Talk:Ulrich B. Phillips

Please defend use of this long passage in encyclopedia

The following blockquote has been removed from this article for cause.

What is the justification for placing this long passage here? Is it online? Can it be linked to? Can it be summarized?

Please cite other examples where passages this long are quoted anywhere in Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia. In addition, please provide citations for the following words in the POV introduction to the passage. If it is influential, please state who says that that it is. Please provide documentation that "most historians" accept the following claim. Skywriter 12:04, 9 May 2006 (UTC) In his highly influential essay "The Central Theme of Southern History" (1928) Phillips argued that white supremacy was the central theme, a position adopted by most historians ever since. He says: <block quote> "Southernisms did not arise from any selectiveness of migration.... It does not lie in religion or language. It was not created by one-crop tillage, nor did agriculture in the large tend to produce a Southern scheme of life and thought.... The South has never had a focus.... What is its essence? Not state rights -- Calhoun himself was for years a nationalist ... not free trade ... not slavery ... not Democracy.... Yet it is a land with a unity despite its diversity ... the white folk a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained -- that it shall be and remain a white man's country. The consciousness of a function in these premises ... is the cardinal test of a Southerner and the central theme of Southern history. It arose as soon as the negroes became numerous enough to create a problem of race control in the interest of orderly government and the maintenance of Caucasian civilization. Slavery was instituted not merely to provide control of labor but also as a system of racial adjustment and social order.... It was defended not only as a vested interest, but with vigor and vehemence as a guarantee of white supremacy and civilization.... The non-slaveholders of course were diverse in their conditions and sentiments.... Those in the black belts ... had their lives conditioned by the presence of the negros; and they had apparatus of court days, militia musters, and political barbecues as well as neighborhood conversation to keep them abreast of affairs.... The white men's ways must prevail; the negroes must be kept innocuous.... In daily contact with blacks from birth, and often on a friendly basis of patron and retainer, the planters were in a sort of partnership with their slaves ... possessing a sense of security as a fruit of long habituation to fairly serene conditions. But the white toilers lived outside this partnership and suffered somewhat from its competition. H.R. Helper in his Impending Crisis (1857) urged them to wreck the system by destroying slavery.... The whole tier from South Carolina to Texas seceded spontaneously but no other states joined them until after Lincoln's call for troops.... The heavy negro proportions in their black belts, together with immaturity in the social order, made their people more sensitive than those of Virginia to the menace of disturbance outside. Slavery questions, which had never been quite negligible since the framing of the Constitution, gained a febrile activity from the abolition agitation; and the study of the Congressional mathematics focussed the main attention upon the rivalry of the sections in territorial enlargement.... The North now had the strength of a giant; the South should strike for independence before that strength should grow yet greater and be consolidated for crushing purposes.... The tension of 1850 had brought much achievement.... 'Southern rights' had come to mean racial security, self-determination by the whites whether in or out of the Union.... Legal sanction for the spread of slave holding, regardless of geographical potentialities, became the touchstone of Southern rights; and the rapid rise of the Republican party which denied this sanction, equally regardless of geographical potentialities, tipped the balance in lower Southern policy.... Many clergyment gave their aid, particularly by praising slavery as a biblical and benevolent institution.... Various expressions in Northern papers, debates in Congress, and events in Kansas and elsewhere had fanned these flames when the stroke of John Brown fell upon Harper's Ferry. This event was taken as a demonstration that abolitionists had lied in saying they were concerned with moral suasion only, and it stimulated suspicion that Republicans were abolitionists in disguise. In December the South Carolina legislature when expressing sympathy with Virginia intimated that she was ripe for secession and invited all Southern states to meet in convention at once to concert measures for united action.... The October elections brought a virtual certainty of Lincoln's election.... If the Republican party should win the contest, its 'unnatural and feverish vitality' would reach exhaustion within a year or two.... Just before election day George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote to the Charleston Mercury ... concluding: 'In the Union there is no hope for us. Let us ... quit the Union.' ... The upper South had votaries of independence no less outspoke than those of the cotton belt but ... none of these conventions took a decisive step until Lincoln's call for troops.... The sequel showed that the boundary of predominant Southern loyalty was not Mason and Dixon's line but a curving zone seldom touching that landmark.... The course of the Federal government during the war and after its close alienated so many borderers that in a sense Kentucky joined the Confederacy after the war was over.... Lincoln in his plan of reconstruction had shown unexpected magnanimity; the Republican party, discarding that obnoxious name, had officially styled itself merely Unionist.... Edward A. Pollard, a Virginian critic of Davis, chronicler of the war and bewailer of the 'lost cause', took courage in 1868 to write his most significant book, The Lost cause Regained. The folly of politicians, he said, had made the South defend slavery seemingly 'as a property tenure, or as a peculiar institution of labour; when the true ground of defence was as of a barrier against a contention and war of races.' ... A dozen years sufficed to restore white control.... By Southern hypothesis, exalted into a creed, negroes in the mass were incompetent for any good political purpose and by reason of their inexperience and racial unwisdom were likely to prove subversive.... White Southerners when facing problems real or fancied concerning the ten million negroes in their midst can look to the federal authorities for no more at best than a tacit acquiescence in what their state governments may do.... Political solidarity at the price of provncial status is maintained to keep assurance double, trebly sure that the South shall remain 'a white man's country.'"

