A Deplorable Scarcity

The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy

Fred Bateman, Thomas Weiss

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807854464, 9780807814475
• eBook ISBN: 9781469639987
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: History

In this major reexamination of the southern industrial economy and its failure to progress during the antebellum period, Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss show that slavery and its consequences were not alone in inhibiting industrialization. They argue, rather, that the planters hesitated to invest in high-risk enterprises and worried that industrialization would undermine their authority. Underpinning this study is a massive data collection from census reports, which permits an economic analysis that was previously not feasible.

1
THE SOUTHERN INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY: INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

Everyone knows that one of the heaviest burdens of the Confederacy was their lack of sufficient mechanical industries to supply their own needs.... We know that there was a deplorable scarcity of every kind of fabricated article. . . . But we lack any sort of account of such local industries as tanneries, wagon shops, shoe shops and the like.... We can only hope that sometime enough records may turn up to enable the historian to reconstruct their [southern industries’] story in greater part than now seems possible.

—Charles W. Ramsdell

The Journal of Southern History (1936)

Had the southern United States not existed, scholars might have invented it. To some extent they did. Stereotyped and caricatured, the South became not only an object of curiosity, but also a bench mark against which to compare other regions. Much of the uniqueness of southern society hinges upon its economic traditions and ultimately upon the institution of slavery. The historical legacies of slavery and the cotton economy have yet to be fully unravelled. Well into the twentieth century, the region was still viewed as relatively less advanced than the rest of the nation, a status presumedly rooted in the antebellum era. Such judgments appeared obvious, given the South’s dependence on a single-crop agriculture and on a forced-labor system. That economic historians would develop a special interest in antebellum southern development seems virtually inevitable.

Despite its presumed similarity to underdeveloped or backward economies, the antebellum South fared better economically than traditionally believed. The growth of per capita income between 1840 and 1860 approximated that of other regions in the United States (Fogel and Engerman, 1974, p. 246). The level of per capita income, while below the national average when slaves are included in the population, approximated that average and even exceeded that of the North-Central region when only the free population is considered. Southern backwardness has been defined largely by comparison with the prosperous Northeast. But when viewed in a broader context, the South appears materially successful, exhibiting the world’s fourth highest per capita income in 1860 (Fogel and Engerman, 1974, p. 250). Still, there remain the questions of whether the region’s economic record could have been better in antebellum days, and whether it could have endured in the environment of the late nineteenth century.

In the debates over southern evolution, agricultural activities garner most attention. The economy is perceived as a limited-base, agricultural export system that engendered, sustained, and depended upon bonded labor. All else traditionally has been seen as peripheral to this system and largely determined by it: services as they supplied agricultural needs, transportation as it served the shipping requirements of staple exports, and the local food-producing activities as they supported the plantation-export economy.

In the economic histories of the South, manufacturing has occupied the lowliest position of all. In the scant literature on the subject, the most frequently cited characteristic of antebellum southern manufacturing is its alleged backwardness. In the words of industrial historian Victor Clark, the region “chafed continually under the discomfort of an ill balanced economic system” (1909, p. 321). Even recent interpretations, such as that in the study of slavery by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman (1974), tend to sustain this perception.

Typically, the most often cited “cause” of the imbalance has been the nature and prominence of southern agriculture. When compared to the rest of the United States, industrial development in the South seemed laggard, held back by the comparative advantage of staple production, by deliberate actions of powerful planters and their legislative allies, by the slave institution so fundamental to the region’s agricultural production, or by other forces related to the farm sector and the “peculiar institution.” Unfortunately, such a diagnosis results from indirect evidence or inference rather than from any thorough analysis of southern manufacturing sectors. The few aggregative studies of antebellum southern manufacturing that exist are too often founded upon presumption, impressions, and implicit hypothesis from studies of agriculture. Some of the clearest examples of such indirectly derived conclusions are found in the studies of slave profitability, all of which center on agriculture, and most on cotton production only. Yet, authors have not refrained from such comments as:

The southern decision to slight manufacturing was not an absurd eccentricity. It now appears to have been a rational response to profits in plantation agriculture, that were considerably above alternative opportunities. [Fogel, 1966, p. 647]

Had the plantation owners, in the absence of slavery, sought other forms of investment, they would have invested wherever they thought the return was highest. That might not have been Southern manufacturing. More probably it would have been in the expansion of plantation agriculture. [Panel Discussion, 1967, p. 541]

These statements, neither of which rests on any information pertaining to manufacturing, are deduced from comparing agricultural returns with returns on northern bonds. In their more recent work, Fogel and Engerman introduced a manufacturing alternative limited to selected industries in the North, and concluded that the returns to slavery investments were comparable to industrial ones (1974, p. 70).

