Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold: Phosphate, Fertilizer, and Industrialization in Postbellum South Carolina by Shepherd W. McKinley (review)

Economic history has recently made a strong comeback in southern history. Recent books by Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert, Walter Johnson, and others have made compelling cases linking slavery in the South and beyond to the rise of global capitalist dominance. Shepherd W. McKinley’s study of South Carolina’s phosphate industry brings the discussion into the post–Civil War years, asking how the South rebounded after the war and emancipation exposed its economic limitations. Along with other recent studies of southern industrialization, McKinley extends the capitalist link formed under slavery to flesh out our understanding of how many southerners, black and white, made a living in a postemancipation economy.

McKinley examines the development of three interrelated South Carolina industries necessary for turning phosphate rock into commercial fertilizer: land mining, river mining, and fertilizer manufacturing. These industries, he argues, signaled a permanent transition toward industrialization in the low country, despite the relative brevity of the mining activities. At first glance, it appears that McKinley is asking too much of the phosphate industry. Within the supply chain and manufacture of one raw material, he attempts to upend long-standing debates in southern historiography regarding continuity and change between the Old South and the New. He weighs in on the extent to which the North “colonized” the South; he makes a case that phosphates formed the basis for a long-term industrial economy in South Carolina; he reconstructs the political relationships of Reconstruction-era South Carolina; he addresses the major implications of manufactured fertilizers for Southern agriculture; and perhaps most pertinent to readers of this journal, he reveals the way workers shaped the contours of this new economy. Yet McKinley succeeds at most of these aims and in the process makes a case that the phosphate industry was one of the region’s most important.

McKinley places his study firmly within the historiographical context of southern economic history, arguing that the move toward phosphate-based fertilizer was as much a local effort as it was the result of northern interest and money. The scientific community of Charleston learned of the value of phosphorus from German chemist Justus Liebig in the 1840s–1850s and soon found that local rocks had very high phosphorus content. What had been nuisances to low-country slaves and rice planters soon became sought-after raw material for lucrative enterprise. After the war, Charlestonians funded a dozen or so firms for mining and processing the rocks, and many of them manufactured the fertilizer as well. Even those firms capitalized by northern lenders, such as the Philadelphia-funded Charleston Mining and Manufacturing Company, were established by well-connected locals who attracted northern capital because of their local knowledge.

The heart of the book reconstructs the three sectors of this new phosphate economy. Former planters repurposed their rice plantations into rock plantations by establishing highly organized and increasingly technical ways of excavating rock from the ground and transporting it to the factory. Each section follows a similar structure. McKinley explains how individual companies were set up, following local scientific and political connections as well as the capital. He then takes a management-level view of how the companies began mining or manufacturing the rock. Finally, he analyzes the labor on both the market and individual levels. Such a strategy makes clear that each component of the industry was not operating in isolation from the other; capital, management, and workers moved from one to the other in fluid ways.

McKinley’s analysis of the workers who transformed raw material into finished product shines brightest. Like their sharecropping brethren in the low country, phosphate workers clung to the tenets of an antebellum task system refusing to work under conditions not amenable to some form of autonomy. The region’s unique sharecropping system worked in conjunction with that of the phosphate industry. For the first couple of decades after the...