Chapter Four
Planters, Junkers, andPomeschiki
Cross-cultural comparative history in the fullest and strictest sense—sustained comparisons in which equal attention is paid to the exotic cases—remains relatively rare. An obvious reason for this state of affairs is that historians of the United States, or any other nation state, are not normally prepared by their training, or encouraged by the nature of their professional responsibilities, to undertake sophisticated, in-depth work on other societies and cultures.
I suspect that there are also doubts in some quarters as to whether the results of cross-national comparisons are worth all the effort. Often the more ambitious and systematic comparative works appear at first glance to do little more than confirm what is already known from studies focusing on a single nation. It can scarcely be denied that the bold hypotheses of broad-gauged and freewheeling works of comparative history or historical sociology like Frank Tannenbaum's Slave and Citizen (1947), Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), and Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolution (1979) have generated new questions and stimulated inquiry. But careful historical examination of particular cases has usually led to the modification or even the discrediting of some of the bold claims made by such works. The books by historians of the United States that have systematically compared some American phenomenon with its analogue in another society have nurtured the growing cosmopolitanism in their fellow Americanists, added some weight to one side or the other in current historiographic debates, and, crossing disciplinary lines,
helped to improve the historical sensitivities of comparative sociologists and political scientists. But, up to now, they have not had a major impact on the main lines of historical interpretation established by historians whose work may employ comparative perspectives for heuristic purposes but does not go deeply into exotic cases.
What cannot be known to most Americanists is the extent to which bilateral studies have raised new questions or even suggested new interpretations in the other historiography on which they impinge. It may be significant that two of the most influential and provocative comparative studies involving the United States were actually written by historians specializing in the other case—the Latin Americanist Frank Tannenbaum and the Africanist John Cell, whose The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (1982) shed new light on American segregation but had no discernible impact on the historiography of South Africa. It would not be surprising if fresh insights came most readily from looking at another history from the vantage point of the one that is more familiar, but to reach its full potentiality, comparative study should jolt historians out of accustomed ways of thinking about their original areas of specialization and enable them to look at the familiar in a new way. The Balkanization of the historical profession is an obstacle to the appreciation, as well as the practice, of cross-national comparative history. Too few of the readers and evaluators of such works are knowledgeable about, or even strongly interested in, both sides of the comparison.
The two most ambitious recent examples of bilateral comparison by historians of the United States are Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labor and Shearer Davis Bowman's Masters and Lords .[1]
Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), and Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters and Lords: Mid-19th-Century U.S. Planters and Russian Junkers (New York, 1993).
It is not surprising that both of them involve aspects of the social history of the antebellum South. Slavery and slave society is the single aspect of American history that has inspired the most extensive and sophisticated comparative literature. But whereas most previous work has focused on slavery in the Americas, these studies broaden the frame of reference to include parts of Europe where, by the mid-nineteenth century, landed gentries with unfree or quasi-free labor systems were confronting pressures and challenges comparable in some ways to those faced by the slaveholders of the Old South at roughly the same time. One virtue of extending the comparison to Russia and Prussia is that it sharply poses the question of what difference, if any, arose from the fact that southern slavery was based on distinctions of "race"—meaning that masters and unfree workers differed in pigmentation and geographical origins—whereas the European patterns of agrarian dominance and dependency werenot, or at least not to nearly the same extent. (This variable is of course lacking in inter-American studies or in comparisons of the United States and South Africa.)
There are, however, significant differences in the nature of the two works. Kolchin's study is broader in scope and more ambitious than Bowman's. It treats the entire history of American slavery and Russian serfdom up to the point of emancipation (which will be the subject of a second volume), and it attempts to compare the experiences of slaves and serfs as well as those of slaveowners and serfholders (pomeschiki ). Bowman, on the other hand, limits his attention mainly to the nineteenth century and to dominant classes of planters and Junkers. He makes no effort to compare the lot of southern slaves with that of peasant workers on the Prussian estates. Another difference is that Bowman gives prominence to theoretical and historiographical issues, addressing them at length in his text, while Kolchin is, for the most part, content to state his conclusions without ruminating on their relevance to current debates among historians and sociologists. The books differ in substance as well as in approach: in fact their respective comparisons are used to support contrasting views of slave society in the Old South and especially of the character of its dominant class.
