What if Eugene Genovese is right? In The Political Economy of Slavery (1965) Genovese argues that the “premodern quality of the Southern world was imparted to it by its dominant slaveholding class,” adding, “the planters, in truth, grew into the closest thing to feudal lords imaginable in a nineteenth-century bourgeois republic.”1 Judging the South to be “premodern” and ascribing a quasi-feudal mind-set to the slave lords is a decidedly unfashionable view. Most scholars today dismiss such assertions, viewing the planters as profit maximizers, with the same outlook as Northern entrepreneurs. To be sure, many writers concede that the South was less wealthy than the North, but contend the differences between the two regions were of degree not kind.2
This essay supports Genovese and takes issue with the prevailing view. But first, it is important to understand exactly what Genovese, and this chapter, argue. For Genovese, the “premodern” outlook was defined by a series of dichotomies. Such a society was agricultural rather than industrial. It was hierarchical rather than democratic. And it was rural rather than urban. Premodern planters sought to accumulate wealth, but never in ways that might undermine traditional relationships. Furthermore, Genovese does not view the South as uniformly premodern. He notes the progress made in manufacturing and discusses agricultural reform in Virginia and Maryland. Genovese contends only that the dominant planter class resisted those developments, laboring (successfully for the most part) to preserve a “premodern” South.
This chapter elaborates that hypothesis. It argues that a powerful group of slave lords opposed change and kept the culture of most Southern states aligned with older values. In part, this argument emerges from the geography of the South. Modernizing trends were most striking in the border states, while planter control was greatest in the Deep South. Indeed, even in the cotton states patterns of trade, settlement, and cultivation created crucial divisions between those resisting and those accepting change. And in part, the argument is political. Slave owners turned to legislative measures—spirited resolutions and, ultimately, secession—to counter economic trends they found so unsettling. To be sure, Northern actions triggered the decision to declare an independent state; but the planters’ fears were immeasurably heightened by their awareness that modernizing trends were undermining the world they valued.
I/
The planters’ hierarchical society was threatened by three broad, overlapping, changes: urbanization, the weakening of slavery in the border states, and the growth of manufacturing.
Slave lords distrusted the rise of cities for several reasons. To begin with, planters denounced the urban economy’s increasing reliance on free labor, including both free blacks and a swelling, restless immigrant population. The weakening grip of slavery on the Southern cities is striking. In the eighteen largest Southern towns—the urban places with a population over 10,000—the percentage of slaves declined from 1850 to 1860 (or in the case of Wilmington, Delaware, which was slave-free, remained the same). On the eve of the Civil War, slaves constituted less than 8 percent of the population of the five largest Southern cities: Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans, Louisville, and Washington, D.C.
Planters regarded the towns, with their growing free populations, as a large, alien intrusion into their rural society. Although the South was far less urbanized than the North, the numbers in Southern centers remain noteworthy. Taken together, the eighteen largest towns in the slave states housed 949,196 people in 1860. Their average slave population of 9.4 percent made this urban world less dependent on forced labor than all Southern states except Delaware.
The slaveholders, with their strength in the rural counties, made clear their opposition to trends that were gradually transforming the larger towns into free-labor economies. The legislatures of Maryland and Virginia illustrate those efforts. An unfair apportionment gave the planters control of the Maryland a ssembly. In 1830, southern Maryland, home to the state’s largest slaveholders, had 60 percent of the seats, even though it could claim only 35 percent of the white population. In 1832 planters pushed through a law ordering the deportation of freed slaves and setting aside $200,000 to develop a colony in Africa. Baltimore employers (and others in northern Maryland) ignored the decree, its penalties, and the incentives for colonization. Free blacks played too important a role in the local economy to be exiled. These servants provided a flexible workforce and helped keep down the wages of white workers. Similarly, Virginia cities defied the restrictive laws that the Virginia assembly passed in the wake of the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion. Curfews were not enforced, nor was the decree stating that freed blacks had to leave Virginia within twelve months of their manumission.3
Defying coercive legislation and driven by economic self-interest, city dwellers relied more and more on a free workforce. The growth of Baltimore, the South’s largest city, is a good example. The town had long boasted extensive connections with the North. During the colonial era, the Susquehanna River brought Pennsylvania grain to Baltimore for milling. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B & O), chartered in 1828, expanded upon canal, river, and ocean links with the free states. As a result of these ties, Baltimore grew as an industrial city—one that increasingly depended on a skilled, free workforce. The town’s population soared from 81,000 in 1830 to 169,000 in 1850 and 212,000 in 1860. At mid-century it was the largest city in the South and the second largest in the nation. Gradually, Baltimore businessmen directed their wealth from flour milling to new enterprises, including metalworking and textiles. On the west side of the city, the B & O established the Mount Clare depot and machine shops, which came to employ a thousand people. Still more operatives were involved in producing finished clothing, the city’s premier industry. Ironworkers, shipbuilders, carpenters, merchants, and clerks swelled the city’s population. Slaves, denied education and excluded from apprenticeships, were ill suited for this urban labor market. Baltimoreans emancipated their slaves, relying on the freed blacks for a significant portion of their workforce—despite the measures adopted by the legislature.4
