Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832-1885

By Laurence Shore

Studying the changing strategies used by the nineteenth-century southern leaders to justify their direction of the South's economy and politics, Shore shows how leaders before, during, and after the Civil War attempted to set standards of success in southern society and to clarify the relations between those standards and national prosperity. Shore offers a new perspective on southern leaders' worldview and helps clarify the enduring question of what is new about the "new South."

Originally published in 1986.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781469647845

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Southern Capitalists

The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies

Southern Capitalists

The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832-1885

by Laurence Shore

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 1986 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shore, Laurence.

Southern capitalists.

(The Fred W. Morrison series in southern studies)

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

I. Slavery—Southern States. 2. Southern States— Economic conditions. 3. Capitalists and financiers— Southern States—History—19th century. 4. Southern States—History—1775-1865. 5. Southern States— History—1865-1877. I. Tide. II. Series.

E449.S56 1986 975’ .41 86-1395

ISBN 0-8078-1702-3

To my parents,

Rita F. Shore

Joseph N. Shore

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book, in an earlier life, was a dissertation that culminated my graduate study in American history at The Johns Hopkins University. Several scholars at Johns Hopkins read and criticized portions of the dissertation: Professors Kenneth S. Lynn, J. G. A. Pocock, Jack P. Greene, and Ronald G. Walters. Professors Louis Galambos and Sidney W. Mintz not only read the entire dissertation but served on my doctoral defense committee; throughout my graduate career they were dedicated and exciting teachers. My debt to them is substantial. Professor Willie Lee Rose gave me the opportunity to study at Johns Hopkins, and her example as a scholar continues to shape my approach to research and writing. Mr. Peter K. Kafer, a fellow student, provided and continues to provide especial intellectual and emotional comradeship.

At a crucial stage in my research the American Antiquarian Society awarded me a Fred Harris Daniels fellowship, which carried intellectual and financial aid that I recall with fondness. I would like to thank the staff of the AAS as well as the staffs of the Southern Historical Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Library of Congress (Rare Book Room, Newspaper and Periodical Division, Manuscripts Division), and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library Special Collections and Interlibrary Loan Divisions.

Four of my colleagues at Queen’s University read and criticized, to my great benefit, either portions of or this entire manuscript: Professors Klaus J. Hansen, George A. Rawlyk, Robert W. Malcolmson, and Bryan Palmer. I am also grateful to Professors Joel R. Williamson and Frank W. Ryan of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Professor Michael O’Brien of the University of Arkansas, Professor Merton Dillon of The Ohio State University, and Mr. Joseph Herzenberg for their commentaries on various chapters.

Two readers for the University of North Carolina Press offered superb suggestions for improving the manuscript. I am especially indebted to Professor Paul D. Escott, University of North Carolina at Charlotte (and one of the press readers), for his report. I should also note that the title of this book is Professor Escott’s contribution, and is a vast improvement over what I had earlier submitted.

A grant from the Queen’s University Advisory Research Committee helped fund the typing of the manuscipt, which was superbly performed by Ms. Linda D. Freeman.

I find it difficult to express my deep gratitude to the four persons who have had most to do with the emergence of this book. Professor William W. Freehling, my graduate advisor, has been the major intellectual influence in my life since September 1977. I alone am responsible for this book’s shortcomings, but without Professor Freehling’s guidance the book would not have been possible at all. Whenever I sit down to write, he is the reader over my shoulder whom I most want to reach and satisfy; even if I fail in that effort, he has made me believe that the effort is worth making.

At a time when attending graduate school in the humanities was distinctly unfashionable, my parents unflaggingly supported my decision. They helped with every research trip I took.

Finally, Shalini Gupta contributed to this book in so many ways that I cannot begin to enumerate them. She has been my closest and most constant critic; without the example of her intellectual and moral toughness I surely would have failed to complete Southern Capitalists.

Preface

Southern history as tragedy has had a long run. Whether Tom Watson or Thomas Sutpen is made to exemplify the region’s history, action culminates in failure. Driven by superhuman purpose and endowed with impressive style, the leader and his region nevertheless embody a fatal flaw. As racism devastates their purpose and corrupts their style, they become inexorably isolated. We experience a catharsis of pity and fear as we witness a Promethean decay, decline, and finally death.¹

It is good theater. For certain leaders whose careers actually correspond to a tragic rhythm, it is good history. But when one considers the South’s white leadership during the period that spans secession and Reconstruction, a comic rather than tragic plot design is more appropriate.² Opportunistic Titans, scornful of Promethean suffering and eager to persist as public leaders, rise from defeat to renew operations in a different political and economic setting. Incorporation into the national mainstream is the leaders’ profitable fate. By transforming their ideology, they save their influence.

