Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry: Commercial Culture in Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1845–1880 (review)

Most southern historians would likely agree that in the era since World War II, the two most influential students of the region’s nineteenth-century history were Genovese and Woodward.¹ Among the many achievements made by these two men was to get other scholars to talk about subjects and themes in which they themselves were interested. In the case of Genovese, one of the principal themes involved the nature of antebellum southern society, particularly whether or not the region’s economy should be characterized as capitalist and the degree to which free inhabitants of the South conformed with, or at least aspired to, emerging bourgeois standards and norms. One of Woodward’s key concerns was the degree to which the Civil War represented a distinct break in the region’s history, demarcating an Old South from a New South, each with its own character, class structure, and, ultimately, raison d’ être.

Scholars have been arguing about these issues for decades, and, not surprisingly, parts of Genovese’s and Woodward’s positions have come under fire. Few critics, however, have challenged both Genovese and Woodward in one work. In that regard alone, Eelman’s Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry is worthy of note. That Eelman’s study has a number of other virtues adds to its importance.

Although nineteenth-century South Carolina has been the subject of a number of important studies over the years, most concentrate on the low country rather than the upcountry, Eelman’s area of interest. Moreover, in focusing primarily on “commercial culture” and “town classes”—merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, physicians, etc.—Eelman distinguishes himself further from most students of South Carolina’s history in the nineteenth century, who have devoted their attention primarily to planters and slaves and, to a lesser extent, yeoman farmers. Eelman’s revisionism completes the process of scholarly differentiation.

Challenging parts of Genovese’s interpretive scheme, Eelman contends that, by and large, the free population in Spartanburg County in northwestern South Carolina and in the town of Spartanburg was market-oriented, responding rationally and relatively vigorously to market signals and signs. From almost the outset, in fact, the small town of Spartanburg, in particular, was home to a significant number of enterprising entrepreneurs who, throughout the antebellum period, promoted a developmental agenda that included support for infrastructural improvements, manufacturing, economic diversification, public education, and legal reform. Interestingly enough, this agenda was promoted, according to Eelman, not to undermine the slave economy but to render it more sustainable through a thoroughgoing process of modernization.

The fact that this agenda did not gain a great deal of traction in the Spartanburg area during the antebellum period owed much, the author claims, to the profits possible by producing cotton and to opposition from low-country planters, who dominated politics in South Carolina. For the record, Genovese would not necessarily disagree with such claims, which could be construed as supporting his overall interpretation of the antebellum South, even if they force some modest concessions regarding the prevalent economic ideology of the upcountry and the agenda of the upcountry bourgeoisie.

Things were different in the postbellum period, however, when much of the modernizing agenda espoused by Spartanburg’s entrepreneurial class was adopted. Thanks to Woodward, among others, we long have known about the surge of railroad construction and the rise of manufacturing in the upcountry in the decades after Appomattox. But unlike Woodward, Eelman stresses continuity rather than change over the course of the nineteenth century, arguing that little was “new” about either the developmental blueprint for Spartanburg or for those who succeeded in implementing significant portions of it in the 1870s and 1880s.

In this well-researched case study, Eelman makes an important contribution to the historiography of the nineteenth-century South. If he has not relegated Genovese or Woodward to the dustbin of history, he has demonstrated that parts of their arguments need...