Similar economic developments weakened slavery in Virginia cities. By 1850 almost all African Americans in Wheeling and most in Alexandria were free. In Norfolk County and several nearby districts, the proportion of free blacks rose strikingly, reflecting individual decisions of masters rather than any concerted movement. Many employers in Richmond, facing growing but erratic demands for labor, shifted from purchasing slaves to hiring them. These bondsmen often received wages and the freedom to live where they pleased, leaving observers to fret about the consequences of such liberality.5
More broadly, Southern cities shifted away from slavery both because of the “push” of the new artisanal industries, which spurned bound workers, and the “pull” of a countryside that drew slaves from the towns. Even in the 1840s—a difficult decade for many planters—the proportion of slaves in the urban population dropped. During that decade, however, that percentage did not fall as uniformly or as sharply as it did in the 1850s, when agricultural prosperity drove up the price for field hands. In other words, the “pull” factor accelerated the decline of urban slavery in the 1850s—but was not the only cause of that drop. Similarly, the gender imbalance in most urban slave populations, with women outnumbering men, suggests that men were drawn off for farmwork. Only in Richmond, where male slaves forged iron and processed tobacco, were there significantly more men. Richmond perhaps illustrates the adaptability of urban slavery. But it should also be emphasized that even in Richmond the proportion of slaves in the town population declined in the 1840s and again in the 1850s.6
Planters disliked urbanization because of another troubling development: the increasing ties between these towns and the North. Like Baltimore, Virginia cities were drawn into the Northern commercial orbit. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Richmond and Norfolk were bustling independent entrepôts, boasting a thriving overseas trade. In 1815, when New York accounted for 19 percent of U.S. exports, Richmond and Norfolk together shipped 12 percent of the total. However, overseas shipments from the Old Dominion dropped precipitously, so that by 1840 the two Virginia ports handled only 3 percent of all exports and in 1860 only 1 percent. The two Virginia cities lacked the financiers, merchants, and rich hinterland that allowed the great ports to flourish. (Meanwhile, New York’s foreign trade soared to 36 percent of all exports in 1860.) In place of sending their goods overseas, Virginians increasingly directed their wares to Northern cities. Richmond tobacco was forwarded to New York shippers, who sent the casks to Europe and to retailers throughout the United States. Garden crops, destined for New York tables, became the chief export of Norfolk. Most flour milled at Alexandria was sent to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. The industrial products produced in Wheeling, which was located on the Ohio River near Pittsburgh, were sold primarily in the North. States’ rights advocate George Fitzhugh commented acidly, “Trade very easily effects now what conquest did formerly.”7
The planters championing states’ rights condemned the cities for their moderation on sectional issues. The leanings of the towns were clear even before the mid-century crisis. By the mid-1840s most urban places in the South were bastions of the Whig Party; and as a rule, Southern Whigs proved more cautious than Southern Democrats in defending slavery. The presence of Northern traders reinforced this leaning. One correspondent told Southern rights leader John C. Calhoun in 1849: “The cities all of them are becoming daily more & more unsound & uncertain & all for the same reason; the infusion of Northerners & Foreigners amongst them & their influence is being felt in the interior[?].”8
The urbanites’ lack of enthusiasm for Southern rights was striking in the years before the Civil War. In 1854 a South Carolina editorialist noted: “Every city is destined to be the seat of free-soilism. It is unconsciously making its appearance in Charleston, and it is destined to increase with every fresh arrival of European immigrants.”9 St. Louis showed its loyal colors, electing a Free-Soil congressman in 1856 and a Republican in 1860, and giving a plurality of votes to Lincoln. A German editor remarked, “St. Louis has the character of a free state, a virtual enclave in this region of slavery.”10 Baltimore too set itself against secession. Businessmen signed two pro-Union petitions, one in December 1860 with thirteen hundred names, and another the following January with five thousand names. Southern rights spokesman J. D. B DeBow complained: “Baltimore must be counted not for us but against us. We must deal with her as with the other Northern cities, all sectional enemies who are assailing our domestic peace and property.”11 In Kentucky no county provided as many volunteers for the Union army as Jefferson, which contained Louisville. New Orleans showed the same leanings. Although John Breckinridge, the Southern Democratic presidential candidate, swept the Deep South in 1860, he fared poorly in the Crescent City. He ran a dismal third in the city’s polls, with only 24 percent of the ballots, well behind the two unionist candidates, Constitutional Unionist John Bell (48 percent) and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas (28 percent).12
To be sure, Southern cities were never monolithic in their political leanings. The St. Louis and Baltimore merchants who focused on the Southern market typically supported the campaigns of the fire-eaters. Irish immigrants in the larger towns often applauded states’ rights orators, delighting in their racist attacks on Free-Soilers and Republicans. Charleston, South Carolina, was a storm center of the Southern rights movement. Acknowledging those exceptions, it remains clear that Southern towns, including most in the Deep South, proved a force for moderation.13
II/
Planters felt threatened by a second broad development: the decline of slavery in the border states. Between 1830 and 1860 each decennial census showed that slaves made up an ever-smaller proportion of the populations in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri.
