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

Majewski’s finely written and astutely argued book should probably have been titled, Attempting to Modernize a Slave Economy. He reveals that secessionists’ ideological commitment to the idea of states’ rights and limited government did not prevent them from advocating a modern slave state that would include government activism, agricultural reform, and economic diversification. In the peculiar hybrid society that was the slave South, most of the Virginian and South Carolinian economic reformers whom Majewski studies were also strongly committed to the defense of slavery. Ironically, the existence of slavery hampered the development of railroads and the removal of agricultural practices that reformers deplored, like shifting cultivation. In the end, the Confederate nation discovered that neither cotton nor slavery was king and that its economic and political commitment to both doomed the Confederacy to defeat.

This book will have a strong impact beyond economic history, especially on the political history of secession. Majewski argues that “southern extremists”—like Edmund Ruffin, Muscoe R. H. Garnett, John Townsend, and Robert Barnwell Rhett—used their championship of economic reform to argue for southern independence. A southern nation, they felt, would emerge from northern economic dominance and follow economic policies that would benefit the South and slavery. Many of them were advocates of state intervention in the economy, whether it was agricultural reform, internal improvements as in the building of railroads, or a revenue tariff that would encourage direct trade with Europe. Unlike some recent southern historians, Majewski argues that secession was the result of visions of modernizing a slave economy that would include governmental direction rather than a fear of economic and political centralization. The Confederate experiment in nation building and economic development had antebellum roots.

Despite a “statistical appendix” that will probably interest only specialists, the book’s strong interdisciplinary focus will appeal to all historians of the Civil War and the South. Majewski’s individual arguments concerning agriculture, railroads, and trade are well constructed. However, he might have explored in greater depth the chilling effect of slavery on long-term economic development, to which he alludes several times but does not systematically address. Furthermore, although he convincingly illustrates that most southern “reformers,” at least those from South Carolina and Virginia, were unabashed champions of statist solutions to their economic dilemmas, he chooses not to analyze the theoretical implications of his argument. He refers to them variously as “Hamiltonian,” “capitalist,” and even, much to this reviewer’s surprise, “socialist.”

Majewski concludes that southern slaveholders failed miserably to marry their reactionary commitment to slave labor with dreams of economic modernization. But their vision of a modern “New South” and, one might add, rigid racial subordination would re-emerge in the postbellum era. This book should have an impact not only on debates about slavery and economic development but also on the coming of secession and southern political ideology.