Author Robert L. Dipboye has had a long, decorated career in the field of psychology, with postings at Rice University and the University of Central Florida. In his latest volume, Authoritarianism in the American South, Dipboye turns to a historical application of psychological and sociological analysis, tracing the authoritarian inclinations of an increasingly self-aware and insular planter class from the founding of Jamestown to secession. Planter authoritarianism, the author contends, profoundly influenced the evolution of society in the Southern British colonies, American independence, and ultimately pushed the South toward the disaster of secession.
The first chapter provides carefully grounded definitions of what constitutes an “authoritarian belief system.” Drawing from various models and scales employed in the social sciences, Dipboye settles on a four-themed definition of authoritarianism’s features: close-mindedness to political and social alternatives; a zero-sum understanding of economic competition; a dichotomous view of social relations (there are the dominant and the dominated); and the tendency to manufacture outside threats to internal stability and prosperity.
The second and third chapters walk the reader through the paranoid world of colonial planters, filled with threats to their security and economic success, both real and spectral. Living amongst the omnipresence of revolting slaves, the heavy risk burdens of agricultural production, and the irrationality of imperial markets, slave masters built an authoritarian society subordinated to their own goals and justified their iron-fisted control over southern public and economic life by promulgating racist justifications for the domination of those they enslaved.
The fourth and final chapter takes a brisk walk through the nineteenth century, arguing that the planter class, “corrupted” by its own authoritarian inclinations and assumptions, disastrously led the Southern states into an insurrection against a union of states that was never so hostile to their interests as they perceived. Their course of action, which eschewed compromise and ignored the extent to which the constitutional order protected their interests, led to their self-destruction. Even if they somehow broke the bonds of their perceived colonial relationship with Northern capital, a successful secession movement would at best have left the South as a colonial outpost of foreign capital from Britain and France.
While intensely interesting as a historical application of psychology and social science, Dipboye’s volume suffers from some historical flaws, particularly in the fourth chapter, which are significant enough that they should be noted—even if they are not so significant as to compromise the integrity of what the book does well.
Specifically, the emphasis on continuity from the colonial period through to the antebellum weakens the author’s ability to account for historical contingency, and the randomness of events and their consequences. While the forms of authoritarian thinking, politics, and rhetorical style the author identifies did indeed have deeply planted roots in the South, intimately tied to the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, Dipboye’s rapid survey of the nineteenth century only clumsily accounts for the quite wide-ranging swings in Southern politics, Southerners attitudes toward enslavement and the enslaved, and the influence of exogenous events on both in the antebellum period.
Prior to the 1850s, the South contained a competitive two-party system at the local, state, and federal levels. “Democracy” never strayed further than the bounds of white males, but within those confines was, at least for a time, a democracy of sorts (as Harry L. Watson argued in his classic Liberty and Power). Both parties, Whig and Democrat, were lashed to slavery, but held competing visions of what enslavement would look like. Southerners’ ambitions for the West were as “corrupted” by the Panic of 1837—and the stagnate cotton markets that lingered long thereafter—as they were by anything else. Jacksonians, for a time, earnestly held up democracy in the form of popular sovereignty as a salve for sectional wounds. Popular sovereignty’s failures and the collapse of the Whig Party played central roles in the coalescence of Fire-Eater authoritarianism in the southern Democratic Party.
Nonetheless, Robert L. Dipboye has produced a timely and thought-provoking volume. In the epilogue, the author comments upon the long shadows that planter authoritarianism cast across the South well after the Civil War. He intentionally draws the reader’s attention to the present, contending that ghosts of the Confederacy and planter ideology walk in our midst. For enthusiasts of Civil War history, this book is a freshly unique meditation on why the Civil War was fought—and why it still matters.
Aaron David Hyams is a lecturer in the Department of History at Sam Houston State University.