The decline was particularly worrisome because it was accompanied, in each border state, by proposals that slavery be abolished. To be sure, those who questioned the “peculiar institution” were always a minority. None of the suggestions, even for gradual emancipation, came to fruition before the Civil War. But the very fact that prominent individuals raised such daring proposals unsettled the slave lords.
In two public gatherings in 1849, Kentuckians courageously criticized slavery. In April over 150 delegates, including both Whig leader Henry Clay and his outspoken cousin, Cassius Marcellus Clay, attended an emancipation convention at Frankfort. Speakers denounced bondage and proposed plans for freeing slaves, although no actions resulted. Delegates to the constitutional convention held at the end of the year presented similar critiques. “We have at hand a Convention to revise the Constitution,” one observer told Calhoun, “& gradual emancipation reared its head with the Northern party.” Again change was voted down, but most Kentuckians recognized that a vocal minority favored a legislated end to the “peculiar institution.”14
Similar sentiments were voiced in Delaware and Maryland. In 1803 and again in 1847 the Delaware assembly came close to adopting a plan for gradual emancipation. Only the actions of the state senate, mirroring the wishes of Sussex County (where most of the larger plantations were located), prevented the measure from becoming law. Still, James Hammond of South Carolina could justly observe that Delaware was “no southern or slave state.”15 Although no conventions or legislative initiatives promoted emancipation in Maryland, many citizens accepted that slavery was on the road to extinction. “I assume that we of the South,” Baltimorean J. H. Alexander remarked in 1848, “are no ways desirous of extending and perpetuating Slavery per se and for its own sake; and that we are even ready and willing to do away with the whole Institution if we could afford it .”16
Planters in the Deep South responded to the weakening of slavery in the border states by urging secession before the corrosive acid of change spread to their states as well. In the “first secession crisis” of 1849–1851, slave lords pointed to the decline of forced labor in the Northern tier of states as a strong reason for severing ties with the free states. “How long will Maryland, Western Virginia, Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee and even the Western part of No. Carolina feel it is their interest to retain slaves?” Governor David Johnson of South Carolina asked in 1848. “They are already unproductive as laborers & their sympathy would not weigh a feather against their interest & their prejudices in another scale.”17 The following year South Carolinian Marcus Hammond told his brother James that Southerners should “break up” the Union before, “Ky., Md., Mo. & Tennessee draw off.” The transformation of the border states raised the chilling specter of the collapse of the entire slave system.18
III/
Planters denounced a third broad trend that threatened their hierarchical society: the growth of manufacturing. The proliferation of factories in larger cities and craft enterprises in smaller ones challenged the slave lords in several ways. One problem was the danger posed by the industrial workforce. Employing this group in large numbers, whether white or black, posed risks to a society that demanded quiescent whites and closely watched slaves.