This comedy is almost completely dark: the slaveholding capitalist, no hero to us, plays the hero’s role. The slaveholder’s fall evokes little sympathy. His reemergence reflects not a moral reordering of Southern society but a harmonizing of capitalistic rhetoric between North and South.³

The final irony, however, is at the hero’s expense. In achieving a postbel-lum victory, the hero loses an old identity that twentieth-century Southern intellectuals have endowed with new nobility. The very word that was anathema to nineteenth-century leaders—agrarian—becomes exalted in the lexicon of Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, and other contributors to I’ll Take My Stand, a 1930 cry against industrial civilization. The economic orientation that Southern leaders adopted in the postbellum era becomes condemned as soulless accommodation to that civilization. Most important, I’ll Take My Stand writers recover an emphasis on the value of leisure that postbellum leaders abjured. Thus, the tables are turned on master table-turners.⁴

This irony stands mostly outside the present study’s scope; the story is complex enough without it. Our hero, a group of politicians and ideologists, relies heavily upon rhetoric to develop protective coloration while its society’s institutional bulwark—slavery—disintegrates. Shedding old and inconsistent guises, members of the Southern ruling elite direct a shift in regional perspective. Values formerly defining Southern distinctiveness are deemphasized. Such reorientation is, these leaders believe, necessary to their survival; to justify their continued right to rule, they must fully adopt the nation’s public grammar. Antebellum leaders attempt to show that they still direct the path to success for white men in a changed, postbellum social context.

The crucial point is how little these changed leaders had to change. If they had truly been reactionary precapitalists, antebellum leaders would have found it extraordinarily difficult to transform themselves in such a brief period of time. But the antebellum ruling elite was not precapitalist; its anti-free-labor rhetoric fitted uncomfortably with capitalistic attitudes and practices. Because they were not so different from their Northern counterparts, members of the antebellum elite could, in postbellum America, adopt Northern rhetoric and values. As one Southern editor commented in 1880, no one should be surprised that the leaders who had justified slavery could accept emancipation and even aspire to direct it.⁵

Some values, however, could not be sacrificed. Racism, the fundamental continuity in Southern and American history, never lessened. Southern leaders could change their own and attempt to induce changes in other white Southerners’ attitudes on many subjects, but on one subject—separate spheres of life and labor for black and white races—no opportunity existed. White supremacy is indeed a central theme of Southern history. But modification of this designation to read upper class white supremacy permits a more accurate interpretation of the nineteenth-century South.⁶

Words and actions of the South’s white supremacist, upper-class leadership constitute the focus of this study. Information and interpretations advanced by other historians will be included only occasionally in the main text. Although historians’ debates can be dramatically important, they are not part of this drama. My goal is not to disprove a thesis or to displace a book. I offer what I have seen with my own crooked eye: a ruling elite striving to shape and reshape white Southerners’ attitudes toward political economy. At the vortex of this transvaluation of values⁷ stood an issue as old as Adam: people’s attitudes toward labor.

Southern Capitalists

Introduction. The Importance of Rulers’ Rulling Ideology

Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy, held political office in each of six consecutive decades. His influence as Southern leader and spokesman matched his longevity. During the first term of his first office (1836), that of Georgia state legislator, Stephens wrote that words can be immensely powerful moral instruments. Orators in Georgia, he observed, should spend less time seeking quotations in Byron and Shakespeare and more time selecting and fitting the matter to the time, place, and circumstances…. Success in producing conviction is the object of oratory.¹

Before the Civil War, Southern leaders like Stephens incessantly sought to produce conviction in Southern minds, white and black, on a subject of overriding importance: perpetuation of Afro-American slavery. Southern leaders had to justify their right to rule and their labor system’s right to exist. Coercion, the weapon of tyrants, held a despised place in the republican hierarchy of principles. Although slaveholders ultimately relied on the lash to persuade black minds, republican principles usually demanded rhetoric to persuade white minds. If a majority of white Southerners doubted their peculiar institution’s validity, they could act within the republican, majority system to crush it. No matter how often lynch-mob justice occurred against whites, slavery’s defenders recognized that only proslavery persuasion could defeat antislavery moral instruments.²

By the turn of the nineteenth century, both Northerners and Southerners had firmly established two areas of antislavery assault. St. George Tucker, a prominent Virginian of the revolutionary era, identified them in his Disserta-tion on Slavery (1796): Christian salvation and republican character. Tucker’s antislavery appeal clustered around two questions: was slavery consistent with scriptural law, and was it consistent with democratic principles? He quoted Montesquieu approvingly: Slavery not only violates the Laws of Nature, and of civil Society, it also wounds the best Forms of Government: in a Democracy, where all men are equal, Slavery is contrary to the Spirit of the Constitution. For Tucker as for most antislavery advocates, especially those in the South, the central concern was religious and political salvation for whites. Emancipation, while it rescued blacks, had more important functions: saving white souls, white liberties, and even white lives.³

