First, Roll, Jordan, Roll is a wonderful book. Beautifully written, deeply felt, wonderfully researched, but in 2018 it is quite dated. This isn't a blow against Genovese's scholarship, though many of his arguments were controversial both then and now, but simply to say that in 1974 historians had some pretty major differences in their understanding of the Southern economy.

Genovese argued that the antebellum South was a decidedly precapitalist society, and that it had been designed that way by the large slaveholders themselves, who stubbornly resisted the intrusion of economic modernity in the 19th century. He compares them, quite explicitly as you no doubt have seen in this book, to medieval feudal lords and describes the antebellum South as essentially a seigneurial society, one more comparable to premodern Europe than 19th century New England. In carrying this belief into all of his arguments about the antebellum South, he argues that slavery as a system was maintained as much by the socially conservative politics of white southerners as it was by profitability, if not more so.

The idea that slavery is not just evil but unprofitable is actually quite an old one. Its source is antebellum abolitionist rhetoric. Antislavery writers like Frederick Law Olmsted firmly believed that slavery was keeping the south backwards and poor. They saw in Northern society, and its labor relations increasingly based on the buying and selling of labor power (that is, wage labor) efficiency and modernity that was impossible to achieve in the primitive South. After all, there were few large factories in the South, and few large cities; literacy rates in the South were appalling compared to the North. Surely all this proved that not only was slavery wrong morally, but economically!

Most historians don't agree with Genovese or Olmsted today, at least in terms of profits. The capitalist or precapitalist or some other nature of Southern society is still a source of active and occasionally bitter debate in Southern history, but most historians of the "old south" now agree that slavery was immensely profitable for the large slaveholders, even in the face of soil exhaustion and the occasional financial panic that plagued southern states in the 19th century. In 1860, the eight wealthiest states in the Union, "ranked by wealth per white person, were South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Connecticut, Alabama, Florida, and Texas." (Edward Baptist, The Half has Never been Told, another interesting and deeply flawed book) Even if most white farmers were not profiting directly from the production of cotton, sugar, rice, hemp, and so on in southern plantations (since only a third of southern whites held any people in slavery, much less large numbers of them), the profits were still so immense as to produce that above statistical reality. Cotton efficiency and profitability actually plummeted after the end of the Civil War as well, and did not return to its prewar levels until the early 20th century.

In regards to the worsened material conditions for some free people, we should be thinking more about the failures of Reconstruction after the war than former slaveholders saving money after beeing freed from the obligations of paternalistic slaveholding. Literacy rates were low (they had been kept that way by slaveholders, of course), assets were few to nonexistent, and after 1877 the federal government allowed southern states free reign to consolidate white supremacy and undo almost all of the gains made by African Americans in the south during reconstruction. When we think about an impoverished 95 year old black woman living in the Jim Crow south and describing their lives to a (most likely) white interviewer asking them about slavery, there are a few reasons why we might imagine them saying that life was better under slavery. Their current poverty, maybe. Childhood nostalgia int heir very advanced age, maybe. The terror of living through the nadir of American race relations in the first decades of the 20th century, maybe. Or, having lived their lives in the South, perhaps they though that the white interviewer wanted to hear good things about life before the Civil War? Genovese could have done a better job interrogating the WPA narratives from which he draws many of the memories of formerly enslaved people. I don't mean to discount the idea that some formerly enslaved people might have felt genuine nostalgia for slavery (though the overwhelmingly majority most certainly did not) but it was not because slavery's profitability was so crippled by the material comfort of life for people enslaved on large plantations.