Ulrich Bonnell Phillips | |
|---|---|
 Phillips in 1928 | |
| Born | (1877-11-04)November 4, 1877 |
| Died | January 21, 1934(1934-01-21) (aged 56) |
| Nationality | American |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Georgia Columbia University |
| Academic advisors | Frederick Jackson TurnerWilliam Archibald Dunning |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of Wisconsin–Madison Tulane University University of Michigan Yale University |
| Main interests | Slavery; Old South |
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (November 4, 1877 – January 21, 1934) was an Americanhistorian who largely defined the field of the social and economic studies of thehistory of the Antebellum South andslavery in the U.S. Phillips concentrated on the large plantations that dominated the Southern economy, and he did not investigate the numerous small farmers who held few slaves. He concluded that plantation slavery produced great wealth, but was a dead end, economically, that left the South bypassed by the industrial revolution underway in the North.
Phillips concluded that plantation slavery was not very profitable, had about reached its geographical limits in 1860, and would probably have faded away without theAmerican Civil War, which he considered a needless conflict. He praised the entrepreneurship of plantation owners and denied they were brutal. Phillips argued that they provided adequate food, clothing, housing, medical care and training in modern technology—that they formed a "school" which helped "civilize" the slaves.[citation needed] He admitted the failure was that no one graduated from this school.
Phillips systematically hunted down and revealed plantation records and unused manuscript sources. An example of pioneering comparative work was "A Jamaica Slave Plantation" (1914). His methods and use of sources shaped the research agenda of most succeeding scholars, even those who disagreed with his favorable treatment of the masters.[1] After thecivil rights movement of the 1960s historians turned their focus away from his emphasis on the material well-being of the slaves to the slaves' own cultural constructs and efforts to achieve freedom.[2]
By turning away from the political debates about slavery that divided North and South, Phillips made the economics and social structure of slavery the main theme in 20th century scholarship. Together with his highly eloquent writing style, his new approach made him the most influential historian of the antebellum south.
He was born on November 4, 1877, inLaGrange, Georgia; his parents were Alonzo R. and Jessie Young Phillips.[3] He graduated with aBachelor of Arts degree from theUniversity of Georgia in 1897.[4][3] He obtained hisMaster of Arts degree from UGA as well in 1899 and hisPh.D. in 1902 fromColumbia University where he studied underWilliam Dunning. His dissertation,Georgia and State Rights won the Justin Winsor Prize in 1901 and was published by theAmerican Historical Association.[4][3]
Phillips was especially influenced byFrederick Jackson Turner who invited Phillips to theUniversity of Wisconsin where Phillips taught from 1902 to 1908. He taught for three years atTulane University. In 1911, Phillips moved to theUniversity of Michigan where he taught until 1929 when he left to teach atYale as Professor of American History until his death in 1934.[5][3] In the 1920s he spent a year in Africa traveling and doing research.[3] He received an honorary D. Litt. from Columbia University in 1929.[3]
He married Lucil Mayo-Smith on February 22, 1911, and had three children: Ulrich, Mabel, and Worthington.[3]
Phillips was seen as the first historian to seriously tackle the practice of slavery and was very influential into the 1950s.[6]
Frederic Bancroft's 1931Slave-Trading in the Old South was a direct attack on Phillips and his school of thought; as historian Michael Tadman explained, "Where Phillips had emphasized slaveholder benevolence, Bancroft saw self‐interest. With Bancroft, the emphasis switched from proslavery to abolitionist traditions—and switched to the cruelty and immorality of slavery, to family separations and slave breeding, and to the everyday presence of the trader in every corner of the South."[7] Bancroft's scholarly attack on the "benevolent paternalism" theory of slavery was so comprehensive that, per theJournal of Negro History book review in April 1931, "It will be necessary [for slavery apologists] to work out another program to cover up the truth for another fifty years."[8]
Some of Phillips' views were rejected by a generation of historians in the 1950s with the publication ofKenneth Stampp'sThe Peculiar Institution[9] seen as a particular landmark in that refutation.[10]
The ideas were revived again from the mid 1960s onwards, particularly byEugene Genovese.[11] AsHarvard Sitkoff wrote in 1986, "[I]n the mid-1960sEugene D. Genovese launched a rehabilitation of Phillips that still continues. Today, as in Phillips' lifetime, scholars again commonly acknowledge the value of many of his insights into the nature of the southern class structure and master-slave relationships."[12] In his own right, Genovese recognized in Phillips' work, as many of his colleagues chose to ignore, that master-slave relationships were complex, multi-faceted, more often negative, exploitive, and dehumanizing, yet provided very limited opportunities for some bondsmen to earn cash, travel outside the plantation situation, and enhance their personal values.
Phillips has been described as a white supremacist historian[13] and building many of his views on an ideology of white supremacism.[7]John David Smith of North Carolina State University argues:[14]
[Phillips was] a conservative, proslavery interpreter of slavery and the slaves ... InLife and Labor in the Old South Phillips failed to revise his interpretation of slavery significantly. His basic arguments—the duality of slavery as an economic cancer but a vital mode of racial control—can be traced back to his earliest writings. Less detailed but more elegantly written thanAmerican Negro Slavery, Phillips'sLife and Labor was a general synthesis rather than a monograph. His racism appeared less pronounced inLife and Labor because of its broad scope. Fewer racial slurs appeared in 1929 than in 1918, but Phillips's prejudice remained. The success ofLife and Labor earned Phillips the year-long Albert Kahn Foundation Fellowship in 1929-30 to observe blacks and other laborers worldwide. In 1929 Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, appointed Phillips professor of history.