Kolchin's massively erudite and elegantly crafted study begins by establishing a fundamental similarity between American slavery and Russian serfdom. He persuasively demonstrates that by the eighteenth century the legal status of the serfs differed little, if at all, from that of slaves in the Americas. Contradicting what is theoretically the defining characteristic of serfdom—that workers were tied to the soil—he shows that they could be, and sometimes were, moved about and even bought and sold at the whim of their masters. This finding is meant to persuade the reader that he is not merely comparing the apple of slavery with the orange of serfdom, but he does not fully put to rest the suspicion that his study is the predictable contrast between too inherently dissimilar institutions. In fact the differences that he finds end up being more or less what one would expect from a comparison of classic slavery and classic serfdom. Unlike slaves, the serfs lived in partially self-governing village communities and spent at least part of their time working for themselves on lands assigned for their communal use. One class of serfs were also required to work as laborers in their masters' fields, but others were permitted to discharge all of their obligations to noble landlords by paying rent. Kolchin argues that traditions of lord-peasant relations originating in the time before serfdom became legally
transformed into a form of slavery that helped to maintain this pattern. One could just as well say that although eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia may have had de jure slavery, or something close to it, it had a de facto or customary system of serfdom. If practice rather than law is taken as the defining characteristic of this system, then much of Kolchin's comparison merely validates and elaborates the predictable differences between categorically different systems of unfree labor. His somewhat contentious argument that the relatively rich communal experience of the serfs shows how "rudimentary" the organization of the slave community really was (p. 200), implying that historians need to rethink recent efforts to celebrate the way the slaves came together and made a collective life for themselves, may simply follow from the axiom that a society of lords and peasants offers greater opportunities for bottom-up community organization than one of master and slaves.
But one major difference that Kolchin finds between slavery and serfdom is more historically specific and does not seem to follow quite so inevitably from a typological contrast of the two systems. Relying heavily on the work of Eugene Genovese, he argues that American slavery was more "paternalistic" than Russian serfdom. By this he does not mean that southern slaveowners were necessarily kinder than Russian pomeschiki , but they felt a greater responsibility for the moral and physical condition of their unfree workers. "The essence of this paternalism," he contends, "was to treat the slaves as permanent children, who on the one hand needed constant protection, but on the other needed constant direction and correction" (p. 134). The pomeschiki , by contrast, normally felt few paternal obligations and left their serfs to shift for themselves so long as they discharged their formal obligations. Kolchin explains this difference in much the same way that Genovese explains the paternalism that he takes to be the major divergence between southern slavery and that in many other parts of the Americas: slaveholdings were comparatively small in the United States and masters were much less likely to be absentees than their Russian counterparts.
To explain the fact that slaveholders militantly defended their peculiar institution and ultimately went to war to protect it, while serfowners acceded to the authority of the czar to determine the fate of their labor system, Kolchin points to four characteristics present in the United States but absent in Russia: "a racial distinction between owner and owned, a democratic political system, freedom of the press, and the sectional nature of servitude," and then adds a fifth "which subsumes
the other four and is the most basic of all, the independence of the master class and the strength of its civilization" (p. 182). Although acknowledging a role for American race consciousness, he does not in the end give it a very significant one. He presents much evidence to show that the pomeschiki regarded the serfs as so radically and unalterably inferior to themselves that their social attitudes and practices become difficult to distinguish, functionally or even ideologically, from the racism of southern whites.
Bowman contends that his comparison of southern planters and Prussian Junkers is based on a stronger analogy than Kolchin's. He can scarcely claim, as Kolchin does, that the labor systems were roughly equivalent—there is obviously a substantial difference between a quasi-feudalism evolving into a system of agricultural wage labor and chattel slavery—but his choice of a landed gentry to compare with that of the Old South eliminates most of the variables that Kolchin uses to distinguish between slaveholders and pomeschiki . Like southern planters, the Junkers were a regional elite, residing in most cases on relatively small estates, and generally businesslike in their orientation toward market production. (Kolchin pays little attention to the fact that slaveholders had to be more entrepreneurial in their outlook than pomeschiki , who tended to have so much land and so many inherited "souls" that they did not need to be very efficient and calculating in order to maintain their position.)
The theoretical basis of Bowman's claim of comparability between Junkers and planters is a distinction between capitalism and modernity. Departing from the neo-Marxist synthesis of Eugene Genovese and his followers, Bowman argues that southern planters (and also Prussian Junkers) were capitalistic and antimodern at the same time. (His conception of modernization relies heavily on the neo-Weberian theories of Reinhold Bendix.) What made these agrarian elites antimodern and reactionary, in Bowman's view, was not some repudiation of the market and capitalist enterprise but their opposition to the political and legal principles that were associated with the growth of representative democracy and equality under the law. Differing intellectual traditions shaped Prussian and southern defenses of authority and hierarchy—the former drew on nineteenth-century German romanticism and idealism, while the latter harked back to Edmund Burke's more matter-of-fact critique of Englightenment rationality and reformism—but the result in both cases was the promulgation of a conservative ideology at odds with nineteenth-century conceptions of political and legal progress. But
Bowman does not assume that most planters and Junkers were conservative intellectuals or ideologues. He makes a distinction between the "idealists," who were ready to live and die for their beliefs, and the larger number of "pragmatists," who put their practical interests ahead of ideological rigor or consistency and were willing to bend or compromise if they saw some immediate advantage in it.
