Introduction The epigraph is from S. F. C., “A Ramble in Southwestern Virginia,” Cultivator, new ser., 6 (February 1849): 46–48 (quotation on 47). 1. Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, March 15, 1784, in Thomas Jefferson , Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 786–89 (quotations on 787). 2. Ibid. 3. Jefferson, Writings, 152. 4. For the many facets of meaning in the word landscape, see Mart A. Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). For examples of using a river valley to discuss environmental and industrial history, see Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); and Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). To compare with long-term developments in a northern setting, see David Stradling, Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 5. On America’s economic rise, see Gavin Wright, “The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879–1940,” American Economic Review 80 (September 1990): 651–68, esp. 661; and Paul A. David and Gavin Wright, “Increasing Returns and the Genesis of American Resource Abundance,” Industrial and Corporate Change 6, no. 2 (1997): 203–45. For the qualitative and still-rewarding classic on these themes, see David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). 6. David Brown, Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and the Impending Crisis of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Victoria E. Bynum, The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies Notes 183 184 Notes to Page 5 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); David Stricklin, A Genealogy of Dissent: Southern Baptist Protest in the Twentieth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). 7. Arguments placing the South in the Atlantic context have been handily summarized in Jack P. Greene, “Early Modern Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American Worlds,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 525–38; and Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009): 627–50. On the late twentieth century, see Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, eds., The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Questioning southern exceptionalism is not a new game. For instance, the contributors to Michele K. Gillespie and Randal L. Hall, eds., Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), show that the infamous racist, usually associated with the South, lived much of his life in the North and found a sympathetic audience there. 8. At the level of first principles, I obviously disagree with historians who define the term capitalism narrowly as applying only to production based solely on free labor. Joyce Appleby, in The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), provides an accessible introduction to the idea that capitalism does not equate solely to industrialization. 9. Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the MidNineteenth -Century South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), chaps. 4, 6, 11; Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). The argument is not new, though. Louis Hartz, for instance, described John Taylor in The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 149: “He was a plantation capitalist, and in the Southwest, for all of its stratified social life, he was a very new, very raw, very fierce plantation capitalist.” (Of course, one cannot quote Hartz without obligatory caveats. See James T. Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America,” Reviews in American History 29 [September 2001]: 460–78.) Note, too, Anthony Kaye’s recent observation : “The long debate about whether the Old South was an anachronistic, seignorial society or a variant on modern capitalism is approaching a consensus around the latter” (“Second Slavery,” 628). Be sure also...