No original research, No POV

These sentences were removed because they are original resarch and POV. Please cite source for these statements or do not return them to the article. "In use of sources and in interretations, he was one of the most influential historians of his era." "The international perspective was an innovation decades ahead of its time. His basic arguments—the duality of slavery as an economic drag on the economy and society," Thank you. Skywriter 05:58, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

No original research--very unlikely in view of the vast historiography about Phillips. I mostly used the two dozen articles collected in Ulrich Bonnell Phillips: A Southern Historian and His Critics. ed by JD Smith & John C. Inscoe (1990).Thus "few historians used plantation records sparingly before Phillips became their chief consultant; he was the first scholar to make them a major source of information." (p. 23); "Phillips went on to break fresh analytical ground in economic, social, and political history. He mastered the available sources in southern history and uncovered rich new collections of plantation materials for later generations of

scholars." (p. 11)

1. "international": Woodward and Smith suggest he was an early exponent of a comparative approach--"comparative" is a better word that "international". (Smith: "his use of the comparative method to examine slavery in the West Indies offered a fresh perspective to American historians." ibid p, 3 also Smith, John David. “U. B. Phillips's World Tour and the Study of Comparative Plantation Societies.” Yale University Library Gazette 1994 68(3-4): 157-168.)
2. Is he important? (Smith: "Does Phillips deserve all this attention? Unquestionably yes. Ironically today's historians of slavery owe a tremendous debt to this racist, white southern historian. Although we may not wish to admit it, Herbert G. Gutman was correct: Phillips continues to dictate the manner in which many historians approach the study of slavery. His works remain the standard against which we judge the new scholarship on slavery." p 10) Also: Smith: "Kenneth M. Stampp has admitted that "In their day the writings of Ulrich B. Phillips on slavery were both highly original and decidedly revisionist." "He was about as objective as the rest of us," asserted Stampp at the meeting of the Southern Historical Association in 1982." (p. 10) Also Smith: "From the vantage point of the three historiographic cycles presented here, 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 in white supremacy than other leading contemporary white scholars." Rjensen 06:27, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

The point is-- when undocumented material is added, as this was ---twice-- it is subject to challenge for documentation when it expresses opinion, as this does. Readers can not be expected to guess as to documentation. It must be clearly cited. Skywriter 08:26, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

happy to oblige--but all the material was already in the published sources, and people who really care about the topic should read some of them. Rjensen 09:35, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Rjensen wrote: "Phillips was no more a believer in white supremacy than other leading contemporary white scholars." Is it possible for you to see outside of the narrow window of white viewpoints -- to see far enough to grasp that others, such as Du Bois and Franklin, both of whom you have openly disparaged on the pages of Wikipedia, do not belong to the white boy POV club?

