Talk to Me Like I'm Stupid: Agrarianism, Marxism, and Slavery

Fair warning--this is a post for history nerds and wannabe history nerds. It's only a hair less obscure than my Warcraft post. 

I tried Eugene Genovese's Roll Jordan, Roll but couldn't finish. I guess I'll have to go back to it. (Maybe I'll take it with me into the Woods.) I found its methodology rather frustrating. Drew Gilpin Faust admires the book quite a bit, but I found her style to be much more convincing. Genovese's hops around a lot--you get a three or four sentences about a slaveholder who may not even be named and without much context. Whereas Faust will draw out a study on five or six people, and contextualize their lives. In all honesty, this may just be the writer in me. I tend to like to think about individual characters. Moreover, I gather that some of the answers to the questions I pose above are covered in Genovese's work. 

For now, let's hear the wisdom of the crowd.

UPDATE: I'm going to clean the thread below up some. To be clear, we're not asking whether Marx defended the Confederacy or slavery, so much as we're asking about sympathies for the South among thinkers tracing their lineage to him. 

It also should go without saying that no one here is literally defending the antebellum or Jim Crow South. Comments outlining why such a defense is wrong, will be deleted. Again, I'm seeking something more than the kind of correctives we can all agree with.