The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets by John E. Stealey III (review)

At the dawn of Kanawha salt’s rise to prominence during the War of 1812, two principal sources of domestic salt existed in the interior United States—Onondaga County, New York, and Gallatin County, Illinois. Wartime embargoes on British salt, coupled with increased demand for the mineral as a meat preservative, created a substantial Western market for Kanawha salt. Area producers developed innovative drilling techniques to tap an ancient subterranean ocean, and shortly thereafter fifty-two furnace operations produced over one million bushels of salt annually. Owing to a shortage of free labor, enslaved African Americans provided the primary workforce that enabled many salt makers to amass great wealth and local power. The slave population of Kanawha County peaked at 3,140 persons in 1850, the highest total of any Virginia county west of the Shenandoah Valley. (Only Jefferson County, with 4,341 slaves, had a higher total than Kanawha County in 1850; see US Bureau of the Census, Seventh Census of the United States, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1850/1850a/1850a-14.pdf.) As the author states, the resultant slave society created a unique situation whereby Southern Appalachian bondsmen produced an extractive product for interstate commerce (133).

Stealey originally published this detailed study of the antebellum Kanawha salt industry in 1993. Time has not diminished the relevance of his work, which remains the sole scholarly monograph focused exclusively on the history of Kanawha salt. The new edition features an updated introduction by the author, but no new primary sources or manuscript collections have been located to alter the original narrative (xi). Stealey utilizes an impressive array of previously unharvested manuscript collections and other primary source documents to tell the Kanawha salt story. Among the most relevant are the Dickinson and Shrewsbury salt company papers, death registers for the 1849 and 1850 cholera outbreak at Kanawha Salines (present-day Malden), and an obscure Virginia court case in the Library of Congress that details a previously unknown association arrangement of antebellum Kanawha salt makers between 1817 and 1851. (Stealey has published all Kanawha salt makers’ agreements of concert and combination in a separate but related work; see John E. Stealey, III. Kanawhan Prelude to Nineteenth-Century Monopoly in the United States: The Virginia Salt Combinations (Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 2000)).

The book engages readers in timely historical inquiry on the business, economic, labor, and legal history of this important industry. In so doing, it has altered existing knowledge about the application of nineteenth-century associative and contract law in the United States. In a broader context, the work is reminiscent of recent studies on the rise of the market economy, the culture of new capitalism, and slavery’s profitability and adaptability. One avenue of exploration is the influence of outside market forces on Kanawha producers, especially the importance of genealogical influences among salt makers and slave owners in the Piedmont region of Virginia.

Stealey heaps praise on the “entrepreneurial acumen” of area salt manufacturers, along with their technological innovation and amazingly sophisticated worldview. Students of West Virginia history have long been aware of the claim that the Kanawha Salt Association, created in 1817, constituted the nation’s first business trust. In his updated work, Stealey reiterates the fact that “So far, no earlier examples of output pools or proposals for a trust arrangement than those on the Great Kanawha have surfaced in the legal literature” (John E. Stealey III, Kanawhan Prelude to Nineteenth-Century Monopoly in the United States, xvi). Indeed, his compelling research and analysis support this assertion, which elevates the monograph to a work of national significance on the evolution of US business organization within a legal history context.

In summary, The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets by John E. Stealey III is a first-rate scholarly work about an essential, but inexplicably neglected, aspect of West Virginia’s industrial past. The book expertly details myriad elements...