In this five-part review of Civil War Era literature at the Virginia History Blog, we will take a look at period topics in politics, war commands, home front, economy, slavery and memory. Turning to the economy, we begin with titles related to plantations and slavery, the emerging market economy, and the industrialization in Virginia that made it the foundry of the Confederacy.
“Slavery and American Economic Development” views slavery economy as a political choice, “Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation” relates three generations of plantation management.
“Becoming Bourgeois” studies Southern rural shopkeepers, “Artisan Workers” investigates white and black tradesmen in Petersburg, and “Race Relations at the Margins” describes the interactions of poor whites and blacks.
“Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth” treats the interplay of coal interests, state economy and politics, “Irons in the Fire”examines three generations of plantation, iron, and commercial development in a family business, “Nations, Markets and War” seeks too classify the American Civil War as the first war between “modern” nations.
Current releases reviewed in Spring 2018 journals can be found at Civil War Era – Spring 2018.
Recent blogs include Civil War Era politics, Civil War commanders and commands, and Civil War home front.
Slavery and Economic Development
Gavin Wright wrote Slavery and American Economic Development in 2006. Available from the LSU Press and online new and used.
This study of the South’s slave economy emphasizes that slavery, at its very core gave one person legal ownership over another’s labor. Adopting the regime was not merely derivative of climate or crops, but rather a political decision generally opposed in both north and south by farmers, artisans and other small producers. As surfaced during the debates over slavery in Indiana and Illinois, land speculators feared that slavery would undermine long-term land values.
Slave owners could move into new regions and quickly amass wealth by deploying slaves as a highly mobile, financially liquid asset without addressing issues of efficiency or productivity. But personal financial growth was not regional economic development. There was no incentive among slave owners to build commercial infrastructure or to attract self-sufficient entrepreneurial migrants with towns or schools. Virginian economic development suffered at the hands of the slave-holder minority in political ascendance.
To buy “Slavery and American Economic Development” on Amazon, click here.
An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation
Lynn A. Nelson wrote Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880 in 2007. Available from the University of Georgia Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
This book describes Pharsalia, a Piedmont plantation of the Massie family. It seeks to integrate agro-ecology, family dynamics, developing markets and political ideology. Jeffersonian Republican ideology promoted agrarian independence by mastering land and labor. The Massie family beginning with Thomas Massie (1796-1815) took steps to replenish exhausted soils and to maximize the efficiencies of their slave labor while turning a rundown tobacco estate into a profitable wheat plantation. This approach was continued by his son William (1815-1862).
By the 1840s, this strategy could not sustain plantation profitability, leading Massie to begin making capital investments financed by debt. These included improved seed, imported blooded livestock, and adopting farm machinery to raise crop yields. Maria Massie, William Massie’s widow, adapted to free labor and continued in new farming innovations in Reconstruction by adding new market crops. But successful farming could not maintain the Massie’s class position in the industrializing Gilded Age. Maria’s descendants repurchased the family place in the 1950s from their industrial profits and remade a their family farming concern in apple production, prize cattle, garden plants and a craft outlet store in nearby Lynchburg.
To buy “Pharsalia” on Amazon, click here.
Becoming Bourgeois
Frank J. Byrne wrote Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865 in 2006. Available from the University of Press of Kentucky, on Kindle and online new and used.
In this cultural analysis of merchants who were rural shopkeepers before, during and after the Civil War, Byrne finds a continuity in attitudes and business practices. Still their social standing and relationship with other social classes changed over time, especially during the dislocations of the Civil War. Unlike artisans, manufacturers or professionals, merchants were more dependent on connecting with their customers. Merchants were more tied to southern culture of evangelism, kinship and racism, leading them as a class to support and defend the slave South at the Civil War.
At the same time they were more likely to have been attracted to the Whig party and programs of government-sponsored economic progress. Ties to national creditors and wholesalers led to bourgeois values promoting education and a strong work ethic. Following the collapse of the Confederacy, though many were driven out of business, surviving merchants were in a crucial position to direct the rebuilding of the southern economy amid once ascendant and then impoverished planters.
To buy “Becoming Bourgeois” on Amazon, click here.
Artisan Workers in the Upper South (Petersburg)
Diane Barnes wrote Artisan Workers in the Upper South: Petersburg, Virginia, 1820-1865 in 2008. Available from the LSU Press, on Kindle and online new and used. It is a TVH top 300 reference pick for survey Virginia history.
Diane Barnes looks at four classes of artisans in Antebellum Petersburg, including the largest free black community as a percentage of its population in Virginia, which as a state had the largest free black population in the South. Other artisan classes were skilled slaves for hire, white wage earners, and master mechanics who were both slave holding and hirers of white and black free labor. Each class has their own dedicated chapter.
