Peskin on Downey, _Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790-1860_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (January 2007)

Tom Downey, _Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and 
Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790-1860_. Baton Rouge: 
Louisiana State University Press, 2006. xiii + 262 pp. $50 (cloth), 
ISBN: 0-8071-3107-5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Lawrence A. Peskin, Department of History, 
Morgan State University.


Let us now praise town studies. They proliferated in the days before 
literary criticism and post-modernism, when positivism and progress 
still held sway. Modest, and implicitly collaborative, they generally 
eschewed broad theoretical statements in favor of intensive archival 
research. When well designed they offered a powerful way to address 
larger historical debates and to advance knowledge one step at a time.

Tom Downey's history of South Carolina's upcountry Edgefield and 
Barnwell districts is a fine town study. Deeply rooted in local 
archives, it also makes good use of the widely scattered papers of 
area capitalists and planters and of the R.G. Dun and Company credit 
reports. Furthermore, it focuses on a particularly important and 
vexing question: the extent and nature of capitalism in the 
antebellum South.

Downey, an assistant editor of the Thomas Jefferson Papers, views 
this hoary question through the lens of the recent debate over the 
extent of the market revolution in the North rather than revisiting 
the older Genovese-Oakes debate over planter mentalité. This approach 
dictates a focus on economic development and political-economy, and 
consequently Downey's concerns tend more toward words than hard 
numbers.

The first chapter offers a broad view of the economic bases of 
Edgefield and Barnwell. Downey demonstrates the relative successes of 
tobacco and cotton culture in ostensibly unpromising, sandy soil. By 
1860, Edgefield and Barnwell respectively ranked first and second in 
gross cotton production among South Carolina districts. Edgefield's 
and Barnwell's agricultural prosperity suggests that, far from an 
alternative to agriculture, relatively extensive mercantile and 
manufacturing development might exist quite comfortably in plantation 
country.

In subsequent chapters, Downey convincingly demonstrates the 
parallels to the northern Market Revolution. Despite the Jeffersonian 
rhetoric of economic independence and the yeoman farmer, commercial 
enterprises such as sawmills played a role in Edgefield and Barnwell 
from the American Revolution on. Moreover, just as in the North, 
local government provided support for entrepreneurs with the 
construction of roads and other internal improvements. As an 
upcountry merchant class grew and expanded, it developed a taste for 
what other historians have termed "state mercantilism" -- utilization 
of South Carolina's resources to assist the state's commercial 
interests, particularly in competition with their rivals across the 
Savannah River in Georgia. Most notably, the state underwrote the new 
commercial town of Hamburg, conceived in 1821and hyped as a means of 
bypassing the merchants of Augusta, Georgia, who received most of 
Edgefield and Barnwell's cotton shipments.

As in the North, this market revolution was further facilitated by 
new railroads and factories. They arrived in the guise of the South 
Carolina Canal and Railroad Company and William Gregg's factories, 
all of which received important incentives from the state. By 1849, 
Gregg's Graniteville factory produced more than a quarter million 
dollars worth of cotton textiles annually. Soon the region also 
welcomed new banks and even new towns, again with state incentives.

Still, Edgefield and Barnwell were hardly late blooming imitations of 
northern towns. They remained vociferously pro-slavery throughout the 
antebellum period. Far from seeing slavery and northern-style market 
capitalism as incompatible, pro-manufacturing leaders from the region 
promoted paternalistic factory villages as a way to provide income 
and teach "habits of industry" to poor white laborers who might 
otherwise become discontented (p. 133). Even the area's most famous 
planter, James Henry Hammond, held out hope that under the proper 
circumstances planters and manufacturers might "mutually enrich and 
strengthen one another" (p. 122). However, such a harmony of 
interests was tricky to maintain. Downey suggests that with the rise 
of large capitalists and corporations, the state began supporting 
corporate projects at the expense of the old single proprietor mills, 
most notably in its riparian laws. Furthermore, the old emphasis on 
the public good, which was always implicit within the commonwealth 
rhetoric of state mercantilism, faded away as large corporations such 
as the railroads began to focus on more profitable intra-state 
projects.

Downey shows that by the time of the Civil War, a new class of 
capitalists had arisen and begun to transform Edgefield and 
Barnwell's economies. The transformation was far from complete, but, 
as Downey concludes, the agrarian landscape was "in transition from 
being a society with capitalist features toward becoming a capitalist 
society" (p. 227). This formulation cleverly mirrors Ira Berlin's 
evaluation of the antebellum North as a society with slaves rather 
than a slave society.

It is here that some of the limitations of the town study become 
apparent. Clearly it is an open question as to how far Downey can 
generalize based on these two admittedly unusual districts. One can 
only hope that other studies will come along to add more bricks to 
the edifice that he has so capably begun.

Beyond issues of representativeness, Downey leaves the reader 
yearning for more analysis of the broader significance of the story 
of Edgefield and Barnwell. Is this a study, as the author 
occasionally implies, that seeks to complicate the commonly accepted 
North/South dichotomies of capitalism/pre-capitalism, 
industry/agriculture, intensive versus extensive development and so 
forth? If so, it also, perhaps inadvertently, reveals the great gulf 
between North and South. One fascinating example is the famous 
Hayne-Webster debate of 1830 which was prompted in part by Hayne's 
refusal to support openly a petition by the South Carolina Canal and 
Railroad Company for federal assistance in its efforts to construct 
the Hamburg railroad, presumably due to southern fears of federal 
interference in slavery. This incident prompted Daniel Webster's once 
immortal speech, which culminated in his declaration, "Liberty and 
union, now and forever, one and inseparable."

For northern Whigs like Webster, federal assistance, the tariff, 
internal improvements and banking all fit together neatly to create 
an American System. But clearly for antebellum South Carolinians like 
Hayne, no matter how interested in Whiggish issues of capitalist 
development, the problem of slavery trumped all other concerns. One 
wishes Downey had dug a bit deeper into the politics of political 
economy here to offer more insight into the Whigs' failures in South 
Carolina. Unfortunately, Downey seems to be unaware of Joseph 
Persky's excellent study of southern economic thought, _The Burden of 
Dependency_ (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) which might have 
provided more of an analytical framework to address the 
contradictions between free-trade and mercantilism, agrarianism and 
economic development, and anti-capitalism and pro-capitalism that 
frequently and seemingly improbably coexisted within the thought of 
southern promoters and political economists and which certainly 
differentiated them from their northern counterparts.


Lawrence A. Peskin is Associate Professor of History at Morgan State 
University in Baltimore and author of _Manufacturing Revolution: The 
Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry_ (Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 2003).

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