In 1846 De Bow had established a magazine in New Orleans with the title Commercial Review of the South and West (popularly known as De Bow's Review) and a hopeful slogan on its cover, "Commerce is King." The amount "lost to us annually by our vassalage to the North," said De Bow in 1852, was "one hundred million dollars. Great God! Does Ireland sustain a more degrading relation to Great Britain? Will we not throw off this humiliating dependence?" De Bow demanded "action! ACTION!! ACTION!!!—not in the rhetoric of Congress, but in the busy hum of mechanism, and in the thrifty operations of the hammer and anvil."29 Plenty of southerners cheered De Bow's words, but they got more rhetoric than action.
De Bow was inspired to found his journal by the vision of a southern commercial empire evoked at a convention in Memphis in 1845. This meeting renewed a tradition of southern conclaves that had begun in the 1830s with a vow "to throw off the degrading shackles of our commercial dependence."30 The dominant theme in these early conventions was the establishment of southern-owned shipping lines for direct trade with Europe. The Memphis convention, the first to meet after a six-year hiatus, focused on the need for railroad connections between the lower Mississippi valley and the south Atlantic coast. No such railroads nor any southern shipping lines had materialized by 1852, but De Bow prodded the commercial convention movement into life again that year with a meeting at New Orleans. Thereafter a similar gathering met at least once a year through 1859 in various southern cities.
These conventions were prolific in oratory and resolutions. In addition
28. Alabama newspaper quoted in Robert Royal Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 1840–1861 (Urbana, 1923), 48; De Bow's Review, 12 (1851), 557.
29. De Bow's speech to a southern commercial convention in New Orleans, January 1852, quoted in Herbert Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions 1837–1859 (Baltimore, 1930), 85; De Bow's Review, 13(1852), 571; 9 (1850), 120.
30. Resolution adopted by the first southern commercial convention in Augusta, Georgia, October 1837, quoted in Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions, 18.
to the call for direct trade with Europe in southern ships, they urged river and harbor improvements, railroad construction, and a southern route for a railroad to the Pacific. They pressed southerners to emulate Yankees in the building of factories. The delegates also devoted some attention to cultural matters. Noting with shame that most books and magazines read by southerners came from northern authors and presses, that the South sent many of its brightest sons to northern colleges, and that a shocking number of southern college presidents, professors, schoolteachers, and even newspaper editors were natives of Yankeedom, the conventions called for the establishment and patronage of southern publishers, magazines, authors, professors, and colleges.
Of all these enterprises, the industrial gospel aroused the most enthusiasm. "Give us factories, machine shops, work shops," declared southern journalists, and "we shall be able ere long to assert our rights." Textiles seemed the South's most logical route to industrialization. "Bring the spindles to the cotton," became a rallying cry of southern promoters. "South Carolina and Georgia possess advantages, which only need to be fostered to lead to success in cotton manufacturing," declared William Gregg, who had proven his credentials by establishing a large textile mill at Graniteville in the South Carolina piedmont. "Have we not the raw material on the spot, thus saving the freight of a double transportation? Is not labor cheaper with us than with our northern brethren?" Next to industry as the South's salvation stood railroads. "This railroad business is the dispensation of the present era," wrote one of South Carolina's few Whigs in 1853. "There have been two great dispensations of Civilization, the Greek & Christian and now comes the railroad."31
The South did take significant strides in the 1850s. The slave states more than quadrupled their railroad mileage, outstripping the northern pace which merely tripled mileage in that section. Capital invested in southern manufacturing rose 77 percent, exceeding the rate of population growth so that the amount invested per capita increased 39 percent.
31. Huntsville Advocate and Richmond Republican, editorials in August 1850, quoted in Arthur C. Cole, The Whig Party in the South (Washington, 1913), 208; Herbert Collins, "The Southern Industrial Gospel before 1860," JSH, 12 (1946), 391; William C. Preston to Waddy Thompson, Sept. 7, 1853, in Robert S. Tinkler, "Against the Grain: Unionists and Whigs in Calhoun's South Carolina," Senior Thesis, Princeton University, 1984, p. 92.
