Planters' Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia (review)

Chad Morgan contends that dominant slaveholders understood that they could not avoid industrialization and technological development, but that the process posed serious problems in a slave society. The ruling class imposed a statist solution during the Confederacy's brief existence. As Morgan observes, slaveholders increasingly tempered their rejection of northern-style development for "the use of state power to promote progress (and ultimately to shelter against its fallout)" (1). Morgan argues that the war crisis enabled the slaveholding elite to embrace activist government in order to get industrialization without free labor and its disruptive influences.

I read the book as a libertarian-tinged critique of the authoritarian economy spawned by the crisis of the war; Morgan cannot be accused of undue enthusiasm for the late Confederacy. The Confederacy's fortuitously "truncated path to the modern world" culminated elsewhere in "some of the most repressive regimes in world history" (68). Unusual is his praise of the ultra-states' rights Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia; though "generations of Confederate house historians" condemned Brown as myopic, he "may have seen further than all of his peers" to a postwar Confederate megastate. Morgan titles his conclusion "Liberalism Triumphant," suggesting that the Union army "scotched the South's authoritarian drift," perhaps the most novel praise of Sherman and his colleagues' economic contribution ever penned (112).

As Morgan cogently argues, Georgia, the deep South industrial center, is an appropriate venue to explore his ideas. However, the execution is unevenly persuasive. In his opening chapters, Morgan contends that several southern intellectuals, safely insulated from actual power, sought statist solutions for the problems of slavery. Unfortunately, none of these intellectuals were actually from Georgia, and it seems that men like the featured Henry Hughes were more interested in the issue of social order and ameliorating slavery than in industrialization. There is no evidence that they had the remotest influence on the Confederate government's resort to crash industrialization. The author consistently identifies the central government as the vehicle of the planter class, but the Confederate bureaucracy in time of conflict had urgent needs of its own, independent of the social constituency it sustained. Given the scope of planter frustration, on impressments of slaves and other issues, it seems strange to see the Davis administration as simply doing planters' bidding on industrial policy.

Another problem is establishing the historiographic significance of Morgan's work. The author certainly knows the literature, but he could situate what he has done within it more clearly. Emory Thomas's The Confederate Nation is still the most influential exploration of forced-draft industrialization as the defining feature of the Confederate experience. Thomas is more appreciative of government economic policy, but Morgan never really addresses his relation to the central work on his topic. Indeed, Thomas's name does not even appear in the book's index.

On the plus side, the body of the text improves considerably. Morgan argues persuasively that while the Confederate state did not nationalize everything possible, for circumstances allowed unprecedented control over the "nominally private sector" (46). Industrialists who resisted government requests found their labor force drafted. Likewise, the threat of conscription and the huge pool of potential female labor inhibited strike disruptions. The racist and sexist pre-suppositions of slave society meant that social hierarchies were preserved in the factories, in natural-seeming divisions between skilled an unskilled laborers. The war promoted the use of slave labor effectively; the departure of so many white workingmen eliminated their longstanding obstruction to black rivals working in factories. In the short run, at least, the evidence supports Morgan's larger notion of a rapid industrialization that did not challenge the basics of a slave society. Morgan may exaggerate the orderliness of the transition, given the number of urban bread riots spearheaded by hungry women, but the basic point seems reasonable.

Morgan seems more impressed with the state's ability to maintain a repressive social order than with its ability to make industrialization [End Page...