Between Slavery and Capitalism: The Legacy of Emancipation in the American South by Martin Ruef (review)

In the 1970s and 1980s, sociologists such as Edward Royce and Ronald L. F. Davis joined with social and economic historians to enrich our understandings of the political economy and class composition of the post–Civil War South. Most of these scholars focused on the ways that the advent of sharecropping and tenant farming served to fasten the yoke of debt peonage on hundreds of thousands of small-farm households, thereby placing freedpeople (and eventually, many yeoman whites) in a status more akin to the slave system that preceded it than it was to the free-labor agriculture of the North and the Midwest. In the ensuing decades, however, a historical consensus gradually emerged that viewed the postbellum (or, “New”) South less as an atavistic hold-out from the modernization processes apparent elsewhere in the United States than it was merely a moderately peculiar example of the social formations possible along the broad arc of fast-developing capitalism.

One might expect that sociologist Martin Ruef’s new book aims to provide a social–scientific grounding to the regnant conventional wisdom in a manner similar to that of Royce and Davis over a generation ago, but it is not at all clear that this is the case. Ruef sought to revise and reshape a collection of mostly previously published, “loosely connected essays... into a more integrated whole” (p. xvii), but with mixed results both individually and in terms of overall thematic cohesion. Perhaps the book’s title best captures how Ruef’s discrete conclusions at times provide support for the older debt-bondage thesis, while others lean more toward recent revisionist interpretations. Somewhat surprisingly, he does not try to stake out a position based on the dynamics of unstable transitional modes of production, as his fellow sociologist Susan Archer Mann has done to good effect in her studies of agrarian capitalism in the postbellum South. Instead, Ruef relies on the rather unsatisfying controlling concept of uncertainty, which he is at considerable pains to distinguish from the notion of risk more commonly deployed by business historians.

His second chapter on “status attainment among emancipated slaves,” for example, tends to confirm earlier conclusions (notably, by Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch) that social mobility for freed blacks was highly circumscribed after the war. Although Ruef shies away from specifying the precise weight of causative factors like racism in perpetuating a fairly static social structure, his emphasis on the existence of constraints adds to the notion of isolated southern labor markets that some economic historians have posited to explain persistent regional under-development. Fewer recent economic historians have proved willing to venture onto the turf of “class structure in the Old and New South,” the subject of Ruef’s third convincing chapter, which he mostly portrays as exhibiting important elements of continuity. While this stance is largely in keeping with now-unfashionable views, his chapter on postbellum credit and trade, by contrast, describes a massive release of pent-up entrepreneurial energies after the war, especially among mercantile classes, on the basis of his examination of expanded listings and revised classificatory schema in the invaluable records of the R. G. Dun & Co. credit-reporting agency. In a short but compelling concluding chapter, which adopts a comparative, transnational perspective, Ruef argues that “[d]espite continuities between slavery and the period of emancipation,... the institutional breach was usually sufficient to generate uncertainty around wages, worker retention, and some possibility of economic activity outside the plantation system” (p. 189). This idea of “institutional breach” seems to represent a moderation of more typical recent emphases on the radical break with the past that emancipation represented in the post–Civil War South.

Some historians may find the deductive logic that inheres to Ruef’s lengthy, abstract discussions of the various categories of uncertainty in the opening chapter confusing and unpersuasive...