Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790-1860 (review)

This study of economic development in the Edgefield and Barnwell Districts of South Carolina "attempt[s] to inject the transition to capitalism focus of market revolution studies [predominantly focused on the northern United States] into the older historiographical debate over the capitalist-noncapitalist nature of the Old South" (6). Such an approach, Downey argues, allows for a better examination of the "interaction of agrarian, commercial, and industrial capitalists" and the impact of those interactions on "the local political economy" (6). Specifically, the study charts the growing influence of merchants and manufacturers in what, according to Downey, remained an "agrarian landscape" shaped by cotton and slavery. Downey describes the development of internal improvements, the growth of a merchant class in new towns such as Hamburg, and the coming of railroads and cotton mills. Drawing on private papers, court documents, government and company records, he illuminates his straightforward narrative analysis of economic change with stories of significant individuals like Henry Shultz, who led the way in the creation of Hamburg, and William Gregg, whose vision of southern industrial development came to life in the town of Graniteville.

Downey sees an increasingly intense "series of contests between different classes of capitalists," one of which "wielded influence through the agrarian capital of land and slaves [and] the other through the control of liquid capital in commercial and corporate forms" (7). Yet evidence for the development of a new commercial class, with a common sense of interests and values, is limited—especially so regarding claims, admittedly mild, for the increasing influence of cultural values antithetical to those of agrarians and slaveholders. Downey does not make a persuasive case that the efforts of manufacturers like Gregg to encourage moral reform and temperance offer evidence for the development of a coherent class or for a cultural transition tied to the growth of mercantile and manufacturing activity. The study might have engaged the rich body of "market revolution" studies that focus, often from an interdisciplinary perspective, on the interrelationship of interests and ideals, economic development, and cultural change.

Downey's argument rests more securely on legal and political changes and conflicts, which offer stronger evidence for the success of merchants and manufacturers in asserting their economic interests. Over time, Downey argues, political and legislative decisions on such matters as eminent domain increasingly favored the private interests of merchants and manufacturers over once dominant "agrarian" values and interests. Downey's argument is modest and restrained, appropriately so as it rests heavily on the successes of a few corporations (such as the South Carolina Railroad) and individuals (such as Gregg). Nonetheless, not even his individual cases demonstrate that, by the eve of Civil War, merchants had coalesced into a class capable of pursuing and defending common interests by the kind of political, cultural, and even military means that the slaveholders could muster.

Downey's study certainly meets its goal of illuminating the changing "local political economy" that he studies (6). Its contribution to the larger debate on the economic and cultural character of the slave states is less certain. Historians who view southern slaveholders as capitalists who just happened to own their workers will, as Downey notes, see his conclusions as entirely compatible with their interpretation. Yet, proponents of the opposing view, which rests on the distinctiveness of those very relations of labor, are not as dismissive of the impact of railroads, cotton mills, and other elements of modernity as Downey suggests. He overstates the "intellectual gymnastics" required of those who seek to assimilate his well-told tale of transition to their own story of the continuing power of slavery to drive the region's economy and culture down a path so distinctive as to lead eventually to secession and war (226).