Essays in Nineteenth Century Economic History: The Old Northwest (review)

BOOK REVIEWS175 many were pleasantly surprised to learn that Yankees, too, could be warm and friendly to strangers. At the same time, some of the travelers could not resist making unfavorable comparisons with their more familiar way of life, emphasizing the poverty, crime and unpleasant aspects of northern life in their reports home. Southerners in northern places tended to congregate together and to reinforce their bias in favor of southern society, including, of course, slavery. On this crucial matter they tended to be very much on the defensive. Many felt that though Northerners could be friendly on a personal basis, they tended to judge the South as a section, and to find it wanting. Nevertheless, Southerners continued to go north in large numbers, often because their private business interests required it. Though they were constantly reminded of the colonial status of their section, Southerners as individuals profited greatly from contacts with and travel in the North. Interruption of such intersectional business during the Civil War proved to be temporary, and the commerce was resumed almost immediately after the guns had stilled. Professor Franklin's approach is largely narrative and descriptive. He provides ample evidence to demonstrate the importance of economic interests in transcending sectional arguments, though individuals were often ambivalent in their attitudes towards the other section. He also concludes that southern travelers, instead of providing a bridge to understanding, contributed to the growing polarization of the two sections. They tended to overreact to criticism and failed to understand the need for change in the South if open conflict were to be avoided. Their contributions to American thought of the antebellum period add a significant chapter to the history of ideas, and that contribution is well presented in this study. Larry Gara Wilmington College Essays in Nineteenth Century Economic History: The Old Northwest . Edited by David C. Klingaman and Richard K. Veddes. (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1975. Pp. xiv, 356. $12.00.) This potpourri of eleven essays and technical papers on the socioeconomic development of the "Old Northwest" in the nineteenth century will be useful to American economic historians and midwestern state historians. This five-state region has been a "relatively neglected region," according to the co-editors, but it is of more than "merely parochial interest" because it led the nation into economic take-off in the ante-bellum decades. The midwestern development is thus a microcosm of the national experience. 176CIVIL WAR HISTORY Whether this collection originated in a conference or by separate commissioning is not clear, but the editors are to be commended for producing a remarkably coherant book. The main theme is the processes by which the simple agrarian society of the Midwest evolved into a complex, integrated industrial society. These processes are explained entirely in economic terms and the chapters are organized according to the traditional triumvirate of productive factors—land, labor, and capital. In the opening essay, which serves as a general introduction to the subject, William Parker presents a pedestrian overview of the "social bases" of the Northwest. The piece is cast in a Turnerian framework, based upon Kohlmeier, Wittke, Wade and other standard sources, but these works should have been supplemented with John Clark's Grain Trade in the Old Northwest and the interregional commodity trade studies of Paul David, Albert Fishlow, and Diane Lindstrom. The next two essays, on the subject of agricultural productivity and income by Robert Gallman and Richard Easterlin respectively, are a marked contrast to Parker, offering a technical, theoretical discussion of agricultural income, output, and labor force estimates that will appeal primarily to specialists. Rounding out the first group of articles on land factors is Edward Rastatter's revisionist analysis of the economic costs of land speculation in Ohio, 1820-1840, measured by estimating the lowest break-even price that farmers could afford to pay for raw land. Rastatter, an economist in the Office of Budget and Management, failed to obtain comparative data on actual land prices in Ohio from government entry records or county deed registers , but his conclusion appears reasonable that speculators sold land at prices far below the potential earning level. The second set of essays deal with human inputs in economic development , namely...