The accepted wisdom regarding southern industrialization thus evolved more from historiographical inference than from direct examination or analysis of this region’s industrial status before the Civil War, perhaps a predictable approach given the close association between agriculture and industry in many developing economies. Students of the southern economy, lacking a prolific literature on the area’s manufacturing sector, perforce made working assumptions or informed guesses about the character of industry, and developed supporting hypotheses to account for its limited development.¹ Consequently, a doctrine arose regarding the retarded nature of antebellum southern manufacturing, accompanied by hypotheses designed to explain it.

This long-standing view of the mid-nineteenth-century American economy saw the Northeast as the developing industrial area, the West as the food-supplying region, and the South as an agricultural region exporting raw materials for industrial use. There followed a tendency to unite East and West into an “industrial North,” where the economy differed dramatically from the nonindustrialized agrarian South. The North by implication became “modern and progressive,” whereas the South remained “traditional and backward.” This categorization depended upon a variety of social and political characteristics, but a key element was usually the southern states’ backward industrial position. The American Industrial Revolution, well under way in the Northeast and already apparent in the Old Northwest, was bypassing the southern states. Innumerable statements illustrate this persistent view:

Almost everything produced at the North meets with ready sale. While, at the same time, there is no demand, even among our own citizens, for the production of the Southern Industry. [Helper, 1857, p. 21]

The South before the Civil War had relied for manufactured goods almost entirely upon England and the North. [Mitchell, 1931, p. 21]

[the South] provided a market for outside industry. On the other hand, that very market was too small to sustain industry on a scale large enough to compete with outsiders who could draw upon wider markets. . . . Plantation slavery so limited the purchasing power of the South that it could not sustain much industry. [Genovese, 1965, pp. 165, 173]

Manufacturing appears to be the only area in which the antebellum South lagged seriously behind the North in physical capital formation. [Fogel and Engerman, 1974, p. 254]

This sampling demonstrates the durability of this belief, from the fiery rhetoric of a Hinton Helper to the cliometric analysis of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman. One need not build an ideological strawman, or single out a particular school of thought. Proslavery or abolitionist, new economic historian or old, nineteenth-century man or twentieth-, most writers characterize the southern industrial sector, and everything related to it, as backward. These views, inferred from research on the plantation-slave economy, receive some support from census statistics which show that only 11 percent of the national output of manufactured goods was produced in that geographic area containing one-third of the national population (U.S. Census, 1860, p. 730; and 1975, Series A: 123–80).

An Overview of the Southern Industrial Economy

The development of colonial southern manufacturing was influenced by regulations and restrictions of the Crown, and at times by bounties offered by the British government. However, the predominating force was the success of the export staples: tobacco, rice, and naval stores (Hawk, 1934, chap. 4; Lord, 1898, p. 137). The chief result was to discourage manufactures in the South, particularly in comparison with the New England and Middle Atlantic colonies where staple exports were less successful. Although fluctuations in the international market for southern staples spurred interest in manufacturing, no substantial market-oriented sector emerged to complement the household manufacturers and cottage producers in woolen textiles, scattered throughout the region (Lander, 1969, p. 3). There were nevertheless some serious attempts at industrial development. In the early eighteenth century, beginning with the discovery of iron ore in northwestern Virginia and the establishment there of Governor Spotswood’s furnace in 1716, southerners “started operating furnaces on a larger scale than any before in America” (Hawk, 1934, p. 120). Although the industry was concentrated in Virginia, North Carolina producers also exported pig iron, and South Carolina iron works were producing near Spartanburg before the Revolution (Hawk, 1934, p. 121; Lander, 1954, p. 337). Flour milling, common throughout the South as a small-scale enterprise, had become an export industry for some Virginia producers by 1765 (Kuhlmann, 1929, p. 32). English artisans whose backgrounds were similar to Samuel Slater’s, began developing simple cotton mill operations during the 1780s, concurrent with Slater’s in Rhode Island. First among those to establish a manufactory was Hugh Templeton who, in partnership with several planters, established a factory-type textile mill that began production in Statesburg in 1789, before Slater’s mill had opened in the North (Griffen, 1964, p. 34; Lander, 1969, p. 5). The mill, producing both woolen and cotton cloth, operated for several years, but proved less successful than Slater’s and was abandoned. Societies to encourage manufacturing were established in Virginia in 1785 and in Kentucky in 1789. The Kentucky Society for the Promotion of Manufacture built a textile mill at Danville that functioned until the Panic of 1837. Near Nashville, Tennessee, a 200-spindle mill was established in 1791 by another Englishman, John Hague (Griffen, 1964, pp. 35, 36; Hammond, 1961, pp. 47–55).

