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

Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. By John Majewski. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvi + 240 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-8078-3251-6.

Reviewed by Mark R. Wilson

Many historians have been struck by the forcefulness of economic regulation in the South during the American Civil War. That the confederate national state wielded such a powerful visible hand is often portrayed as an ironic turn of events, given that the South ostensibly stood for local control and free trade. In Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation, John Majewski argues that the many economic interventions of the Confederate state were actually consistent with antebellum secessionist ideas about political economy. "Many secessionists," he explains, "envisioned industrial expansion, economic independence, and government activism as essential features of the Confederacy" (p. 3). By showing that southerners pursued a variety of state-sponsored schemes for economic development well before the era of the New South, Majewski successfully refutes those who would like to remember Dixie as a pastoral bastion of economic liberty.

Modernizing a Slave Economy builds on some of the work presented in Majewski's first book, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War (2000). As in that book, Majewski here again uses an impressive blend of quantitative and qualitative analysis to shed light on Americans' efforts during the antebellum era to achieve regional economic growth. But instead of exploring differences in Northern and Southern development, in Modernizing a Slave Economy he focuses on two Southern states: Virginia and South Carolina. He is especially concerned with describing the economic ideas of leading secessionists. Many of these men, including Edmund Ruffin, James H. Hammond, and George W. Randolph, supported various forms of state intervention to encourage regional economic development, as well as slavery and secession. Focusing on the antebellum writings of these proslavery modernizers, Majewski suggests that the Confederacy's statism came not only from wartime expethency, but also from its ideological origins.

Although much of the book is taken up with an analysis of political rhetoric and economic ideas, it begins with a first chapter that is far more materialist. In this opening essay, Majewski explains that the South's inferior soils promoted the practice of shifting cultivation, in which farmland was used for crops for five or six years and then allowed to rest for two decades at a time. This contrasted with the practice of continuous cultivation, more common in the North, which involved crop rotation and greater use of fertilizer. Using statistical analysis, Majewski concludes that the South relied more heavily on shifting cultivation because of soil quality, climate, and topography- not because of slavery, lack of urban markets, or cultural backwardness. Although this technical discussion of agricultural geography fits somewhat awkwardly with the remainder of the book, it provides an important foundation for all that follows. Poor soils were an important cause of the South's failure to keep pace with the North in the race for economic development.

Far from being content with shifting cultivation and an agrarian economy based entirely on cotton exports, many Southerners pushed for economic modernization. In the middle three chapters of the book, Majewski discusses the vigorous efforts of many Southern leaders to champion agricultural reform, railroad construction, and anti-Northern trade policies. Of these, the Southern states' very large public investments in antebellum railroads provide the most impressive evidence in support of the book's central argument. Like other Southern states, Virginia and South Carolina spent millions of dollars in state funds to promote railroads before the Civil War. At a time when most of the financing for Northern railroads came from private capital, Virginia and South Carolina together spent over $45 million in public money, which represented about seventy percent of total investment on railroads in those states. This was indeed a remarkably statist approach to the development of transport infrastructure.

Given this antebellum record, Majewski argues, the Confederate approach to wartime political economy, which some have dubbed "war socialism," did not require great leaps of imagination. The book's final chapter describes some of the steps taken by the Confederacy to ramp up economic regulation and create new state-run enterprises, including railroads, gunpowder plants, and uniform manufactories. Many historians have described these developments before. What Majewski's discussion adds is an emphasis on the continuities between antebellum ideas and practices and wartime measures.

Modernizing a Slave Economy shows that well before the emergency of the Civil War, many influential Southerners were interested in using government to promote economic development. However, it is never quite clear how these modernizers compared to the larger population of Southerners, or secessionists. As Majewski acknowledges, although the states did make huge investments in railroads, they did much less to promote agricultural reform or other antebellum public enterprises. One reason for this mixed record, almost certainly, is that the modernizers featured in this book had more conservative, anti-statist counterparts, who at certain times and in certain places may have been at least as influential in state politics. One task for future historians in this field, who will all benefit from Majewski's many valuable contributions, will be to do more to measure the relative influence of different camps of economic thinkers and policymakers in the South, and to assess how that influence changed over time.

[Author Affiliation]

Mark R. Wilson is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of The Business of Civil War (2006) and several articles on US. military-industrial history.