Christopher Memminger, South Carolina lawyer, legislator, and later treasurer of the Confederacy, noted the dangers of relying on white workers rather than slaves. He asked, “Drive our negro mechanics and all sorts of operatives from our Cities, and who must take their place?” His answer: “The same men who make the cry in the Northern Cities against the tyranny of Capital—and there as here would drive all before them all who interfere with them—and would soon raise hue and cry against the Negro, and be hot Abolitionists—and every one of those men have a vote.”19 Such views persuaded Richmond ironmaster Joseph Anderson to replace white workers with slaves after a strike in 1847 closed his foundry. In the 1850s, strikes in Baltimore, St. Louis, Louisville, and New Orleans exacerbated planter concerns about white laborers.20
Planters were equally worried about turning servants into operatives. Industrial slaves could not be subjected to the same strict regime as field workers. To a remarkable degree, industrialists who employed slaves had to provide incentives, either in the form of pay for “overwork” or additional holiday time. But those rewards, which went far beyond the incentives offered field workers, created problems. One slave owner, who withdrew his laborers from service, explained: “I regret having to adopt this course but you will upon a moments reflection, see the impolicy of keeping amongst a gang of negroes a portion to be more favored than the rest. It would prevent all just and efficient discipline.”21 James H. Hammond of South Carolina agreed. He noted in 1849, “Whenever a slave is made a mechanic, he is more than half freed, and soon becomes, as we too well know, and all history attests, with rare exceptions, the most corrupt and turbulent of his class.”22
Planters also worried that Southern manufacturers might join the crusade for higher tariffs and challenge one of slave society’s fundamental tenets: free trade. Even the stirrings of artisan production in the northern districts of states like South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama appeared worrisome. One observer remarked in 1860,
How long would it be after disunion before we should have the same hungry manufacturing population infesting the upper part of So. Ca., Cherokee Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina . . . and even the upper portion of Alabama—why not five years would elapse before they would be setting their looms on every stream in these locations under the impulse of occupation and the introduction of numbers. . . . A few years more and you would have a strong party of our own people in favour of a protective Tarriff, and advocating all those extravagant expenditures for Internal Improvements, and nearer home we shall be compelled to fight that same battle which has continued in the present Union since 1824.23
The hostility of the Southern elite to manufacturing was evident in the actions of legislatures and in the policies of public and private institutions. Sean Adams’s study of coal production in Virginia and Pennsylvania illustrates how planters and their allies hindered industrialization. In 1810 coal from the Richmond, Virginia, basin dominated the market in the eastern United States. By contrast, Pennsylvania anthracite was labeled “stone coal” and considered unusable. But by 1860 the picture was reversed: Pennsylvania now produced 78 percent of the nation’s coal, while Virginia, despite rich deposits in both the east and west, was reduced to a peripheral role, supplying only 2.4 percent of national consumption.
The explanation for these divergent paths did not lie in the resource endowment of the two states. Both had large coalfields. Rather it reflected the very different role played by the dominant groups. Pennsylvania’s lawmakers provided corporate charters on favorable terms and subsidized the canals and railroads that moved the heavy fuel. By contrast, Virginia lawmakers placed more restrictions on incorporation and refused to improve waterways. Moreover, the planters who controlled the James River Company charged miners higher fees than farmers. Virginia also had no counterpart to Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, which mounted a successful campaign to market anthracite.24
States’ rights advocates wanted manufacturing to play at most a minor role. Few went as far in condemning enterprise as John Forsythe, the editor of the Columbus Times. In 1850 Forsythe declared: “I would to God we had fewer miles of railroad, fewer millions invested in manufactures and stocks, fewer proofs of enterprise, and thrift and money-making, and more of that chivalry of Georgia, of the olden time, which, on more than one occasion, has interposed her sovereignty to check the usurpations of the federal government.”25 Most politicians, of all persuasions, favored railroads. Some Southern rights leaders accepted a subordinate role for manufacturing. They acknowledged that the occasional textile mill or armory could help the South become more self-reliant. But states’ rights leaders condemned the spread of “manufacturing as a system”; industrialization neither could be nor should be the path of Southern development.26
Economic historians who view the slave lords as profit-maximizers argue that rational self-interest explains the opposition to manufacturing and comparatively low levels of production. Staple production, they suggest, simply paid better. Such an argument might be valid for the eighteenth-century South. Slaves worked longer days and had a higher “labor force participation rate” than whites, since most black women worked outside the home while most white women did not.
But in the nineteenth century, planters favored agriculture and shunned industry despite higher returns from manufacturing. Artisans, benefiting from the division of labor and specialized tools, and operatives, assisted by machinery, generated higher profits than field slaves. Using manufacturing census returns, Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss show that the average profitability of all Southern industries in 1850 was 25 percent and in 1860, 28 percent. Still-higher returns came from boot-and-shoe-making; the fabrication of tin, sheet iron, and copper; and the production of wagons and carriages. By comparison, plantations provided only single-digit earnings. Although industry outperformed agriculture, wealthy slaveholders shunned manufacturing. Only 6 percent of wealthy slaveholders invested in manufacturing. Less than 15 percent of industrialists in the South belonged to the slaveholding elite. Bateman and Weiss conclude that it seems “plausible to accept the view espoused by Eugene Genovese and others: that the opportunities existed [in the South] and were known, but that investors chose to ignore them.”27
IV/
While urbanization, the decline of slavery, and the growth of manufacturing unsettled many planters, the impact of these developments must be kept in perspective. Before 1860 these trends did not turn a traditional society into a modern one. The impact of these changes was greatest in the border states, and their influence was least felt where wealthy planters remained strongest: the Deep South.