Then again, here in this very article, Rjensen, you added an extraordinary claim in the final phrase of the following sentence. "In "The Central Theme of Southern History" (1928), Phillips maintained that the desire to keep their region "a white man's country" united southerners, a proposition that has largely been accepted by scholars of all viewpoints." That latter phrase, of course, POV in the purest (and most mistaken) sense, is now gone.Skywriter 22:28, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

The quote was by Smith, and so I set it off properly. The proposition about Central Theme is not at all POV --who disagrees? Rjensen 23:34, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

No need to quote secondary sourcequoting Gutman. Gutman was quite clear in his 645-page book. Skywriter 23:50, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't know what you are doing with that "everybody agrees with Phillips" bit you are trying to reinstate re: Phillips viewpoints united the white south but listen up: it will not stand. Whites are not alone in populating the South. Oh, and by the way, please document where it says you speak for all whites. Cheers. And Thank You. Skywriter 23:50, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

I documented with citations from big names like McPherson--and please don't pretend to be a black who bashes white boys. It's unbecoming for a Wiki editor.Rjensen 00:15, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Request for opinions of other Wikipedia editors

Rjensen and I dispute what the lead should be. Rjensen contends that the views of this early 20th century historian continue to influence historical writing. And yet, link after link demonstrates that Phillips's views have been widely rejected because he wrote from a deeply racist perspective, based on plantation manuscripts that ignored but claimed to interpret African American culture. Phillips's point that slaves were happy and that the system of slavery benefited them, and that slave holders allowed the economic slave system to continue because they were benevolent. No serious historian accepts these views anymore. My dispute with Rjensen in this matter is his selective and truncated use of quotes to make the point that Phillips was a great historian still revered today. The cited articles show exactly the opposite. My point is he was influential in his time when racist historiography was acceptable to white textbook purveyors but these views have not survived in the second half of the 20th century and much less the 21st century. At this point, it would be wise to solicit the opinions of other Wikipedia editors to settle how this article should be presented.

It is also my contention that some of the long quotes in this article can be summarized. Skywriter 12:20, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Quote after quote says that Phillips defined the field. Yes his POV has been rejected but quote after quote shows his great importance. As for POV I think Skywriter has a deep animus against Phillips that is dangerous for an editor trying to create a NPOV article. Note that many of the leading historians of slavery South are quoted here which shows his importance. Rjensen 12:27, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Rjensen's personal attack as exhibited in the last comment does not foster negotiation. I propose that the personal attacks stop right now and that we follow the guidelines in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Resolving_disputes Continual reverts are not the way to go. Integrating the various viewpoints is fair. Relegating the viewpoint of the African American journal Rjensen dislikes to near the bottom of the article is not a way to reach concensus. Article after article, except those that are more than 40 years old, conclude that Phillips work is and was racially biased. Rjensen's viewpoint being pressed in this article is to erase evidence of conclusions historians have reached in the last 40 years concerning Phillips and to press the viewpoint that he was a great and influential historian-- based on writings more than 40 years old when segregation was still present and even legal in parts of the United States. The summary paragraph by the North Carolina historian in the Georgia Encylopedia seems fair in its summary of Phillips's strengths and weaknesses, and yet, Rjensen has reverted it twice, calling it "stale." I am willing to work this out directly with Rjensen. I ask that Rjensen stop the condescenion and personal attacks. To suggest someone has "deep animus" toward a long dead historian is ridiculous. Skywriter 12:53, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Dillon

The problem with Dillon's screed is that he is talking about what Phillips did not write about: the inner culture of the slave community. Dillon is of course exaggerating--or else Dillon did not notice that the Blacks on the plantation adopted white traits like language & religion, and after emancipation joined Baptist and Methodist churches and the Republican party. Rjensen 12:50, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

The scholarly objection to many of your entries in this article, Rjensen, is that you selectively quote to fit your viewpoint. When one goes back to read the entire article, one finds that it is very different from the sentence scraps extracted to fit into the Rjensen viewpoint. It is fair to include the context and intent of the writer, not to abstract from that with ellipses only what you want to present. I repeat that the Georgia Enclyclopedia article seems fair. Claims that you have repeatedly tried to insert in this article that Phillips continues to influence historians is poppycock, and as importantly, that viewpoint is 40 years buried.Skywriter 12:59, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

