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  • Sprawling Cities and New Factories:Rethinking the Political Economy of Secession
  • Marc Egnal (bio)
John Majewski . Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 256 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, and index. $39.95.

Brush aside the Spanish moss. Hold the mint juleps. Forget your image of refined, ineffectual planters like Augustine St. Clare in Uncle Tom's Cabin or Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. According to John Majewski, slaveholders had a "decidedly businesslike mentality" (p. 6). More particularly, he contends that the secessionists sought to build a modern economy marked by "industrial expansion, economic independence, and government activism" and that these goals reflected "southern attitudes established during the antebellum period" (pp. 3, 7). The real St. Clares and Wilkeses, Majewski suggests, dreamed not of leisure but of "sprawling cities and new factories" (p. 152). Modernizing a Slave Economy is an engaging, provocative, valuable book, but ultimately its arguments are unpersuasive.

Majewski's analysis has three components. To begin with, he examines Southern agriculture to show that poor soils and climate, not slavery or entrepreneurial failings, lay at the heart of regional underdevelopment. This part of the book is only loosely connected to his larger themes. Next, Majewski discusses how leading southerners in the decades before the Civil War demanded an activist state to promote agricultural reform, railroad construction, and direct trade with Europe. Finally, he analyzes the Confederacy and New South to show that the same emphasis on a modern, urbanized, industrial state marked policies during these years. Throughout, Majewski focuses on programs and leaders in two states: Virginia and South Carolina.

The book opens with a detailed, if unconvincing, discussion of why the environment, not the planters' behavior, made the South poorer than the North. This analysis, with its quantitative underpinnings, has the feel of a stand-alone essay, the sort that might appear in the Journal of Economic History. Still it plays a role in the larger presentation: if the book were a trial, this discussion would be a character witness. It shows that we can accept the [End Page 462] planters as "businesslike," the sort of individuals who would seek an activist state to promote development. It refutes the charge, often made at the time and repeated by modern scholars, that slavery was a flawed system of production and responsible for the South's economic problems.

While accepting that Southern farmers failed to keep pace with their counterparts in the North, Majewski points to rainfall, disease, and soil conditions as the culprits—not slavery. Climate, he suggests, caused extensive soil erosion: "Simply put, it rained harder in the South" (p. 36). Climate also helped breed ticks and spread Texas cattle fever: hence the scrawniness of Southern livestock. Still more significant were poor soils that led to "shifting cultivation." Southern land was quickly exhausted, then left fallow for long periods as planters moved to new tracts. In the North, richer soils, boosted by fertilizers and crop rotation, allowed fields to remain steadily productive.

Using data from the 1994 U.S. General Soil Map, Majewski argues poor farmland forced planters to seek new expanses. Most Southern land, he explains, can be classified either as alfisols, which contained vital nutrients, or less fertile ultisols. "Even a cursory examination of a soil order map . . . ," he writes, "shows that the South is heavily burdened with ultisols" (p. 35). Shifting cultivation, he notes, was a "rational response" to these conditions, adding that, where alfisols predominated, farmers were less likely to engage in wasteful practices (p. 25).

To prove the links between soils and cultivation, Majewski offers two sets of data. The first is a list of eight counties (seven in Virginia, one in South Carolina)—districts, he claims, that had better soils and engaged in more intensive cultivation. But the list includes only some of the Virginia counties where a high proportion of the land was farmed and provides no information on soil types. From the map displayed on page 34, it appears some of the selected counties sat on fertile alfisols, while others did not. The appendix provides the second body of supporting evidence: three multivariate regression equations...

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