Urbanization was focused in the border area. Four of the top five cities in the South were located there, while fully one-fifth of the population in this region lived in towns. Except for Louisiana, the other Southern states had less than 10 percent of their population in towns of 2,500 or more. Indeed, in six states (Arkansas, North Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas) town dwellers accounted for less than 5 percent of the total, and of this group only Tennessee boasted a city of 10,000 or more. More generally, the South, excluding the border areas, lagged far behind the North. Maryland was the only Southern state more than 30 percent of the population urbanized. By contrast, five Northern states (Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) surpassed that mark, and two (Massachusetts and Rhode Island) had urban majorities. New York alone boasted as many cities of 10,000 or more as the entire South.
Similarly, the steady decline of slavery evident in the border states was rarely repeated elsewhere in the South. Outside of the four border states, only Virginia (which included in its boundaries the future border state of West Virginia), Louisiana, and Florida exhibited a similar steady declension. Several states—Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Texas—increased their percentage of slaves in every census year. Most states showed a rising proportion of slaves from 1830 to 1860.
Finally, manufacturing lagged in the slave states, and particularly in the Deep South. In 1860 the South contained the bottom nine states in the union for per capita manufactures (Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas). All of these states produced finished goods worth less than $1,800 per person. That group of nine included all the states of the Deep South, except for Louisiana, whose output, thanks to the sugar industry and the artisans of New Orleans, was just slightly higher. By contrast, the top eight manufacturing states were Northern, each creating products worth over $9,000 per person. Among the slave states, only Maryland and Delaware compared favorably to the less wealthy Northern states.28
Clearly, by 1860 modernizing trends had an impact on the South. But apart from the border states and a few scattered enclaves, the slave South still remained its old self. It was overwhelmingly rural, dependent on a growing slave population, and focused on agriculture rather than manufacturing.
V/
Although critics urged the leading planters to accept the forces for change, these slave lords firmly rejected all such suggestions. Instead, following the logic of their commitment to premodern values, they vigorously opposed the rise of an urban, diversified, free-labor society; and when their efforts to stifle change appeared doomed, they led their states out of the union.
These traditional-minded planters, however, faced considerable opposition within the South. The border states spurned the proposals of states’ rights leaders in the 1840s and 1850s and rejected secession in 1860–1861. Upper South politicians were divided during these decades: some individuals championed the states’ rights movement, but others strongly dissented. And while Southern nationalists carried the day in the Deep South, a sizeable minority disagreed with them and applauded the new commercial developments. Sorting out who stood on the two sides of this divide deepens any analysis of the battle over modernization. A brief essay, such as this one, can only sketch the broad outlines of this division. My book, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War, provides a fuller discussion, surveying a range of evidence, including the votes in state elections and Congress, and presenting a series of maps documenting these splits.29
To begin with, in the upper South the defenders of traditional society typically hailed from the districts with the largest plantations and the highest concentrations of slaves, such as the tobacco-growing counties of eastern Virginia and North Carolina. Early in the century these districts elected lawmakers such as John Randolph and Nathaniel Mason; in the decades before the Civil War, they selected equally strong-minded individuals such as Robert M. T. Hunter, James M. Mason, and Abraham Venable. These individuals denounced manufacturing, urban growth, tariffs, and federal outlays for internal improvements. They called for a limited central government that would confine its activities to measures such as keeping new western territories open to slavery and capturing fugitive slaves.
Representatives of the small farmers opposed these states’ rights planters. But because the South remained a deferential society, the split was never strictly along class lines. Where large plantations predominated, most small farmers voted for their wealthy neighbors. Only in the areas with few slaves and few plantations—for example, western Virginia and eastern Tennessee—did small farmers and their spokesmen openly challenge the great planters. Townsfolk and some of the business interests in the upper South also criticized the designs of the slave lords.
The most outspoken, numerous, and influential defenders of traditional society resided in the Deep South—but they too had to deal with determined opponents. Some historians suggest that the conflict in the cotton states resembled the clashes in the upper South, with small farmers pitted against planters.30 But the evidence does not support that simple dichotomy. Rather, the most important line of division in the Deep South was a geographical one. The citizenry in the northern part of states like South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi were more sympathetic to manufacturing and the creation of a diversified economy, while representatives from the southern districts in those states were the most vehement in denouncing change. This fissure divided both planters and yeomen.
