Second Slavery, Second Landlordism, and Modernity: A Comparison of Antebellum Mississippi and Nineteenth-Century Ireland

In May 1839, John A. Quitman, a planter from Natchez, Mississippi, set out on a journey to Europe. His first destination was supposed to be England, but when his ship encountered storms off the south coast of Ireland, he disembarked near Cork and completed his journey by traveling overland to Dublin and sailing from there to Liverpool.¹ Soon after reaching London, he attended a session of the House of Lords and subsequently wrote of his experience, “Some of their first orators spoke and I assure you they are not equal to our first men.”² While he compared Americans favorably with the British aristocracy, Quitman might also conceivably have reflected upon some of the striking parallels between southern planters and Irish landlords. Both groups were conservative, regionally distinctive, agrarian elites deemed “backward” during the 1800s by many influential contemporaries, including John Elliott Cairnes and John Stuart Mill.³

Arguably, the perception that American planters and Irish landlords were backward classes resulted from their implicit comparison with a particular understanding of modernity that took England as its exemplar. Since nineteenth-century political economists usually considered industrialization and urbanization indicators of “progress,” most agrarian regions fell short of classically defined modernity and accordingly won “backward” status. Backwardness, in this sense, implied deviation from a “normal” pattern of economic development. Yet, that industrial capitalism was the only form that modernity could take is open to question. As Walter Johnson has written, “to ask why Mississippi wasn’t more like Manchester . . . presupposes that there is a reason it should have been, that there is a natural course of historical development.”⁴

Instead of pursuing such teleological narratives, it is more helpful to consider modernity as Christopher Bayly does: as a process of believing oneself to be modern and an active attempt to keep up with the times.⁵ If this provides a definition of modernity, then it is possible to recognize that many supposedly backward agrarian elites—including American slaveholders and Irish landlords—attempted to modernize their socioeconomic systems during the nineteenth century. Since they did so while simultaneously endeavoring to retain traditional, hierarchical social relationships, their efforts were often dismissed at the time and in subsequent historiographies. Despite their qualified and selective nature, elite attempts to effect forms of agrarian modernization deserve to be considered on their own terms, rather than in negative relation to a British standard.⁶

Viewing the antebellum U.S. South and nineteenth-century Ireland in comparative perspective reveals that, to a greater or lesser extent, the elites in both locations attempted to modernize their economic behavior in response to transformations in global capitalism associated with the Industrial Revolution. From the late eighteenth century onward, British industrialization and urbanization increased demand for agricultural raw materials and foodstuffs, which affected agrarian regions throughout the Euro-American world. Since U.S. southern plantations provided most of the cotton used in British textile mills and Ireland’s landed estates provided much of the grain, dairy, and livestock that fed the populations of Britain’s cities, these regions both facilitated and were affected by the Industrial Revolution. Competition on international markets and fluctuations in prices for the different agricultural commodities produced in either location prompted responses from the elites, who embarked on systematic drives for economic reform during the nineteenth century.

As a result of these developments, a modern form of slavery emerged throughout the New World beginning in the 1790s—in a rejuvenation of American slave-worked plantation agriculture that recent scholarship has called “the second slavery.” This geographical expansion of slavery went hand in hand with the adoption of capitalistic behavior on the part of those slaveholders who engaged in cotton, sugar, and coffee cultivation.⁷ In Ireland, however, landlords increasingly sought to reform their estates in the decades after 1815.⁸ Representing a break with their behavior during the eighteenth century, when Irish landlords often relinquished the direct management of their properties to middlemen and played a more passive rentier role, it can be said that this trend constituted a “second landlordism.” In other words, transformations in global...