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

In 1862, the Confederate government issued a $100 note that richly depicted a vision of the South’s future political economy. Issuing the currency was an act of faith in the potential of an independent and financially stable Confederacy. Even more potent was the image selected to appear on the note. The engraving of a large and powerful locomotive, featured prominently at the top center, encapsulated the hopes for a new, self-sufficient state. As John Majewski argues in his brief but important examination of the Confederate political economy, “Modern, powerful, and dynamic, the locomotive aptly symbolized how Confederates imagined their economic future” (140). Contrary to entrenched scholarly perceptions that southerners created an independent state to ensure that the region’s rural character would remain unchanged, Majewski argues that secessionists believed independence would bring forth an industrialized, modernized, and diversified economy promoted by an activist state. However much secession might have been undergirded by states’ rights ideology, Majewski argues, that ideology quickly made way for a Confederate government that exercised unprecedented centralized power.

Focusing on South Carolina and Virginia, Majewski employs a range of methodological approaches to the region’s political economy. In addition to quantitative analysis of census data on soil quality, population density, and economic growth, Majewski skillfully mines the region’s rich and largely untapped agricultural periodicals. Monthly magazines such as the Southern Planter and the Farmers’ Register pounded the drum of economic diversification, and reformers from Edmund Ruffin to James D. B. DeBow argued for vigorous state funding and the exercise of governmental authority to help bring about a new and more economically vibrant economy that could compete with the North.

Although he does not engage directly new literature on the Old South’s political economy, such as works by Tom Downey, Mark Wilson, Chad Morgan, and Frank Towers, Majewski demonstrates convincingly that the booster mentality we associate with the New South was trumpeted with equal power before and during the Civil War. Despite the ideological continuity between the antebellum South and the Confederacy, southerners did adapt to new wartime exigencies. For example, although prewar southerners loudly denounced tariffs, the Confederate government enacted a 25 percent tariff soon after the war began. Despite such shifts in thinking, Majewski shows that an active, centralized Confederate state was not solely a product of wartime pressures or a revolutionary shift in southern ideology; in fact, secessionists seamlessly incorporated a modernizing, entrepreneurial spirit into their unwavering commitment to maintaining slavery.

Contrary to many recent studies emphasizing the South’s economic growth in the 1850s, Majewski argues that the visions of a modern South remained largely unfulfilled in the mid-nineteenth century. In an unusual blending of environmental and economic history, Majewski explains that southerners had to engage in shifting cultivation that sapped the region of potential wealth. While secessionists and Confederates pushed for a modernizing South supported by an activist state, these boosters could only get so far in their efforts because of the debilitating effects of the region’s acidic and infertile soil.

While Majewski makes a persuasive case that the Confederacy’s embrace of an active and centralizing state had deep roots in the Old South, less convincing is his claim that weaknesses in the southern program of industrialization directly shaped the region’s culture. According to Majewski, the region’s slower patterns of urbanization and industrialization relative to the North “made it difficult to establish schools and libraries, organize agricultural societies and mechanics’ institutes, and circulate periodicals and newspapers” (26). Evidence from antebellum southern city directories, as well as census data, contradicts this statement. The Old South fostered hundreds of local and state associations, clubs, and organizations of all kinds, sponsored countless agricultural fairs and societies, and published thousands of newspapers and magazines that were widely available and disseminated.

Also debatable is Majewski’s argument that secessionists and Confederates supported an active state and an industrializing, modernizing economy primarily to...