Citizens in the cotton states split along these geographical lines for several reasons. One was the different origins of the inhabitants. Settlers in the northern districts typically had migrated from the upper South and had ties of kinship with states to the north. Those in the southern districts arrived from settlements in South Carolina and Georgia. Patterns of commerce reinforced this division, as a growing overland trade, which exchanged cotton for finished goods, gradually integrated the northern districts into the national economy. Differences in crop choices strengthened the split. Wheat cultivation, which fostered a society of towns and craft industry, flourished in the northern districts but not in the southern ones.
To be sure, circumstances varied from state to state, with local conditions modifying these generalizations. In Louisiana crop choices helped dictate loyalties: sugar planters depended on government protection and applauded a central government that levied tariffs and encouraged local industry. Overland trade had little impact on politics in Florida, the one Deep South state that did not border the upper South. In Texas relatively few planters joined the wheat-growing small farmers in protesting the plans of the secessionists. South Carolina remained more unified and harbored fewer moderates than the other states. Neverthless, divisions shaped by settlement, trade, and crops were evident in all the cotton states, as was a vigorous debate over modernization.
Politicians from the northern districts of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi (and kindred spirits in the other Deep South states) demonstrated courage in standing up to the states’ right majority and in applauding the new commercial trends. James Alcorn, a Whig planter who resided in northern Mississippi, exemplified these leaders. A follower of Henry Clay, he argued that the future of the South lay in a broad program of economic development, not in a rush to secession. Alexander Stephens, a northern Georgia planter and lawyer, contended that the South would fare better within a growing union than outside of it. James Orr, head of the South Carolina National Democrats, also argued for economic diversification not separation. “The first step to be taken,” he explained in 1855, “to reinvigorate our decaying prosperity, and to develop our exhaustless resources, is for our planters and farmers to invest the whole of the nett profits on agricultural capital in some species of manufacturing; the field is broad and inviting, and but little has yet been occupied.”31
Many townsfolk shared the outlook of these landholders and made clear their receptivity to modernizing currents. Newspapers based in the larger centers often boosted new crops and industry. For example, the Mobile Advertiser suggested that cotton planters “instead of investing their surplus capital in negroes and lands, [should] invest it in manufactures, and draw around and among them in every neighborhood of the South an industrious, thriving, laboring white population to consume their surplus products and manufacture their staple.”32
These townsfolk, planters, and small farmers made certain that in the Deep South the debate over modernization was always a discussion and never simply a monologue. During the “first secession crisis,” of 1849–1851, spokesmen from the northern districts and their allies resisted call for secession, and they rehearsed the same arguments again in 1860–1861. Lincoln’s election, however, weakened the forces advocating diversification rather than independence. Once secession occurred, almost all the moderates “went with their state,” often accepting high offices in the Confederacy.
The dominant group in the Deep South, the ones who championed secession and who fought modernization—and who shaped the path taken by Southern society—came from the southern districts. These were the individuals least involved in overland trade, least likely to raise crops other than cotton, and least inclined to promote local manufacturing. Although opposed by the small farmers and planters in the northern counties, these slave lords drew strong support from the poorer farmers in the southern reaches. The deep fissures within the yeomanry would remain evident during the war and Reconstruction.
The states’ rights leaders insisted time and again that regional prosperity depended on fresh soils and a cash crop raised by slaves. They contended that approaches to growth based on manufacturing or agricultural diversification inevitably must fail. U.S. senator and future Confederate president Jefferson Davis was among the most outspoken advocates of this credo. “Without mountain slopes, and mountain streams to furnish water power,” he explained in 1846, “without coal mines permanently to supply large amounts of cheap fuel at any locality, we cannot expect, in competition with those who enjoy either or both of these advantages, ever to become a manufacturing people. We must continue to rely, as at present, almost entirely upon our exports.”33 Davis often returned to this theme. During the Panic of 1857, he rejoiced in the strengths of the Southern way. “Ours was an agricultural people, and in that consisted their strength,” he told an audience in Jackson, Mississippi. “Their prosperity was not at the mercy of such a commercial crisis as the one with which the country had just been visited. Our great staple was our safety.”34
More broadly, Southern rights leaders extolled their traditional way of life, distinguishing it from the destructive commercial spirit of the North. In 1855 Alabama fire-eater William Lowndes Yancey expounded on the differences between the North and South: “The climate, soil and productions of these two grand divisions of the land, have made the character of their inhabitants. Those who occupy the one are cool, calculating, enterprising, selfish and grasping; the inhabitants of the other, are ardent, brave and magnanimous, more disposed to give than to accumulate, to enjoy ease rather than labor.”35 Mississippi radical John F. H. Claiborne remarked: “Sedentary and agricultural, we cherish the homesteads and laws of our ancestors, and live among the reminiscences of the past.”36
Louis Wigfall, the South Carolinian who became a leader of Texas’s secession movement, affirmed similar values, sharply distinguishing the South from modern, industrializing societies. “We are an agricultural people,” he announced in May 1861. “We are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no cities—we don’t want them. . . . We want no manufactures; we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command the wealth to purchase all we want from those nations with which we are in amity, and lay up money besides.”37