It's bad editing to search for nasty things to say about people whose biases one does he not share. That is not the way to build a NPOV encyclopedia. Nor is quoting an encyclopedia rather than summarizing the article itself the way to lead the article. Let's ask, why have so many serious historians of slavery discussed Phillips at such length of he is so unimportant.(Woodward, Fogel, Genovese, Stampp, Gutman, Potter, Sitkoff, etc.) Did Phillips shape the field? Ask Frederickson and Lasch: "The critics of Phillips have tried to meet him on his own ground." Ask Vann Woodward: "Much of what Phillips wrote has not been superseded or seriously challenged and remains indispensable" Ask Herbert Gutman: "Critics, including such able scholars as (E. Franklin) Frazier, Kenneth M. Stampp, and Stanley M. Elkins, sharply rejected the racial assumptions of Phillips and his followers but focused on the same question." Ask Genovese (in his Marxist days): "his 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." Ask David Brion Davis: "The most comprehensive study of North American slavery is still Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918), which needs to be supplemented by Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South ( New York, 1956)." Ask Howard Sitkoff: "Today, as in Phillips's lifetime, scholars again commonly acknowledge the value of many of his insights into the nature of the southern class structure and master-slave relationships." How much more evidence is needed that Phillips shaped the debate??? Rjensen 13:10, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Thank you. All of your citations in the above note are more than 40 years old. One goes all the way back to 1918.(!) Historiography has transformed itself since the era when historians provided the intellectual justifications for slavery and segregation. That transformation began and continued dynamically through the second half of the 20th century. Gutman is deeply critical of Phillips in many places in his book. Your wrongful quotation of Gutman via a tertiary source is suspect, primarily because you have taken so many quotes out of context. Frederickson and Lasch make the point that both Phillips and his critics were asking the wrong questions. Historians have refocused since then. I don't know why you are trying to make this fellow into more than he was in the context of his time. Do you contend that the Georgia Encyclopedia article is unfair? If it is fair, then may I suggest that this article stay close in depiction, not using the same material but in terms of judgment of his place in history without the exaggeration you seem to favor. You appear to be so emotionally involved in building support for Phillips's point of view that you are reaching the point of unfairness in depiction. The Wikipedia article on arbitration suggests stepping back. May I suggest that happen at this point, and that other editors be invited to review this article and its talk page for comment. Can you live with that suggestion? Skywriter 13:25, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Genovese is not a Marxist and hasn't been for 40 years

Rjsensen has returned to this article numerous times to change the fact that Genovese is a well-known conservative historian who dallied with Marxism when he was much younger. As the Wikipedia article on Genovese documents, this man is not a Marxist. Rjensen's continued reverts to his POV claim that Genovese is a Marxist underlines my doubts that Rjensen is pushing his own viewpoint, which is avowedly conservative. Accuracy is important and facts are not just matters of convenience. The fact that Rjensen repeatedly reverts and deletes the correction that Genovese is and has been a conservative for 40 years is in part the basis of the fact and POV tags on this article. When other editors come to this page, I hope this will be looked at. Skywriter 13:34, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

actually Genovese was probably the leading Marxist intellectual in the US in the 1960s, when the quotes originated, For example, he edited Marxist Perspectives where many leading Marxists published. Of course Genovese is the leading historian of plantation slavery in the last 50 years, but no matter to Skywriter. The problem here is that Skywriter has a bitter hatred of conservative historians (like Phillips) and uses every chance to demean and ridicule them. That is a very serious flaw for an editor seeking to achieve an NPOV article. Rjensen 03:49, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Obviously this talk page dispute ended a long time ago, but it's strange seeing Genovese described as having merely "dallied with Marxism when he was much younger." Genovese's most influential works (including his essays on Phillips) were written when he was an avowed Marxist, and he only started identifying as a conservative when he was in his 60s (which, back in 2006, meant less than 15 years, not 40.) One can certainly critique Genovese's understanding of Marxism and how he used it when analyzing US history, but to call it a youthful dalliance just seems ignorant. --Ismail (talk) 09:18, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

