Marse

A Psychological Portrait of the Southern Slave Master and His Legacy of White Supremacy

H. D. Kirkpatrick

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781633887589
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Marse: A Psychological Portrait of the Southern Slave Masterand His Legacy of White Supremacy focuses on the white men who composed the antebellum southern planter class in the period of 1830-1861. This book is a psychological autopsy of the minds and behaviors of enslavers that helps explain the enduring roots of white supremacy and the hidden wound of racist slavery that continues to affect all Americans today.

Marse details and illustrates examples of the psychological mechanisms by which southern slave masters justified owning another human being as property and how they formed a society in which enslavement was morally acceptable. Kirkpatrick uses forensic psychology to analyze the personality formation, defense mechanisms, and psychopathologies of slave masters. Their delusional beliefs and assumptions about Black Africans extended to a forceful cohort of white slaveholding women, as well as how they twisted Christianity to promote slavery as a positive good. He examines the masters’ stresses and fears, and how they coped by developing psychologically fatal, slavery-specific defense mechanisms. Utilizing sources such as the vast treasure trove of slavery historiography, diaries, letters, autobiographies, and sermons, Marse describes the ways in which slaveholders created a delusional worldview that sanctioned cruel instruments of punishment and implemented laws and social policies of domination used to rob Blacks of their human rights. The seismic shift in race relations our nation is experiencing right now make this book timely, as it will advance our understanding of the South’s self-defeating romance with racist slavery and its latent and chronic effects. The parallels between the psychology of antebellum slaveholding and today’s racism are palpable.

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chronology
• 1 A Brief Psychological Portrait of the American Southern White Elite Planter Class
• 2 The Elite Enslavers’ Core Assumptions and Beliefs about Black Africans
• 3 The Surprising Sketch of the White Southern Female Elite Slaveholder
• 4 Common and Idiosyncratic Enslaver Psychological Defense Mechanisms
• 5 Unassailable Divine Defense of Racist Chattel Slavery
• 6 Scriptural Confabulation: The Story of Noah in Genesis 9:18–27
• 7 The Psychological Dynamics of the Slaveholders’ Fears
• 8 The Slave Masters’ Methodologies
• 9 The Slave Masters’ Laws and Social Policies
• 10 Money Talks: Slavery Was Just Business
• 11 The Throughline
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: Adaptive and Maladaptive Slaveholder Psychological Defense Mechanisms
• Appendix B: Psychological Defense Mechanisms
• Appendix C: A Hypothetical Proslavery Sermon
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments