Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (review)

In his second book, John Majewski tangles with the premise that the Confederacy was an agrarian nation happy to be shed of the burdens of commerce and industry. Bucking the trend of existing scholarship that emphasizes the antimodern policies and practices of southerners, he argues that close examination of the two most prominent southern states, South Carolina and Virginia, reveals that scholarly fixation on states' rights, limited government, and strict constitutional construction does not tell the full story of the region on the eve of the Civil War. Instead, he reexamines the subject with the same type of careful analysis evidenced in his first book, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War (2006), which contrasted the events in Pennsylvania and Virginia as the nation moved toward the Civil War. Majewski is an economic historian, and as such he relies extensively on statistical regression to "integrate political, economic, and environmental history to better understand both the real world in which secessionists lived and the imaginary world that they hoped to create" (16). Combining his data with the public statements of prominent secessionists, he concludes that most envisioned an economic and political independence that required industrial expansion and an active role of the government in that growth. In stark contrast to the standard interpretation of pro-southern nationalists as advocates of states' rights and laissez faire policies, Majewski's analysis portrays them as favoring a modern Confederacy that integrated slavery, commercial agriculture, and industrialization. Perhaps most surprising, he shows their agenda also featured an activist and strong central government.

The choice of South Carolina, home to many of the most radical southern nationalists, and Virginia, the most populous southern state, provides Majewski with much fodder for his argument. Defining the most vocal secessionists as southern extremists, he contrasts his statistical analysis with the public words of the likes of John C. Calhoun, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Edmund Ruffin, and Virginia governor John B. Floyd. As Lacy Ford did in his important study of the residents of upcountry South Carolina, Majewski demonstrates that southern extremists supported agricultural reform, industrialization, and railroad development. They openly advocated state support and involvement in all of these ventures. However, where Ford found that those in the upcountry came to react strongly against these forms of economic development on the eve of secession, Majewski shows that the strongest advocates of disunion continued to espouse a modern economic agenda. Even protectionist trade policies found a home in their vision of the Confederacy. Support for a revenue tariff of 15 to 20 percent gained popularity in Virginia although, not surprisingly, found less support in South Carolina. Many southern extremists argued that such a tariff would not dissuade trade with Europe but would out-price northern goods and give southern manufacturers a chance to make up some ground. Aiming to eventually pull the Confederate South together economically, these visionaries believed that "Europeans would bow down before the power of King Cotton; [and] northerners would hopelessly watch as Confederate manufacturers undermined their industrial dominance" (21). These predictions were unfounded, of course, but Majewski does a pretty thorough job of arguing that they were rooted in the economic thinking of these modernizing Confederates.

Modernizing a Slave Economy is mostly successful at integrating regression analysis and other statistical measures with the larger narrative of the late antebellum South. However, this approach does not always capture nuances and variations. Majewski argues in chapter 1, for example, that shifting cultivation in the sparsely settled South necessarily retarded manufacturing and urban development and that the lack of local manufacturing pushed slaveholders to achieve self-sufficiency and rely on slaves for production of required goods such as shoes and textiles. The author draws this conclusion from a regression analysis of acres of improved land and manufacturing output as reported in the 1860 census. However, recent studies of the urban South show a more fluid connection between industry...