The value of southern-produced textiles increased 44 percent. But like Alice in Wonderland, the faster the South ran, the farther behind it seemed to fall. While the slave states' proportion of national railroad mileage increased to 35 percent in 1860, this was less than the 44 percent of 1840. By an index of railroad mileage per capita and per thousand square miles, the North remained more than twice as well supplied with rail transportation in 1860. And the amount of capital invested per mile in trackage and rolling stock was 30 percent greater in the free than in the slave states. While per capita investment in manufacturing increased no faster in the North than in the South during the 1850s, the population of free states grew more than that of slave states (40 percent to 27 percent) so that the southern share of national manufacturing capacity dropped from 18 to 16 percent. The effort to bring the spindles to the cotton failed: in 1860 the value of cotton textiles manufactured in the slave states was only 10 percent of the American total.32 Nearly half of the southern spindles were in states that grew virtually no cotton. The city of Lowell, Massachusetts, operated more spindles in 1860 than all eleven of the soon-to-be Confederate states combined.33 Two-fifths of all southern manufacturing capital in 1860 was in the four border states. Northern banks, mercantile firms, factors, and shipping lines continued to monopolize the southern carrying trade.34
32. These data are for the value of textile products reported in the manufactures section of the census. They do not include household manufactures, which were apparently greater in the South than the North, proportionately, judging from the amount of raw cotton consumed in the slave states, which amounted to an estimated 19 percent of the American total during the 1850s.
33. Stephen J. Goldfarb, "A Note on Limits to the Growth of the Cotton-Textile Industry in the Old South," JSH, 48 (1982), 545.
34. Two econometric historians have argued that by world standards the southern economy in 1860 did not lag significantly in commercial and industrial development. Using three per-capita indices—railroad mileage, cotton textile production, and pig iron production, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman found that the South ranked just behind the North in railroads but ahead of every other country. In textile production the South ranked sixth and in pig iron eighth. But the railroad index they used is specious, for railroads connect places as well as people. By an index that combines population and square miles of territory the South's railroad capacity was not only less than half of the North's but also considerably less than that of several European countries in 1860. Combining the two measures of industrial capacity used by Fogel and Engerman, the South produced only one-nineteenth as much per capita as Britain, one-seventh as much as Belgium, one-fifth as much as the North, and one-fourth as much as Sweden—rather significant differences which tend to undermine the point they are trying to make. See Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974), 254–56.
Proponents of industrial development below the Potomac confessed frustration. Southerners were "destitute of every feature which characterizes an industrious people," mourned textile manufacturer William Gregg. Southern industries had "fagged, sickened, and died" because "there is a canker-worm at work" that had "underminefd] the best efforts at success" and "blighted the fairest hopes of the Southern manufacturer."35
Contemporaries and historians have advanced several explanations for this "failure of industrialization in the slave economy," as the subtitle of a recent study has termed it. Following the lead of Adam Smith, class
ical economists considered free labor more efficient than slave labor because the free worker is stimulated by the fear of want and the desire for betterment. A slave, wrote Smith, "can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible." Yankee opponents of slavery agreed. "Enslave a man," declared Horace Greeley, "and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort."36 The northern journalist and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted made three extensive trips through the South in the 1850s which resulted in three books that portrayed a shiftless, indolent, rundown society as the fruit of bondage. The subsistence level at which slaves and many "poor whites" lived discouraged the development of a market for consumer goods that could have stimulated southern manufacturing.37
35. William Gregg, "Domestic Industry—Manufactures at the South," De Bow's Review, 8 (1850), 134–36, and "Southern Patronage to Southern Imports and Domestic Industry," ibid., 29 (1860), 77–83.
36. Smith quoted in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975), 352; Greeley quoted in Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 46.
37. Olmsted's three books were titled A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country (1860). In 1861 Olmsted abridged the three volumes into one with the title The Cotton Kingdom. For the question of a southern consumer market, see Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (New York, 1965), esp. chaps. 7 and 8.
These explanations for southern "backwardness" have some merit. Yet they are not entirely convincing. The successful employment of slaves as well as white workers in southern textile mills, in iron foundries like the Tredegar Works in Richmond, and in other industries demonstrated a potential for industrialization on a greater scale. As for the lack of a home market, southern consumers generated a significant demand for northern-made shoes, clothing, locomotives, steamboats, farm implements—to name just a few products—that encouraged such promoters as Gregg and De Bow to believe that a market for southern manufactures existed if it could only be exploited.
Other accounts of southern industrialization have focused not on deficiencies of labor or of demand but on a lack of capital. Capital was abundant in the South, to be sure: in 1860, according to the census measure of wealth (real and personal property), the average southern white male was nearly twice as wealthy as the average northern white man.38 The problem was that most of this wealth was invested in land and slaves. A British visitor to Georgia in 1846 was "struck with the difficulty experienced in raising money here by small shares for the building of mills. 'Why,' say they, 'should all our cotton make so long a journey to the North, to be manufactured there, and come back to us at so high a price? It is because all spare cash is sunk here in purchasing negroes.' " A northerner described the investment cycle of the southern economy: "To sell cotton in order to buy negroes—to make more cotton to buy more negroes, 'ad infinitum,' is the aim and direct tendency of all the operations of the thorough going cotton planter."39
Was this preference for reinvestment in slaves economically rational? No, answered an earlier generation of historians following the lead of Ulrich B. Phillips, who found plantation agriculture a decreasingly profitable enterprise that southern whites preserved for cultural rather than economic reasons.40 Yes, answered a more recent generation of historians, who have analyzed bushels of data and concluded that slave agriculture
38. Lee Soltow, Men and Wealth in the United States 1850–1870 (New Haven, 1975), 65.
39. Sir Charles Lyell, Second Visit to the United States, 2 vols. (London, 1846), II, 35; Joseph Holt Ingraham, The Southwest, by a Yankee, 2 vols. (New York, 1835), II, 91.
