Informed by intimate primary sources such as letters and journals, the anecdotal or platitudinous details of which are usually considered too prosaic to warrant study in their own right, Eugene Genovese's The Sweetness of Life gives an astoundingly sensual and evocative insight into the private world of the master class.
Genovese recapitulates reflections pertaining to kitchen and carriage, dining room and garden, recounting the manner in which the planter class ate oysters, flirted, danced, read, hunted and gambled, omitting no particularity along the way. Tastes, sounds and materials are conjured in meticulous detail, presenting an insight to the social and leisurely world of the slaveholding class entirely removed from the slave auction and senate floor they are usually relegated to in historical staging. Owing to a professional lifetime of archival work, and clearly inundated with material, this monograph – Genovese's swansong – is bursting at the seams with vignettes stitched together lovingly.
As noted in Douglas Ambrose's editorial foreword, The Sweetness of Life lacks a central thesis. As such, those familiar with Genovese's usual style could find this publication to be comparably vacuous, yet any scholar sharing his fascination with the life of the slaveholder will, upon reading, luxuriate in the depth of this descriptive work, just as he appears to have done when writing. This is truly and evidently a labour of love, but one whose scholarship precludes criticism by virtue of its quality, drawing on sources selected from almost two dozen archives across the US.
These small details, as Genovese himself argued, are essential for furnishing our understanding of the antebellum South more comprehensively. Taken in accumulation, they form the texture of the context of secession, the individual fragments of a grander narrative encapsulating politics, slavery and Civil War. The sectional crisis, for example, surfaces when Genovese discusses the antagonisms suffered when northerners and southerners visited the same springs on vacation. The slave presence at horse races and barbecues, similarly, invokes the peculiar institution with subtlety, depicting enslaver and enslaved interacting in their daily lives without the spectre of abolitionism, just as it would have been.
Genovese evokes the southern sense of humour in a way made possible by his familiarity with the masters’ mind-sets, effortlessly delivering punchlines, advice and anecdotes as fluidly as the men in question (seemingly) would have. This familiarity, it must be noted, could easily be misinterpreted by a scholar unfamiliar with Genovese's corpus of work as a romanticized account of the Old South. Admitting to “liking” southern slaveholders (2), Genovese certainly made no effort to accompany his fondness with reproach in this particular project. Such a style could be jarring, resounding perhaps as a celebration of the world of the planter class funded by the blood and sweat of slaves, whose blood and sweat features barely in this monograph. Genovese's condemnation, therefore, must be taken as axiomatic when reading.
The book is well organized in seven chapters, each focussing on a different aspect of the tastes and pastimes of the planter class. The study allows for a balanced discussion of both men and women, even if at times the women enter fleetingly, decorating a discussion mainly focussed on men. But Genovese deserves utmost credit for seeking the female insight on topics such as war and sex, from which they were typically excluded by both their male contemporaries and some historians alike, and for presenting both opinions alongside each other as opposed to consigning female commentaries to a chapter of their own.
The text covers the South broadly, with recounted tales selected from Texas to Georgia, satisfying scholars focussing on any of the singular states. Moreover, particularly revealing with regard to the interior world of the slave master, themes such as the discomfort suffered by those barely able to afford to host guests, but forced to do so in order to maintain public image and political reputation, reveal the struggles of men in psychological terms, dealing with them as multidimensional historical actors. In that sense the text, and the private sources informing it, will be most pleasing to historians of the emotions seeking a truer account of the lived experience of the slaveholder, which still lacks sufficient scholarship.
Overall The Sweetness of Life is as engrossing as it is illuminating, affording scholars the rare pleasure of reengaging with the descriptive aspects of history usually omitted from heavily theoretical work.