The differences that Bowman finds between planters and Junkers are nevertheless substantial, and they stem for the most part from the peculiar conjunction of racism and republicanism in the southern case. Following the lead of a number of recent historians, Bowman describes how the racist subordination of blacks enabled the southern elite to accept and even on occasion to celebrate the republican citizenship of all white males, without at the same time surrendering to the liberal principle of equal rights for all and thereby undermining their defense of slavery. The Junkers, on the other hand, were monarchists and defenders of a multitiered hierarchy of legally constituted status groups or orders. Whether one prefers to characterize the Old South as a "Herrenvolk democracy," calling attention to its de jure equality for all white males, or "an aristocracy of race," which underlines the undemocratic features of this society when viewed from a nonracist perspective, it is clear that it differed from the kind of corporate hierarchy that the Prussian Junkers were defending. As we have seen, Kolchin acknowledges the role of racism in differentiating the American case from the Russian, but he raises doubts about the sharpness of the contrast and accords less weight to racism than to other variables. Perhaps if Bowman had examined more closely the attitudes of Junkers toward the peasants on their estates, he would have found the same kind of quasi-racism that Kolchin detected among the pomeschiki . But regarding subaltern people as hopelessly inferior is not the same thing as consciously and deliberately basing a social order and a polity squarely on the alleged fact that one large population group is radically and permanently inferior to another.
The other main contrast between the two books is in their treatment of the capitalism/paternalism issue. For almost forty years historians of the American South have been debating the question of whether or not southern slavery can be persuasively described as a paternalistic institution. Since paternalistic social and economic relationships were assumed to be characteristic of precapitalist society, neo-Marxist historians, led by Eugene Genovese, have argued further that the South was a precapitalist society and that the world view of its ruling class
was antithetical to that of the bourgeois North. From this vantage point, the Civil War becomes comparable to European struggles between the rising bourgeoisie and the old order of landed aristocracies and their peasant retainers.
Kolchin does not explicitly invoke the dichotomy of a capitalist North and a precapitalist South, but he has no doubts about the paternalistic character of the master-slave relationship. His assurance on this issue is surprising given the serious attacks that have been mounted recently on this view of slaveholders' mentality. But since his book was published in 1987, he could not have had the benefit of such works as Michael Tadman's Speculators and Slaves (1989) and Norrece Jones's Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave (1990). These studies focus on the crass commercialization of slave labor and the callous attitudes that must have been associated with it. The heavy dependence of most masters on the internal slave trade for purposes of speculative profit and for the leverage that the threat of sale gave them over their unfree workers strongly suggest that paternalism was more myth and ideology than social reality. If Kolchin had compared the slave trade to the more incidental and marginal trade in Russian serfs, he might have come to a different conclusion as to which system was more paternalistic. Parental neglect may be a poor form of paternalism, but a willingness to sell one's "children" cannot be reconciled with any conception of familial governance; it clearly represents the triumph of the capitalistic marketplace over any conceivable ethic of paternal responsibility.
Bowman's treatment of the capitalism/paternalism issue is, to my mind, more persuasive than Kolchin's. "Although slavery manifested some paternalistic features," he concludes, "positing the paternalistic character of the institution is more problematic than portraying planters as 'capitalist in every sense of the word.' Even plantation labor itself was capital, in the literal sense of a productive asset used to create more wealth" (p. 183). Bowman argues that nineteenth-century planters and Junkers were essentially market-oriented capitalist producers and that their professions of paternalism revealed more about their reactionary political ideas than it did about their relations with their unfree or semifree laborers. He thus comes down decisively on one side in the debate that has divided historians and sociologists over the essential features of capitalism. For him capitalism means private property and the pursuit of profit through market activity; he agrees with Jean Baecher that "There is no necessary or essential link between the capitalist system and free labor" (p. 100). There is also in his view no
essential link between capitalism and political democracy. Agrarian capitalists dependent on legalized hierarchies of race or status will tend to be fierce opponents of the equalization of status and citizenship when they confront liberal reformers. The difference between the planters and Junkers was that the former could use the racism that they shared with most nonelite southern whites to avoid a direct conflict with the American republicanism that they had embraced when they supported the American Revolution. The monarchism and (in most cases) the legally sanctioned aristocratic status of the latter permitted a more comprehensive and straightforward defense of inequality. Such a comparison makes a great deal of sense and may help to dispel some persistent but misleading notions about "the world that the slaveholders made."
Although narrower and not as well-written as Unfree Labor, Masters and Lords comes closer to achieving the full promise of comparative history. Southern planters look different to me than they did before Bowman had compared them to the Junkers, whereas the southern slavery of Kolchin's study seems to the whole relatively familiar. Perhaps the greatest potential contribution of Unfree Labor, and it is a valuable one, is to convey an understanding of Russian serfdom that will make it, along with the salve societies of the Americas and white supremacist regime in South Africa, an unavoidable point of reference in the search for perspective on the enigmatic history of the American South.