Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (21 page)

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, classical 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