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  • Planters' Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia
  • William Harris Bragg
Planters' Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia. By Chad Morgan. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. xii, 163. $55.00 cloth.)

The pleasantly alliterative title of Chad Morgan's excellent first book echoes John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. Most similarities between the books end there, however. Morgan's concept of "progress"—unlike Bunyan's meaning: a journey toward a goal—is "material progress, the material improvement of the lot of all classes in a society . . . generally associated with a substantial degree of industrialization and urbanization" (124n13). Nonetheless, while the idea of a journey toward a goal remains, the author demonstrates that Georgia's planters fell far short of reaching theirs: long-term "industrialization in a slave society" (2). Indeed, Bunyan's protagonist's point of departure, the City of Destruction, became the planters' destination.

Morgan satisfyingly explains the link between what might seem opposites—planters and industrialization—by providing succinct histories of both. He painstakingly traces the roots of planters' power, quite disproportionate to their numbers, to the late 1700s and early 1800s. Political decisions during that period sanctioned the primacy of planters in politics by creating property-holding qualifications for officeholders. Adoption of the federal ratio for representation in the state legislature (which appointed the governor until 1824) further strengthened the planters. By the time the government became more democratized in the 1840s, planter dominance was firmly established.

Early Southern industrialization, on the other hand, failed to flourish. Factory expansion came mainly at the sufferance of the planters, who comprised only 20 percent of the South's industrialists. During the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, factory owners depended on water to transport goods to major markets from their water-powered plants on the fall line. The distance from Lowell to the Massachusetts coast was around twenty miles; that [End Page 315] from Macon to Georgia's Atlantic seaboard was closer to two hundred. This made quite a difference. By the 1840s rail transportation somewhat reduced this disparity, but by then northern industrial dominance had been as well established as planter political power.

The planters tended to support railroad construction and even found ways for slave property to further rail expansion; consequently, Georgia's rail mileage would exceed all but Virginia's when the Civil War came to the American southeast. But other factors limited expansion of the state's industrial base: the superior momentum and skill of Northern industries—even in manufacturing cotton products, weaknesses in the Southern banking system, and deficits in industrial tradition and experience—translating into "amateur manufacturing" (12).

Morgan records pro-industrial sentiments in the antebellum South, quoting thinkers who understood that a mixed economy of agriculture and industry promised independence. These observers also knew that lack of industry helped explain the South's non-competitive population growth, which was draining the region's national political power. Consequently, many Georgians were heartened by the Confederacy's incredibly rapid wartime industrial expansion. One 1862 Georgia newspaper even hoped wistfully for a longer, rather than a shorter war, for "a too speedy peace . . . would expose [Southerners] to a worse danger than that of war—the danger of being kept in our former commercial vassalage" (33).

Modernization thus came to Confederate Georgia and its sister states, adding the Southern Confederacy to those other almost instantaneously modernized nation-states of the mid-1800s, Germany and Japan—a membership that would also be quickly revoked. This modernization, "nonrevolutionary [and] overseen by a landed elite" (1), combined "industrialization, urbanization, and . . . the expansion of state power" (118n1). Consequently, long before the first Union army crossed Georgia's borders, the state's industrial base and potential, its abundant population, and its rail-linked towns had made it a battleground for Confederate and Georgia authorities, all seeking to expand their powers in the midst of war.

Modernized Georgia's industries were quickly harnessed to meet the needs of the soldiers on whom the Confederacy's independence depended—producing the food, arms, clothing, and shelter vital to the nation's troops. Morgan sees that national conscription was central not only to keeping adequate forces in the field, but to controlling the industrial labor...

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