Confederate Invention: The Story of the Confederate States Patent Office and Its Inventors by H. Jackson Knight (review)

The South began deliberating how best to protect intellectual property when the Provisional Confederate Congress formed a Committee on Patents, on February 12, 1861. The planning was none too soon. A mere four days later—two days before a bill creating a patent office could be introduced—a resolution granting a caveat to a railway switch inventor was already under consideration. The disorganization was not enough to prevent an informal office from opening in Montgomery, Alabama, but, all things considered, the Confederacy’s first steps toward a full-fledged patent process proved tentative. Yet as states continued to join the Confederate States of America and demand for a serviceable arrangement grew, a functional system took shape. By May 21, 1861, the Confederates States Patent Office (CSPO) had been created.

Given how the Confederates based their founding document on the Constitution of the United States, it is not surprising that the Confederate Congress modeled the southern patent office on its northern counterpart. With the exception of a few tweaks on matters like whether a master was allowed to patent a slave’s invention (he could not in the United States), and a few changes on questions like to whom an appeal should ultimately be directed (the Confederates appealed to their attorney general, not the secretary of the interior), the Confederacy essentially accepted the antebellum office as it was. Formal shop was set up near the War Department in Richmond, Virginia, under Commissioner of Patents Rufus R. Rhodes, a former U.S. patent examiner.

In his account of this little-studied agency, H. Jackson Knight focuses, however, neither on the Confederacy’s initial missteps nor on the lack of innovation Confederates displayed in their political economy. What does concern him is the resourcefulness of southern inventors—before, during, and after the Civil War—and the extent to which their technological ingenuity has been understated. Those who have a sense of southern creativity from stories like that of the Hunley will probably feel a bit underwhelmed at this aim, but Knight seeks to make a broader case to a more general audience—a case that does not rest as directly on anecdotes or misunderstandings about patents.

Knight’s analysis of such misapprehensions, admittedly, tends to run counter to his overall purpose for, as he suggests, patents themselves are not necessarily definitive measures of inventiveness. The process itself tends to discourage those who are not likely to profit from their invention, and some are not motivated by such rationales to begin with. Moreover, as Knight contends, lower rates of immigration, lower population densities, and poorer communication and transportation networks, as compared to the North, all cut into the South’s inventiveness before the war.

How inventive was the South? Rather than emphasizing the long-term pattern and despite qualms about the validity of patents for such measures, Knight answers the question by stressing the increase in patents granted before secession. During the 1850s, the South’s patent rate was less than half what the North’s was on a per capita basis (73). But by decade’s end, the region was reducing the gap; its share of patents grew by 82 percent in that time frame, versus a 55 percent increase in U.S. patents (69). Though impressive, this increase obscures the disproportionate impact of the Panic of 1857. (As James L. Huston and Kenneth M. Stampp have shown, secessionists made a similar error when they calculated the importance of King Cotton before the war.) Nor are any other comparisons offered.

The South’s situation did not improve during the war. In fact, it worsened dramatically. Under Rhodes’s parsimonious administration—Knight credits him greatly for running the CSPO in a professional manner in spite of deficiencies in his reference library and among his staff—some 275 patents were issued. (In his research, Knight found...