Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (review)

John Majewski has written a stimulating and original analysis of the antebellum Southern economy and the emergence of a southern ideology in favor of strong state support for economic development. The book presents two distinct arguments. The first maintains that southern underdevelopment was rooted in a set of agricultural practices known as Shifting Cultivation, associated with poor soil quality and low population densities. The second calls attention to a perhaps surprising clustering of opinion around agrarian reform, state-sponsored development, and secessionism, within a group of prominent political and intellectual leaders in Virginia and South Carolina. The connection between the two themes is not necessarily obvious, since Majewski does not claim that the reformer-secessionists were particularly accurate or successful in their diagnosis of regional economic problems (quite the contrary). But he argues that the “war socialism” of the Confederacy did not constitute as sharp a policy reversal as is often implied, because its ideological preconditions were well developed in the tradition of state activism that is traced in the book.

The analysis of shifting cultivation is readily classifiable as economic history, complete with statistical tables and regression coefficients. Southern soils were predominantly ultisols, short on nutrients and high in acidity, in contrast to the alfisols prevailing in the northern states. (See Douglas Helms, “Soils and Southern History,” Agricultural History 74 (2000).) Because their soils were easily depleted and eroded, southern farmers were unable to practice intensive farming methods, but instead maintained large reserves of unimproved land in “long fallow” rotation. The main quantitative evidence for this thesis is the low percentage of improved land on farms in the southern states, and the key economic consequence was low rural population density.

On this topic, it should be noted that Majewski and this reviewer occupy different positions on the spectrum of explanations for southern agricultural distinctiveness. He emphasizes the environment, whereas I interpret many of the same phenomena as consequences of slavery. (See Slavery and American Economic Development (2006), pp. 62–82.) No doubt the truth lies somewhere in between, or perhaps better, in an interaction between geography and institutions. Majewski clearly states that “slavery and shifting cultivation worked together to stunt the development of southern markets” (p. 171), though slavery does not play an integral role in his analysis. Suffice it to say here that many features of the two interpretations are similar, particularly the difficulties posed by dispersed rural purchasing power for promoters of southern railroads, towns, schools, and agricultural reform.

On political economy, Majewski’s discussion takes many novel turns. Perhaps the most notable is the chapter on “Redefining Free Trade to Modernize the South.” Free trade had long been politically sacrosanct in the South, reflecting the interests of the export sector, chiefly cotton. (The protectionist sugar planters of Louisiana were evidently not troubled by their deviation from regional orthodoxy on this issue.) Southern industrialists and their advocates favored government support, but the federal tariff did them no good because their chief competition was from northern producers. Calls for discriminatory regional taxes “generated a good many speeches but little action” in the antebellum period (p. 123). Majewski shows that in this setting, secession from the union provided just the strategic alteration required to advance this political agenda. “Free trade” under an independent Confederacy was redefined to mean a moderate or revenue tariff of about 15 or 20 percent, and activists maintained that such a duty—well below U.S. levels—would be sufficient to redirect European trade southward and foster southern industrialization. Majewski reports that this program, accompanied by rhetorical visions of a prosperous, modernizing region, was extremely popular at the Virginia secession convention (pp. 125–30). A tariff schedule along these lines was in fact enacted by the provisional Confederate Congress, though it was never implemented because of the outbreak of war (pp. 130–39).

Majewski’s approach raises the larger question of how the lofty...