40. See especially Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston, 1929); and Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery.
yielded as great a return on capital as potential alternative investments.41 Maybe, is the answer of still another group of economic historians, who suggest that investments in railroads and mills might have yielded higher returns than agriculture, that cotton was living on the borrowed time of an almost saturated market, and that whatever the rationality of individual planter reinvestment in agriculture the collective result inhibited the economic development of the South as a whole.42
Some evidence points to the South's agrarian value system as an important reason for lack of industrialization. Although the light of Jeffer-sonian egalitarianism may have dimmed by 1850, the torch of agrari-anism still glowed. "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God . . . whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue," the husbandman of Monticello had written. The proportion of urban workingmen to farmers in any society "is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts" and adds "just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body."43 The durability of this conviction in the South created a cultural climate unfriendly to industrialization. "In cities and factories, the vices of our nature are more fully displayed," declared James Hammond of South Carolina in 1829, while rural life "promotes a generous hospitality, a high and perfect courtesy, a lofty spirit of independence . . . and all the nobler virtues and heroic traits." An Englishman traveling through the South in 1842 found a widespread feeling "that the labours of the people should be confined to agriculture, leaving manufactures to Europe or to the States of the North."44
Defenders of slavery contrasted the bondsman's comfortable lot with the misery of wage slaves so often that they began to believe it. Beware
41. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956); Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South," Journal of Political Economy, 66 (1958), 95–130; Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross.
42. Alfred H. Conrad et al., "Slavery as an Obstacle to Economic Growth in the United States: A Panel Discussion," Journal of Economic History, 27 (1967), 518–60; Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (New York, 1978); Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill, 1981).
43. Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, 1955), 164–65.
44. Hammond quoted in Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1985), 37; James S. Buckingham, The Slave States of America, 2 vols. (London, 1842), II, 112.
of the "endeavor to imitate . . . Northern civilization" with its "filthy, crowded, licentious factories," warned a planter in 1854. "Let the North enjoy their hireling labor with all its . . . pauperism, rowdyism, mob-ism and anti-rentism," said the collector of customs in Charleston. "We do not want it. We are satisfied with our slave labor. . . . We like old things—old wine, old books, old friends, old and fixed relations between employer and employed."45
By the later 1850s southern agrarians had mounted a counterattack against the gospel of industrialization. The social prestige of planters pulled other occupations into their orbit rather than vice versa. "A large plantation and Negroes are the ultima Thule of every Southern gentleman's ambition," wrote a frustrated Mississippi industrial promoter in 1860. "For this the lawyer pores over his dusty tomes, the merchant measures his tape . . . the editor drives his quill, and the mechanic his plane—all, all who dare to aspire at all, look to this as the goal of their ambition." After all, trade was a lowly calling fit for Yankees, not for gentlemen. "That the North does our trading and manufacturing mostly is true," wrote an Alabamian in 1858, "and we are willing that they should. Ours is an agricultural people, and God grant that we may continue so. It is the freest, happiest, most independent, and with us, the most powerful condition on earth."46
45. "The Prospects and Policy of the South, as They Appear to the Eyes of a Planter," Southern Quarterly Review, 26 (1854), 431–32; William J. Grayson, Letters of Curtius (Charleston, 1852), 8.
46. Vicksburg Sun, April 9, 1860; Alabamian quoted in Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 207.
47. During the same period the per capita wealth of northerners increased 26 percent and per capita northern investment in industry rose 38 percent. Data on per capita wealth are from Soltow, Men and Wealth, 67; data on the price of slaves are from Phillips, American Negro Slavery, 371; all other data cited here have been compiled from the published census returns of 1850 and 1860.
Although the persistence of Jeffersonian agrarianism may help explain this phenomenon, the historian can discover pragmatic reasons as well. The 1850s were boom years for cotton and for other southern staples. Low cotton prices in the 1840s had spurred the crusade for economic diversification. But during the next decade the price of cotton jumped more than 50 percent to an average of 11.5 cents a pound. The cotton crop consequently doubled to four million bales annually by the late 1850s. Sugar and tobacco prices and production similarly increased. The apparent insatiable demand for southern staples caused planters to put every available acre into these crops. The per capita output of the principal southern food crops actually declined in the 1850s, and this agricultural society headed toward the status of a food-deficit region.48
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