Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth

Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America

Sean Patrick Adams

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781421400518
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

In 1796, famed engineer and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe toured the coal fields outside Richmond, Virginia, declaring enthusiastically, "Such a mine of Wealth exists, I believe, nowhere else!" With its abundant and accessible deposits, growing industries, and network of rivers and ports, Virginia stood poised to serve as the center of the young nation's coal trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Virginia's leadership in the American coal industry had completely unraveled while Pennsylvania, at first slow to exploit its vast reserves of anthracite and bituminous coal, had become the country's leading producer.

Sean Patrick Adams compares the political economies of coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, examining the divergent paths these two states took in developing their ample coal reserves during a critical period of American industrialization. In both cases, Adams finds, state economic policies played a major role. Virginia's failure to exploit the rich coal fields in the western part of the state can be traced to the legislature's overriding concern to protect and promote the interests of the agrarian, slaveholding elite of eastern Virginia. Pennsylvania's more factious legislature enthusiastically embraced a policy of economic growth that resulted in the construction of an extensive transportation network, a statewide geological survey, and support for private investment in its coal fields.

Using coal as a barometer of economic change, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth addresses longstanding questions about North-South economic divergence and the role of state government in American industrial development, providing new insights for both political and economic historians of nineteenth-century America.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Political Economy of Coal
• 1 The Intersection of Politics and Geology: America’s First Coal Trade
• 2 The Commonwealth’s Fuel: The Rise of Pennsylvania Anthracite
• 3 Trunk and Branch: State Internal Improvement Networks and the Coal Trade
• 4 “Hidden Treasures” and Nasty Politics: Antebellum Geological Surveys in Pennsylvania and Virginia
• 5 Miners without Souls: Corporations and Coal in Pennsylvania and Virginia
• 6 Three Separate Paths: The Impact of the Civil War
• Epilogue: Capture and Confusion
• Notes
• Essay on Sources
• Index