Hubbell Prize

Jay Carlendar and John Majewski have won the John T. Hubbell Prize for work published in Civil War History during 2003. Their article, "Imagining a 'Great Manufacturing Empire': Virginia and the Possibilities of the Confederate Tariff," was judged to be the best one published in the journal for volume year forty-nine. The prize earns the recipient a $1,000 cash award.

Carlendar and Majewski provided further challenge to the old saw that Southerners lived and breathed only the rarified air of free trade. In their case study of Virginia early during secession, they discovered that scholarly interpretations need to be reevaluated because, even by reducing a tariff, Confederates stood to gain as secession opened an entire category of goods to duties—material from the North. While the war prevented such duties from ever being collected, the authors showed that many Confederates moved quickly to try to adopt tariffs and turn "free trade" to their advantage. Southerners showed little practical concern against adopting these techniques and even hoped they would encourage greater manufacturing. A committee consisting of the editor, an associate editor, and an editorial board member believed the work provided fresh evidence that the Confederacy had Hamiltonian tendencies within its political culture and saw itself as fusing a slave society with a modern one.

Carlendar is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is writing a dissertation on Southern economic thought in the antebellum era. Majewski is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The author of A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War (2001), he is working on a book about political economy of Confederate secession.

Awarded annually and funded by a donor through the Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University, the John T. Hubbell Prize recognizes the extraordinary contribution to the field of its namesake, who served as editor of Civil War History for thirty-five years.