Given this mind-set, secession was the logical response for the slave lords as they witnessed the mounting threats to their way of life. In their minds, reform was never an option. For this dominant group of planters, slavery was more than a means of production. Slavery defined a social hierarchy with the bondmen and bondwomen at the bottom and the great slave lords at the pinnacle. By protecting slavery, they were protecting the world they knew. Henry Benning, the secessionist commissioner that Georgia sent to Virginia in February 1861, presented the case succinctly. “What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession?” he asked. “This reason may be summed up in a single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery.”38 Robert Barnwell Rhett, editor of the Charleston Mercury, warned his readers that “the issue before the country is the extinction of slavery. No man of common sense, who has observed the progress of events, and who is not prepared to surrender the institution, with the safety and independence of the South, can doubt that the time for action has come—now or never.”39
This same antimodern outlook, the same determination to defend older ways, was embodied in the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, adopted in March 1861. That charter forbade all tariffs “laid to promote or foster any branch of industry.” It barred all “internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce”—a prohibition that delighted fire-eaters like Barnwell Rhett. His newspaper, the Charleston Mercury, rejoiced: “Internal improvements, by appropriations from the treasury of the Confederate States is therefore rooted out of the system of Government the Constitution establishes.”40
In deciding for secession, these planters responded to several threats. The rise of the Republican Party and its decision to block the spread of slavery was the most serious problem—and the immediate cause of the war. But this group of slave lords also recognized that modernizing trends—the growth of Southern cities, the decline of slavery in the border South, and the rise of manufacturing—also posed long-term challenges to their existence. These developments made clear that unless the planters remained masters in their own house, they could not survive.
In sum, Genovese is right: The leading planters had a premodern outlook, and that ideology dominated politics, particularly in the Deep South. The powerful forces for change, unmistakable by the middle of the nineteenth century, did not dissuade these autocrats. Instead, the incipient forces for modernization made them more determined to defend their traditional view of society, even to the point of breaking up the union.
NOTES
[Readers will notice that Marc Egnal does not adopt the same interpretive framework as the other contributors to this anthology. His essay is intended as a counterpoint to interpretations of the Old South as modern-minded. As such this contribution seeks to further debate on reinterpreting the history of the antebellum South.]—Ed.
1. Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy & Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 3, 31. Also see Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (1968; repr., Middletown, Conn.: Pantheon Books, 1988), vi; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3, and the introduction to Political Economy of Slavery, 2nd ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Pantheon Books, 1989).
2. Robert Whaples, “Where Is There Consensus Among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions,” Journal of Economic History 55 (1995): 139–154.
3. J. H. Alexander to Calhoun, July 31, 1848, in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed. Robert L. Meriwether et al., 28 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959–2003), 25:643; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 197–202, 204.
4. Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 8, 22–24, 39–60, 95; Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 40–62; Marc Egnal, Divergent Paths: How Culture and Institutions Have Shaped North American Growth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 14–18.
5. Freehling, Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 123–135; Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 179–195; Midori Takagi, “Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction”: Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782–1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 71–80, 96–123; Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 242–252.
6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitants and Statistics of the United States: (Washington, D.C.: T. Allen, 1841); The Seventh Census of the United States, 1850 (Washington, D.C.: Robert Armstrong, 1853); Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1864), online at http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial (accessed October 2010). See also Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 28–40.
7. David R. Goldfield, Urban Growth in the Age of Sectionalism: Virginia, 1847– 1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), xi–xxiv, 2–21, 182–201, 228–247, 235 (quotation).
8. Augustus Fisher[lue?] to Calhoun, September 24, 1848, Henry Conner to Calhoun, January 12, 1849, Joseph W. Lesesne to John C. Calhoun, September 12, 1847, Papers of John C. Calhoun, 26:63, 26:211, 24:552; J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 42; D. Clayton James, Antebellum Natchez (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 164–165; Towers, Urban South, 78–79; Lacy K. Ford, Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 167–170; Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 198–199, 289– 292. President John Tyler (1790–1862)was one of the last, prominent states’ rights Whigs.
9. Quoted in John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 100.
10. Quoted in Towers, Urban South, 188.
11. DeBow’s Review (1856), quoted in Towers, Urban South, 31.
12. Towers, Urban South, 192–197; Egnal, Clash of Extremes, 176, 183–187; Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana: A Social History of White Farmers and Laborers during Slavery and After, 1840–1875 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939), 157–168; John M. Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 259–290.