==The current version-- The current version of this article is unacceptable. For example, the following sentence represents rjensen's opinin and is not true-- "African American historians expressed disappointment that his emphasis on the material well being of the slaves diverted attention from the slaves' own cultural constructs and efforts to achieve freedom." Many more than African American historians are critical of Phillips and Jensen's suppression of this information causes serious problems in the truth of this article. The lead of the article is too long and unencyclopedic. That Rjensen continues to engage in personal attacks instead of trying to reach consensus is noted. Rjensen's opinions on who is and is not the leading historian of slavery are mistaken, and off point of this article. Leon Litwack and Ira Berlin, are giants in this field. Genovese's views are controversial. The point of the comment about Genovese was to support the edit that he has not been a Marxist for 40 years. Jensen does not address that point or accept it. Rjensen's rants on editing are what they are. Skywriter 04:52, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Skywriter simply hates conservative historians. That is not allowed. Skywriter apparently has not read a single book or article by Phillips and yet seems to think he's qualified to edit the biography. I think it is true that African American historians expressed disappointment that his emphasis on the material well being of the slaves diverted attention from the slaves' own cultural constructs and efforts to achieve freedom. -- I actually read the reviews in the Jorunal of Negro History in the 1920s era that prove that. The fact that white historians decades later took up the same argument should not trump simple statements of fact. Genovese's quotes in 1950s-1970s came when he was a leading Marxist. Rjensen 05:00, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

another challenge--pick the richer, more detailed, more helpful into

Here's my draft for an introduction: does anyone see a problem?? Skywriter says it's too favorable toward a conservative historian.

Phillips concentrated on the large plantations that dominated the Southern economy, neglecting the large number of smaller farms that employed a 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. On the whole plantation slavery was not very profitable, he said, had about reached its limits in 1860, and would probably have faded away without the American Civil War, which he considered needless. He praised the plantation owners and denied they were brutal, arguing they provided adequate food, clothing, housing, medical care and training in modern technology--that they were a school "civilized" the slaves. He admitted the failure was that no one graduated from this school. Phillips systematically hunted down and opened 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 thouse who disagreed with his favorable treatment of the masters. African American historians expressed disappointment that his emphasis on the material well being of the slaves diverted attention from the slaves' own cultural constructs and efforts to achieve freedom. 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 ante-bellum south. His interpretation of white supremacy as the "central theme of southern history" remains one of the main interpretations of Southern history.

Here is the alernative introduction copied from an encyclopedia. Does anyine think it tells us more?

"Today historians remember Phillips as a path-breaking scholar, as a pioneer in the use of plantation and other southern manuscript sources, as the inspiration for the "Phillips school" of state slavery studies, and as a conservative, proslavery interpreter of slavery and the slaves."

Rjensen 05:42, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Hagiography at its worst

It is rjensen's personal, immodest opinion that his own rant is "richer, more detailed, more helpful." In fact, it is hagiography and unencyclopedic in approach. Readers do not favor long first paragraphs. Wikipedia favors short summary paragraphs. The above offering is entirely inappropriate, and rjensen's ravings concerning a fellow editor are, of course, out of line. Skywriter 10:51, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Hagiography? Since when is that a problem for Skywriter? see his line " Leon Litwack and Ira Berlin, are giants in this field." (above). Berlin is indeed good (I quoted him) but the Litwack is wildly off base. Litwack has written very little on slavey (he writes on free blacks esp after 1863). Someday someone may even write an essay about Litwack (the only one in print downgrades his work)--but look at the multiple books and articles on Phillips. Now we have cleared that problem, which sentences does he disagree with, if any?

Use of "Negro" - That would have been the most acceptable term for a writer of that time period to use. Yes he was racist, but that is not evidence of that! !~~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.54.83.29 (talk) 17:41, 16 August 2008 (UTC)