Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley (review)

The extent of industrialization in the antebellum southern economy has long been the subject of vigorous debate. In the late nineteenth century, Lost Cause mythologizers portrayed the antebellum South as an overwhelmingly agrarian society and launched "moonlight and magnolia" stereotypes that persist to this day. This portrayal allowed white southerners to make arguments about the doomed nature of the Confederate war effort, and it made the industrial transformations of the New South era all the more dramatic. Historians like Eugene Genovese, while disavowing much of this myth, have also insisted that the antebellum South was pre-capitalist and that industrialization was incompatible with a slave society. As the argument goes, the profitability of cotton meant that planters with extra capital had little incentive to innovate and push the region in a new economic direction.

On the other side of this debate, scholars like John Majewski have pointed out that the South was a modernizing society that saw substantial industrial development. Historians associated with the Southern Industrialization Project have produced ample evidence of prewar industrialization and noted the coexistence of plantation slavery and manufacturing. Others have argued that railroad construction or the rise of an antebellum southern middle class serves as evidence of a changing region. Lest this long-running argument become stale, scholars associated with the "new history of capitalism" have recently reenergized these arguments by noting the central role of the South in the rise of global capitalism. It was on the plantation, they contend, that we see the emergence of labor management systems and vast increases in violence-driven productivity that made cotton so cheap and readily available to textile industrialists around the world.

Michael Frawley weighs into this debate on the nature of the Old South economy and gives us a solid recapitulation of these arguments in Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South. Frawley decisively comes down on the side of those who see the South as an industrializing society. He contends that historians have been using a flawed data set—census records—to look at southern industrialization and, in doing so, they have downplayed the extent of the region's industrial transformation. Frawley also insists that comparing the region to the booming North is a misguided way to get at this issue. He argues that we should examine the South without these comparisons so that we can see the region as one going through a significant industrial transition. This is a fair point and one that lets us assess the region on its own terms.

The book's argument thus rests largely on the voluminous amounts of quantitative data found and recovered by Frawley. While this data begins with the census, Frawley notes the undercount of this data and supplements it with information from newspapers and the R. G. Dun Credit Reports. Both sources reveal firms and corporations that the census overlooked. As one example, Frawley presents a detailed list of businesses omitted from the census in Mobile that ranges from railroads to furniture makers to sawmills. To help visualize this data and to drive home his main argument, Frawley provides the reader with charts and GIS-generated maps. While the GIS technology promises new insights, I wonder if even more could have been done to analyze the spatial spread and economic geography of industrial development. The application of this technology mainly just provides maps showing county-by-county data. Frawley replicates a similar model of analysis—a display and discussion of numerical data—in chapters that correspond to different aspects of industrialization like labor, business owners, production, transportation, and raw materials. As with most quantitative histories, the danger here is that individual stories and narratives can be muted, but Frawley takes pains to discuss examples of specific firms and entrepreneurs.

One of the book's greatest contributions is its focus on a southern...