In Petersburg, a center of industry and transportation second only to Richmond, there was railroad and construction work along with employment in tobacco, iron, cotton and milling manufacturing. The whites living in a slave society were not as concerned with exploitation by bosses as were their Northern counterparts; they were more persistently antagonistic towards black labor competition, both slave and free.
To buy “Artisan Workers” on Amazon, click here.
Race Relations at the Margins
Jeff Forret wrote Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum South in 2006. Available from the LSU Press and online new and used.
In this examination of interactions between slaves and poor whites in Virginia and the Carolinas, Forrett describes both occasions of racial animosity and also “inverted normal social order”. Among whites he includes laborers and tenants, but also marginal small farmers and grog shop owners. His settings include both agricultural, urban and port city venues. Mutual “resentment and contempt” could coexist with “friendship and camaraderie”. Poor whites might serve on slave patrols, but others helped slaves escape bondage.
Common venues included work places, shucking bees, churches, grog shops and gambling dens. The two groups also maintained an underground economy exchanging clothing and agricultural products. The final chapter narrates a number of cases in which both male and female poor whites entered into sexual relationships with slaves. Poor whites felt little loyalty to either Confederacy or Union, but at reconstruction poor whites and freed slaves competed for scarce resources, and in an increasingly segregated and violent New South, the whites made economic gains at the expense of blacks.
To buy “Race Relations at the Margins” on Amazon, click here.
Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth
Sean Patrick Adams wrote Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics and Economy in Antebellum America in 2004. Available from the Johns Hopkins University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. It is a TVH top 300 reference pick for survey Virginia history.
Sean Patrick Adams in 300 pages shows that state legislature politics built institutional structures for the coal industry in both Virginia and Pennsylvania. In Virginia the landed elites fostered policy that proved incapable of balancing disparate geographic and industrial interests. With limited canals improvements, restricted incorporation laws and prohibitive restraint on capital formation, Virginia fell behind Pennsylvania in coal production between 1820 and the end of the 1830s.
The Pennsylvanians started behind the Virginians in the 1790s, their anthracite coal was harder to mine and more difficult to ignite for commercial and domestic use than Virginia’s bituminous coal. But the Pennsylvania canal system connected its fields to eastern markets, and the addition of British coal miners brought skills and innovation that increased productivity not seen among Virginia’s enterprises of slave labor. The Virginian political strategy which served only its eastern tobacco interests led inevitably to an eclipse of Virginia’s leadership in coal production.
To buy “Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth” on Amazon, click here.
Irons in the Fire
Laura Croghan Kamoie wrote Irons in the Fire: The Business History of the Tyloe Family and Virginia’s Gentry, 1700-1860 in 2007. Available from the University of Virginia Press and online new and used.
John Tayloe I (1687-1747) established a tobacco plantation and diversified into pig iron in a partnership with the Bristol Ironworks, then he established his own ironworks on Neabsco Creek In Prince William County. John Tayloe II (1721-1779) added another iron furnace of his own for Chesapeake and export markets. He also switched from tobacco production to wheat. He developed an industrial park of slave-based blacksmiths, saw mills and grist mills, expanded into shipbuilding and commercial fishing.
John Tayloe III (1771-1828) invested money into real estate development in
Washington, DC, and shifted ore procurement to family owned mines in Appalachian Botetourt County. He continued family enterprises in land speculation and rentals, running stores, hotel taverns, maritime operations and mail and carriage routes. Kamoie argues that a distinctively southern economic culture in the United States emerged only after the 1820s New Nation period.
To buy “Irons in the Fire” on Amazon, click here.
Nations, Markets and War
Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf wrote Nations, Markets and War: Modern History and the American Civil War in 2006. Available from the University of Virginia Press and online new and used.
This book places the American Civil War as an example of building a modern nation, and the war itself as the first conflict between “modern” nations of opposing political economies, the Union and the Confederacy. In the first part, the concept of “modernity” is explored, concluding that nineteenth century liberalism saw the principles of self-determination and self-reliance applying to nations as well as to individuals.
In part two, the Onufs define how the two different nations of northerners and southerners defined themselves by their differences regarding both slavery and the market. Northerners sought centralizing, collective protectionism for the benefit of American manufacturers, southerners sought decentralizing, individualist free trade for the benefit of sectional plantation-based economy.
To buy “Nations, Markets and War” on Amazon, click here.
Additional history related to Virginia during this time period can be found at the Table of Contents of TheVirginiaHistorian website on the page for Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction, 1820-1883. Titles are organized by topics, political and economic Virginia, social history, gender, religious, African American, and Wars in Virginia 1750-1824.
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.