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book reviews279 Evarts, Charles Loring Brace, Jacob A. Riis, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Nast are familiar names to students of this period. But many lesser-known individuals grace these pages, and their views of and responses to their society are just as significant. Passages from an 1883 book by Anthony Comstock, who personified fin de sièck efforts to impose morality dirough literary and artistic censorship, reVeal die etiiical and psychological assumptions which dominated his generation. An 1881 essay by Doctor George M. Beard, a pioneer in the field of psychosomatic medicine, presents penetrating conclusions on the social effects of industrialization. A number of illuminating excerpts from the verbatim records of congressional investigating committees bring vividly to Ufe the squalor, misery, and general hopelessness endured and felt by workers and newly-arrived immigrants in search of The American Dream. In sum, these two volumes are wordiy additions to die increasing amount of American documentary history being made accessible to graduate and undergraduate students, not to mention the general reading public. Irving Katz Indiana University Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy: 1790-1860. Edited by Stuart Bruchey. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967. Pp. xi, 275. $3.95.) The readings in Stuart Bruchey's Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy: 1790-1860 are, on the whole, well chosen; and, with only a few exceptions, the editor's comments are judicious and reasonable. In terms of Bruchey's broad conceptualizations, however, his approach has important limitations. According to the main thesis of the book, the concentration of soutiiem resources on export staples, particularly cotton, was a dominant growth factor in pre-Civil War America. It stimulated the development of northern manufacturing and western agriculture since the export earnings enabled the South to purchase the manufactured goods and commercial services of the North and the food suppUes and Uvestock of the West. This pattern of mutually beneficial regional specialization, according to natural or acquired advantages, widened and deepened the internal market for goods and services. Bruchey further suggests that the underlying economic reality explaining the failure of industrialization to sink roots in the South was the profitabiUty of slave-based cotton production. Bruchey's commentary and selections concentrate on the technical aspects of cotton production, marketing, financing and interregional trade instead of the poUtical economy of slavery. Within this narrower perspective, there is a rich detaihng of the role of cotton in early American history. Slavery is perhaps the single most important cause of early American growth, directly influencing it in the South where it was the main form of labor for the most important export staples, and indirectly influencing it 280CIVIL WAR HISTORY elsewhere. Slavery cannot be examined as an economic system divorced from its accompanying role as a social system. The lack of mobility of southern capital from agriculture to manufacturing, even in periods of considerable economic distress was due, not to high profits in agriculture, but to cultural and institutional rigidities. Slavery stunted the development of capitaUst rationaUty. The growth of capitalism would have threatened the dominance of the slave-holding aristocracy and therefore could be tolerated only within circumscribed limits. Some of the advanced southern thinkers of die antebellum period, such as William Gregg and Jacob Cardozo in South Carolina (both of whom the editor could have profitably included in the readings) noted that profits in southern manufacturing were often higher than in agriculture; they, in fact, urged the use of excess slaves and poor whites in manufacturing to make the southern economy more viable. The great underutilization of resources of the southern plantation economy , particularly die labor of a poor white class, made it inefficient from the aspect of growth, even though it may have been efficient in terms of the profitabiUty level for some individual holders of slave capital. In this basic sense, American slavery was not an economically viable system. The value of Bruchey's books of readings would have been enhanced, in the opinion of this reviewer, if some attention had been focused on the political economy of slavery. As it stands, the book is still worthy of close reading by students of tiie antebellum period. Melvin M. Leiman SUNY, Binghamton The...

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