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In terms of methodology, the Genoveses, like Miller, are fanatical scholars and researchers. In a mark of characteristic hubris, Miller refused to footnote all of his sources, but when independently compiled years later, they confirmed that he had read virtually the entire canon of Puritan texts—mostly sermons—before the age of Evans micro-cards and photocopiers. A scholar's scholar, Miller ransacked the primary sources, achieving a depth of understanding and knowledge that no one else of his time—including Christian clergy and theologians—could begin to approach. Implicitly, Miller's prodigious archival research challenged the historical community to match his industry and consequent interpretation—or shut up.
Central to the "mind" that Miller elucidated was classical Western history and Protestant Christianity. By looking at Cambridge and Harvard, as well as Puritan literature, Miller described a culture of enormous philosophical erudition, well steeped in the Christian classics, the ancients, and the Renaissance and Reformation. One figure in particular loomed large over the intellectual enterprise: the French Protestant philosopher Peter Ramus whose new system of "logic" (really rhetoric) presented "reality" as it existed in the mind of God. That reality became the organizing device for Puritan preaching and social engineering.
The depth and range of the Genoveses' exploration of Planter intellectual culture and education is no less thorough and encyclopedic. Like Miller they probe deeply into the antebellum world of sermons and theology, and like Miller they also examine higher education and the authors read and studied by the slave-holding élites. In the Plantation South, no less than Puritan New England, public culture was defined by a learned mix of classical history and theology. Ancients were read widely in the South, and knowledge of Greek and Latin was a highly valued skill that any gentleman should possess. The medieval Schoolmen were read also with approval, despite their Roman Catholic context. (By war's end, some Southern intellectuals were actually wondering if the Reformation—with its individualistic ethos—was a good thing after all.) "Modern" philosophers from Hume to Locke were read, critiqued, and integrated into a distinctive Southern world view which privileged the corporate and hierarchical social ethic that upheld slavery as a positive good.
Theologically, Southern intellectuals tended to take their cues from Presbyterian theologians like James Henley Thornwell, Robert Dabney, Thomas Smyth, and Moses Hoge, who all defended slavery and the larger planter household it supported from carefully grounded Scriptural arguments and precedents. Indeed, in a fascinating—and certainly provocative—evaluation of Northern and Southern biblical arguments over slavery, the Genoveses argue that the South got the better of the argument if one stuck to the literal "Word" of the biblical text in contradistinction to some vague "Spirit" of Scripture based on abstract understandings of neighbor love or the Golden Rule: "To speak bluntly: The abolitionists did not make their case for slavery as sin—that is, as condemned in Scripture. The proslavery protagonists proved so strong in their appeal to Scripture as to make comprehensible the readiness with which southern whites satisfied themselves that God sanctioned slavery."
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