13. Towers, Urban South, 170–178, 185–192; William J. Evitts, A Matter of Allegiances: Maryland from 1850 to 1861 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 170–171.
14. Nathan Gaither to Calhoun, December 2, John Custis Darby to Calhoun, December 4, 1848, Papers of John C. Calhoun, 26:145, 26:155; Freehling, Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 467–471.
15. Freehling, Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 197, 207–209, 473 (quotation).
16. J. H. Alexander to Calhoun, July 31, 1848, Papers of John C. Calhoun, 25:643; Freehling, Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 197–209; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861, 2 vols. (New York, 2007), 2: 175, 281, 438, 499–501.
17. David Johnson to Calhoun, October 18, 1848, Papers of John C. Calhoun, 26:98.
18. Marcus Hammond to James Hammond, December 17, 1849, quoted in Freehling, Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 474; Egnal, Clash of Extremes, 166–168, 179–202.
19. C. G. Memminger to J. H. Hammond, April 28, 1849, quoted in Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 210. I have added the question mark for clarity.
20. Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery, 232–233; Towers, Urban South, 37–71; Charles B. Dew, Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 22–26; Takagi, “Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction,” 81–84.
21. Starobin, Industrial Slavery, 103, 111; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 269–277; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 566–584; William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 88–91.
22. Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery, 182, 225 (quotation); Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 143–179, 242–266.
23. Daniel H. Hamilton to William Porcher Miles, January 23, 1860, Charleston, S.C., William Porcher Miles Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
24. Sean Patrick Adams, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), passim.
25. John Forsythe to “Gentlemen of Charleston,” September 12, 1850, in John W. DuBose, The Life and Times of William Lowndes Yancey, 2 vols. (1892; repr., New York: Peter Smith, 1942), 2:426.
26. Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery, 180–239; William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828–1843 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 18–20, 40–53, 222–224; Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy, 81–107.
27. Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 99–127, 113 (quotation). For a contrasting viewpoint, see David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 73–83, 163–178; Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 254–257; Gavin Wright, “Cheap Labor and Southern Textiles before 1880,” Journal of Economic History 39 (1979): 655–680.
28. Data drawn from U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Eighth Census, vol. 3: Manufactures of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1865). Scott P. Marler, “Merchants and the Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana: New Orleans and Its Hinterlands” (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 2007), 54–101, shows that New Orleans merchants were far more interested in investing in real estate than in manufacturing or railroads.
29. The following discussion of divisions within the South is drawn from Egnal, Clash of Extremes, 150–202, 258–306.
30. For example, Michael P. Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977).
31. James L. Orr, “Development of Southern Industry,” DeBow’s Review 19:1 (July 1855): 1–22, 11–12 (quotation); Egnal, Divergent Paths, 63–68.
32. [Mobile] Advertiser, November 27, 1848, quoted in Larry K. Menna, “Southern Whiggery and Economic Development: The Meaning of Slavery in a National Context,” in The Meaning of Slavery in the North, ed. David Roediger and Martin H. Blatt, (New York: Garland Publishers, 1998), 64; Menna, “Embattled Conservatism: The Ideology of the Southern Whigs” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1991), 230.
33. Davis to the People of Mississippi, July 13, 1846, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, ed. Haskell M. Monroe, Jr., and James T. McIntosh, 10 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971–1999), 3:5.
34. Davis, Speech at Jackson, November 4, 1857, Papers of Jefferson Davis, 6:157.
35. Yancey, Speech at Columbus, Georgia, 1855, in DuBose, William Lowndes Yancey, 1:301.
36. J. F. H. Claiborne, Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1860), 2:273; Egnal, Divergent Paths, 21–32, 87–101.
37. Quoted in Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy, 144. Majewski, who argues that the South was indeed a modern society, has a different reading of this quotation, which was given to a reporter for the Times of London. Majewski suggests that Wigfall presented these views to gain British support for the Confederacy.
38. Henry Benning, secessionist commissioner of Georgia, to Virginia convention, February 18, 1861, online at http://civilwarcauses.org/benningva.htm (accessed October 2010); Egnal, Clash of Extremes, 258–286.
39. Charleston Mercury, November 3, 1860, quoted in Southern Editorials on Secession, ed. Dwight L. Dumond (1931; repr., Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 204; Laura A. White, Robert Barnwell Rhett: Father of Secession (1931; repr., Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 135–190; Eric H. Walther, The Fire-Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 147–156; Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., to William Porcher Miles, April 7, 1858, January 29, 1860, March 28, 1860, April 17, 1860, William Porcher Miles Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
40. Constitution of the Confederate States, March 11, 1861, online at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp (accessed December 2010); Charleston Mercury quoted in Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy,146.