked, the “beautiful land we till,” so they were being alienated from their own land and culture by the impositions of slavery and their reality was being portrayed in a much better light so it could easily be integrated into a gentler narrative about the South. They were losing the cultural war, for Wright there was no doubt about it.
Contrarily, if anyone is willing to consider that perhaps African Americans were not the only victims under the regime of “Queen Cotton”, he might find that Phillips and Wright had some common ground, as they both identified a kind of paradox emerging from the complex relations between white poor and slaves: both groups would benefit from the abolition of slavery and they were just as destitute and alienated, yet both of them felt they had it worse than the other. At the core of this paradox, Phillips theorized a “sort of partnership” between masters and slaves that stemmed from the life-long bond they had, which was at times he argued friendly and good-willed and provided slaves with some sense of security. For Philips — and this is where Wright part ways with him — the slaves got dealt the best hand because they were part of the partnership, whereas the “white toilers lived outside of it and suffered somewhat from its competition.”
But were slaves really in a better position? What kind of security could a person have when the master had a say on what she or he could or could not do, think or not think? If any impulse or inspiration, if any plan or idea, that would lead to any kind improvement had not only to be approved by someone else, but everything could suddenly change on a whim of the planter, a person whose only incentive was the status quo. Is it a life worth living if your only hope for tomorrow is that it is not worse than today? There is more to these questions than meets the eye, because they not only expose the immorality of Phillips’ ideas, but it would also mean that what kept slaves and sharecroppers alive was more idealistic than practical and that it had more to do with the cultural ties they created with the South, the same land and culture people like Phillips claimed to be exclusively theirs.
For Phillips, race relations were the Central Theme of Southern History. For him, Southernism and the essence of the South had nothing to do with migration, religion, language, crops, geography, state rights, free trade, slavery, or partisanship of any kind, but the South was a land united by a common goal: “that it shall be and remain a white man’s country,” and slavery was nothing more than a “system of racial adjustment and social order” where both plantation owners and slaves would benefit. On the one hand, it is clear that black people did not see any real benefits since they were physically and mentally enslaved. On the other hand, it is not clear what, according to Phillips, the benefits were for white people beyond perhaps some safety deriving from the civilization of “barbaric” Africans. After all, Phillips judged slavery to be an utter economic failure; slavery was too “inelastic and rigid” to be profitable.
In consequence, if you cannot follow the money, perhaps you should be following your passions, and even his harshest critics all seem to accept that Phillips honestly believed that economic considerations were less relevant to the slavery question. Therefore, it is valid to think that he was being honest when he considered slavery as a necessary and successful mode of racial control. So why go into all the detailed justification of slavery as a partnership of dependent unequals? If slavery was necessary, what difference would it make if planters were not benign or paternalistic? Viewed from Wright’s perspective, this is just another attempt to romanticize life under the institution of slavery performed by just another “mighty artist.” And it fits the bill, as Phillips constantly fails to recognize black people as human beings in the same subtle and pernicious way Planters suppressed slaves’ free will: by denying them the possibility of being responsible for their own fate. With all this in mind, it seems impossible to answer any of these questions outside the Central Theme of Southern History. Every arc seems to evolve into the necessity of the South becoming unequivocally a white man’s land, a story that was disrupted when the struggle moved from the merely political to the military and, in spite of Phillips’ best efforts, the center of gravity of Southern history migrated from race to slavery. So, it is clear now that Phillips’ too was a fight for survival, and quite a complicated one, since it is hard to confront an enemy that one refuse to acknowledge even exists.
Nevertheless, Phillips recognized that his ideas had some enemies, and they were of a political nature. The battle for white supremacy was not being fought between blacks and whites but by politicians in Congress. He wrote extensively, among many other things, about independence, unionists, states, elections and votes, and how they would affect the political balance of Republicans and Democrats and if the tide could turn in favor of one or the other faction. So, a whim of the “Lords of the Land” could again dramatically change the fate of the black people for many years to come.
When the relationship between the Planter and the Negro had to be redefined after the abolition of slavery, it became transactional. So, although it was no longer necessary to maintain the paternalistic facade of the “sort of partnership,” it was still necessary to keep under control the expectations and aspirations of the black workers in the field, so the new institutions attempted, and mostly succeeded, to control them under the same pretenses Phillips long tried in the name of white supremacy. This is the time when sharecroppers, and African Americans in general, inherited many of the vices of the slavery system. For some, it happened because slavery was an integral part of the cultural system of the South, so it should never have been abolished; for others, because it was done the wrong way, abolition came either too fast or too radical. For many others like Wright, it seems to have happened because only the most obvious and outrageous moral distortions were abolished, but they were just a guise for the survival of the white man’s country, so race could come back to be the main driver of Southern history. Under this context, Phillips remains relevant, especially as a catalyzer of writers and thinkers like Wright, who helped us to shed new light on one of the darkest times of American history.
