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Rating: 
Summary: Superb, as usual.
Review: Eugene Genovese is the outstanding historian of the past 30 years. His books on American slavery touched off the enormous flowering of slavery studies during that time, and his recent work on southern whites has been equally exemplary. This brief volume, a collection of three papers, has redefined the Confederacy.What Genovese shows here is that their experience in the Civil War led many southerners to decide that God was punishing them for not reforming their slave system. Genovese's subjects remained convinced that slavery was an institution that had been ordained by God; however, they decided that their prohibitions on slave marriage (which forced slaves to reproduce illicitly) and slave literacy (which kept slaves from becoming proper Protestants) were offensive to God, and many of them insisted on changes to remove these objections. By the war's end, many concluded God had chastised them for their sins.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent source about the southern viewpoint of slavery
Review: There are innumerable controversies between the vast schools of thought in American history. Perhaps one of the largest is that of slavery in the United States. Throughout their years of public education, students are taught that slavery is immoral and wrong. Eugene Genovese, on the other hand, shows the side that students are not often taught. He tells of the reasons why slavery was so strongly supported and gives his interpretations and support of slavery in his book, A Consuming Fire. According to Genovese, the slave owners of the South didn't believe that slavery was inhumane. In fact, they believed that it was God's will that slaves be owned. Southern pastors found many Biblical passages which convinced Southerners not only to own slaves, but how to treat them and what rights to give them, or not give them. Genovese says that many slave holders were torn between politics and Christianity by saying, "The efforts to recognize slave marriage, to keep slave families intact, and to repeal the literacy laws confronted slave holders with an uncomfortable choice between their religion and their political and socioeconomic interests," (pg. 23). One of the arguments Genovese makes is that since God wants people to own slaves, He would allow them to win the war. The first few battles of the Civil War supported this side, since the Confederacy seemed to be winning against such impressive odds. Later, when the South lost the war and slavery was non-existant, the Christian South claimed that it was because they did not live according to God's commandments of being good slave owners. Genovese's work, A Consuming Fire, is an excellent portrayal of the system of slavery in Southern eyes. This book is filled with interesting facts, and the reader learns that the laws created by the Southern government were often opposed by slave owners themselves. Stated on the cover is, "The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South." Nothing better summarizes Genovese's theory than this statement.
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