Phillips contended that masters treated slaves relatively well. His views were rejected most sharply byKenneth M. Stampp in the 1950s.[15] However, to a large degree Phillips' interpretive model of the dynamic between master and slave was revived byEugene Genovese, who wrote that Phillips's "work, taken as a whole, remains the best and most subtle introduction to antebellum Southern history and especially to the problems posed by race and class."[16] In 1963,C. Vann Woodward wrote: "Much of what Phillips wrote has not been superseded or seriously challenged and remains indispensable."[17]
Peter Kolchin described the state of historiography in the early 20th century as follows:
During the first half of the twentieth century, a major component of this approach was often simply racism, manifest in the belief that blacks were, at best, imitative of whites. ThusUlrich B. Phillips, the era's most celebrated and influential expert on slavery, combined a sophisticated portrait of the white planters' life and behavior with crude passing generalizations about the life and behavior of their black slaves.[6]
HistoriansJames Oliver Horton andLois E. Horton described Phillips's mindset, methodology and influence:
His portrayal of blacks as passive, inferior people, whose African origins made them uncivilized, seemed to provide historical evidence for the theories of racial inferiority that supportedracial segregation. Drawing evidence exclusively from plantation records, letters, southern newspapers, and other sources reflecting the slaveholder's point of view, Phillips depicted slave masters who provided for the welfare of their slaves and contended that true affection existed between master and slave.[18]
Phillips denied he was proslavery. He was an intellectual leader of theProgressive Movement and slavery, in his interpretation, was inefficient and antithetical to the principles of progressivism. Phillips (1910) explained in detail why slavery was a failed system. It is Smith's opinion that:[19]
Phillips's contributions to the study of slavery clearly outweigh his deficiencies. Neither saint nor sinner, he was subject to the same forces-- bias,selectivity of evidence, inaccuracy--that plague us all. Descended from slave owners and reared in the rural South, he dominated slave historiography in an era when Progressivism was literally for whites only. Of all scholars, historians can ill afford to be anachronistic. Phillips was no more a believer inwhite supremacy than other leading contemporary white scholars.
W. E. B. Du Bois criticized Phillips's 1918 bookAmerican Negro Slavery, writing that it was a "defense of American slavery" and that Phillips engaged in thespecial pleading fallacy.[20][21]
Phillips argued that large-scale plantation slavery was inefficient and not progressive. It had reached its geographical limits by 1860 or so, and eventually had to fade away (as happened in Brazil). In 1910, he argued in "The Decadence of the Plantation System" that slavery was an unprofitable relic that persisted because it produced social status, honor, and political power, that is,Slave Power.
Phillips' economic conclusions about the inefficiency of slavery were challenged byAlfred H. Conrad andJohn R. Meyer,[22] andRobert Fogel in the 1950s and 1960s, who argued that slavery was both efficient and profitable as long as the price of cotton was high enough. In turn Fogel came under sharp attack by other scholars.
An essay by the historiansGeorge M. Fredrickson andChristopher Lasch (1967) analyzed limitations of both Phillips and his critics. They argued that far too much attention was given to slave "treatment" in examining the social and psychological effects of slavery on Afro-Americans. They said Phillips had defined the treatment issue and his most severe critics had failed to redefine it:
By compiling instances of the kindness and benevolence of masters, Phillips proved to his satisfaction that slavery was a mild and permissive institution, the primary function of which was not so much to produce a marketable surplus as to ease the accommodation of the lower race into the culture of the higher. The critics of Phillips have tried to meet him on his own ground. Where he compiled lists of indulgences and benefactions, they have assembled lists of atrocities. Both methods suffer from the same defect: they attempt to solve a conceptual problem—what did slavery do to the slave?—by accumulating quantitative evidence.... The only conclusion that one can legitimately draw from this debate is that great variations in treatment existed from plantation to plantation.[23]
In "The Central Theme of Southern History" (1928), Phillips maintained that the desire to keep their region "a white man's country" united the white southerners for centuries. Phillips' emphasis on race was overshadowed in the late 1920s and 1930s by the Beardian interpretation ofCharles A. Beard andMary Ritter Beard, who in their enormously successfulThe Rise of American Civilization (1927) emphasized class conflict and downplayed slavery and race relations as a cause of theAmerican Civil War. By the 1950s, however, the Beardianeconomic determinism was out of fashion, and the emphasis on race (rather than region or class) became a major topic in historiography.[24]
By 2000, Jane Dailey,Glenda Gilmore, and Bryant Simon argue by citing Phillips:[25]
The ways in which white southerners "met" the race "problem" have intrigued historians writing about post-Civil War southern politics since at least 1928, when Ulrich B. Phillips pronounced race relations the "central theme" of southern history. What contemporaries referred to as "the race question" may be phrased more bluntly today as the struggle for white domination. Establishing and maintaining this domination--creating the system of racial segregation and African American disfranchisement known as Jim Crow--has remained a preoccupation of southern historians.
In his review ofComplicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang and Jenifer Frank, the historianIra Berlin wrote, "Slavery in the North, like its counterpart in the South, was a brutal, violent relationship that fostered white supremacy.Complicity's authors shred the notion, famously advanced by the Yale historian U.B. Phillips, that the central theme of Southern history was the region's desire to remain a white man's country. Phillips was not so much wrong about the centrality of white supremacy to the South as blind to its presence in the North."[26]
For a comprehensive annotated guide see Fred Landon and Everett E. Edwards, "A Bibliography of the Writings of Professor Ulrich Bonnell Phillips," (1934).[27]
Edited
Articles
{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
