Transition to an Industrial South: Athens, Georgia, 1830-1870 by Michael J. Gagnon (review)

The abominable tariff of 1828 radicalized planters in Athens, Georgia, and instigated an industrializing trend that epitomized southern development, according to Michael Gagnon in his study of the university town. In retaliation, the planters chartered three vertically integrated, waterpowered textile mills, substituting locally made fabrics for increasingly expensive imports. They built the mills on the outskirts of town, staffed them with poor whites and enslaved blacks, and marketed the yarn and cloth both locally and to upcountry merchants and northern houses; they also invested in railroads and dabbled in social reform. At the forefront of change, these planter-industrialists remained committed to conservatism; Gagnon believes that they were reluctant to shatter the community's tranquility or the plantation's economy. He argues that the planters initiated an industrial transition that challenged no contemporary mores, but resulted after the CivilWar in an industrialized South.

Gagnon defines his terms in the introduction and develops his argument over five chronological chapters. Even though Georgia had a long history of managing a mixed economy, Athens, he explains, became the model of industrialization. Home to the University of Georgia (chartered in 1785), it attracted not only students and professors, but also artisans and merchants. Artisans operated small shops in town, and merchants ran saw and grist mills on the Oconee River; as they clustered, they created pockets of industry that grew to meet demand. Gagnon excludes both groups from his definition of "industrial," regarding only factory owners and operatives tending inanimately powered machinery as industrial. Mechanized textile production represents the standard of industrialization for Gagnon, not only because in the South it was one of the largest nonagricultural industries, but also because Georgia led in its production fromthe 1840s through the 1870s. Athens prefigured that predominance.

As Gagnon demonstrates in the first chapter on beginnings, the planter-industrialists wanted the benefits of industry without its trade-offs. The planter-industrialists compromised and combined the scale of Samuel Slater, who built small mills, with the scope of Lowell in Massachusetts, which included both spinning and weaving. Augustin Clayton founded the first enterprise, the Georgia Factory, in 1829, and he was on the board of directors of the second, William Dearing's Athens Factory, which opened in 1832. James Camak chartered the third, the Princeton Factory, in 1833. That textile production remained a small sector of Athens's economy is one of the points that Gagnon makes in chapter 2 on the peopling of the industry. According to the 1850 and 1860 censuses, the industry never employed more than 4 percent of the county's total population (table 1, p. 56). Gagnon includes colorful biographies of these longtime millworkers, demonstrating that such work fostered upward social mobility for some; he likewise presents intriguing biographies of two generations of planter-industrialist-investors and assesses how their peers and the public perceived them.

In chapters 3 and 4 on reform movements and industrial networks, Gagnon shows that the planter-industrialists imposed few Jacksonian reforms and instead focused on development. In 1833, they chartered the Georgia Railroad, which was intended to link Athens and Augusta, and hired J. Edgar Thomson as chief engineer, later of Pennsylvania Railroad fame. When the line was completed in 1841, Athens found itself on a branch that ran from Augusta to Marthasville—today's Atlanta. The railroad stifled Athens's development, Gagnon believes, because it facilitated the growth of other industrial sites in the state. Yet, Athens's planter-industrialists responded by opening new mills and enticing artisanal firms and factories to Athens during and after the Civil War, thus laying the foundations, Gagnon concludes in his epilogue, of the textile mill-building campaigns throughout the New South.

Gagnon's book joins a growing body of work that challenges the theory of planter-induced southern backwardness. Bess Beatty's 1999 study of Edwin Holt serves as an example. The Panic of 1837 forced Holt into opening a small, vertically...