The first major stimulus to manufacturing during the national period began with the Embargo Act of 1807, and was sustained by the effects of the War of 1812. According to one student of cotton-industry history, Virginia was the first southern state to issue corporate charters for cotton-manufacturing enterprises, granting the initial charter in 1803 to the Petersburg Manufacturing Society and to the Halifax County Manufacturing Society (Griffen, 1960, pp. 36, 37). Victor Clark, citing the “scanty official returns,” claims that by 1810 there were 6 spinning frames in Maryland, 17 in Virginia, 56 in North Carolina, and 91 in Georgia; many were powered by hand or by horses (1909, p. 320). Most of them, like the small iron works then in South Carolina, sold exclusively in local markets. In total, according to Albert Gallatin’s 1810 report, southern textile mills comprised only 5 percent of the national total, but approximately 17 percent (16,800) of all spindles as of 1809 (Griffen, 1964, p. 37). The obstruction of foreign trade during the second war with England stimulated domestic production in the South as in the North, but most war-induced mills disappeared with the end of that conflict.

After the war, northern textile producers, most of whom came from Rhode Island, migrated into the region. Among them were Henry Donaldson and Thomas Hutchins (North Carolina), Samuel Nightengale (Tennessee), and William Bates (the Carolinas) (Griffen, 1960, p. 38). Among their establishments was the South Carolina Cotton Manufactory, opened in 1816, which consisted of a 500-spindle mill, a cotton gin, a sawmill, and gristmill (Lander, 1960a, p. 88).² These industrialists helped to establish the foundations for southern cotton textile manufacturing, which by 1860 was to become the region’s fourth largest industry. From their ranks also arose some of the most ardent advocates for southern industrial development during the antebellum period.

The southern industrialists’ advocacy was reinforced by state legislative actions and newspaper editorial support, and by the commercial conventions that became commonplace after 1820. In 1827 the North Carolina legislature created a special committee to explore possibilities for the state’s textile industry, including an examination of the role of state government in fostering industrial development, and the possibilities for employing slave labor in industry (Griffen, 1964, p. 39). The committee reported favorably on the latter. Similar studies followed in Georgia and Virginia, both of which encouraged the expansion of cotton manufacturing. During the late 1840s another legislative committee was appointed in Georgia to report on the progress of manufacturing; at the same time the legislature endorsed development of the state’s iron industry (Clark, 1909, pp. 316, 317).

Newspaper support was even stronger. The best-known publication, DeBow’s Commercial Review founded in 1846, “had the development of manufacturing, especially cotton manufacturing, for a sort of religion” (Herring, 1931, p. 8). During the 1820s, Hezakiah Niles in his Register and John Skinner in The American Farmer performed a similar role in encouraging industrial expansion (Griffen, 1964, p. 39). Reinforcing these publicists were many textile mill owners themselves, most notably William Gregg, who sought to attract both northerners and southerners to industrial development in the South.

These companies’ concern coincided with a resurgent interest in textile development during the 1820s. Mills that closed after the War of 1812 were reopened, new factories were built, and the migration of northern businessmen resumed. This movement, claims textile-industry historian Richard Griffen, proceeded with scant criticism. In his estimate, the result was a resurgence of the southern textile industry that led to its producing at least 12 percent of the national output by 1833. By 1860 the southern share of the textile industry had grown to between 20 and 25 percent (1963, p. 87; 1964, p. 39).³

The spate of commercial conventions—which began during the late 1830s and early 1840s as an outgrowth of the general movement for industrialization—accelerated in response to the Panic of 1837 (Clark, 1909; Collins, 1946; Wender, 1930). North Carolina spinners held a convention in Raleigh in 1840 to promote the state’s cotton manufacturing industry. This event was followed by others, including the Southwestern Convention in Memphis in 1845, which was addressed by John Calhoun and which resolved that planters should invest in manufacturing industries. Meetings in Tennessee in 1847, in Richmond in 1851, in Memphis two years later, and in Charleston in 1854 were among the more important conventions designed to promote southern industrialization before the Civil War. “The movement to encourage and promote the manufacture of cotton,” says Herbert Collins, “was not far removed from the impulse which led to the general convening habit which descended upon northern cities after 1837 in the form of commercial conventions” (1946, p. 391). This general impulse, Collins asserts, was similarly related to the publication of such journals as the Southern Quarterly Review, and to the movement to employ poor whites in southern manufacturing, as expressed in the creation of the South Carolina Institute and by the hiring policies of William Gregg (1946, p. 393).⁴

Although the literary evidence tends to emphasize the textile industry, it also provides some impression of the extent of other industrial activities.⁵ There were the ubiquitous flour and lumber mills, scattered over the southern countryside as they were across the northe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Southern Industrial Economy: Introduction and Overview
• 2 Why Was Southern Manufacturing “Backward”?: The Major Hypotheses
• 3 Firm, Industry, and Market Size: The Effect on Southern Industrial Development
• 4 Did Factor Supplies Constrain Southern Industrialization?
• 5 Profitability of Antebellum Southern Manufacturing and the Investment Response
• 6 Capital Gains, Information Costs, Risk, and the Behavior of Southern Investors
• 7 Market Structure, Profitability, and Southern Industrialization
• 8 Summary and Conclusions
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index