Slavery’s defenders responded vigorously. Scriptural justifications of slavery abounded, they protested, and classical republicanism accorded slavery an eminent position. In their attempt to legitimate what was increasingly seen as unconscionable and unvirtuous behavior, proslavery Southerners had to demonstrate that the Word of God and word of government could be harnessed together in slavery’s defense. Citizens of Halifax County, Virginia, for example, used Leviticus and property rights as twin pillars in a 1785 petition that decried a movement in Virginia towards general emancipation.⁴

God and republicanism, then, stirred late eighteenth-century debate. Although Thomas Jefferson’s carefully designed antislavery declarations represented sentiments of many influential Southerners of the revolutionary era, other shapers of the Southern public mind—South Carolinians, in particular—had no use for Jefferson’s tortuous indulgences. Confronting the specter of emancipation, they developed proslavery orientations that guided their society’s purpose and renounced unobtainable abolition. Jefferson and some upper South leaders may have been able to live and work while questioning their society’s reasonableness, but less extraordinary individuals could not sustain such dissonance. In eighteenth-century America, reasonableness was embedded in Scripture and republicanism. Southerners needed to feel that their social institutions qualified on both ideological counts.⁵

Early proslavery ideologists worked to frame religious and political orientations that justified Africans’ bondage until different circumstances might make emancipation possible. Such defenses became more urgent and more elaborate as slavery died in the North and antislavery challenges grew more powerful. By the 1830s, however, a new mode of argument fully emerged and became as central to public debate on slavery as Protestantism and republicanism. This mode—political economy—had occasionally surfaced in previous decades, when the issue of public prosperity joined Christian and republican virtue as grounds for being pro-or antislavery. But slavery arguments based on political economy remained inchoate until the Jacksonian era for two fundamental reasons.⁶

First, through the early national period, North and South’s divergent economic paths seemed to lead to more or less equal prosperity. An enterprising North did not yet provide a counterimage to the sleepy South. Charleston, South Carolina, was still a major North American city—not yet a stagnant shipping point. Virginia led the new nation in population and commercial agriculture. Historian James A. Henretta notes that only after 1815, with expansion of Southern cotton production, northeastern industrialization, and western freeholding settlement, were differences magnified between slave and free economic systems.⁷ To be sure, as early as 1774 some Southerners denounced slavery’s blighting economic effects. Citizens of Prince George County, Virginia, resolved that the African trade is injurious to this Colony, obstructs the population of it by freemen, prevents manufacturers and other useful emigrants from Europe from settling amongst us, and occasions an annual increase of the balance of trade against this Colony. Most other Southerners, however, either expressed contrary sentiments or saw no challenge to slavery’s supposetly beneficial economic influences. Slavery, to their minds, was necessary to settlement and to staple crop production. Need for labor that could be made to work long hours in certain areas and produce certain crops constituted one basis of a necessary evil proslavery argument.⁸

A classic expression of this argument was a petition presented to Congress by Louisiana citizens in 1804. Reinforcing the necessity of employing African laborers in warm latitudes, the petition affirmed, was the combined effect in Louisiana of a deleterious moisture, and a degree of heat intolerable to whites…. If, therefore, this traffic is justifiable anywhere, it is surely in this province.⁹ Louisiana petitioners unquestioningly assumed that slavery aided the country’s improvement. They felt no need to respond to economic criticism of the Prince George type. The Louisianians did not argue as if their audience were skeptical about slavery’s economic validity. Their petition represents an economic justification of slave labor only in the sense that the link between slavery and regional prosperity is offered as an obvious appeal, not a point requiring demonstration. Slaveholding areas, Prince George notwithstanding, did not appear to be economic laggards. The concern of such eminent colonial leaders as William Byrd II, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson that slavery’s presence, by associating labor with servitude, fostered an indolent free population did not accord with the compelling image of social reality. The South’s slaveholders and would-be slaveholders saw no significant challenge to slave labor’s productive power.¹⁰

A second reason is perhaps more important than slavery’s apparent prosperity in explaining the slow emergence of an economic justification: not until Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) became established as orthodoxy in Western thought did public discourse concerning slavery and political economy develop intensively and extensively. Although Smith did not advance original ideas in Wealth of Nations, his book built the ideological foundation of political economy. In Robert Heilbroner’s felicitous phrase, Smith’s vision became the prescription for the spectacles of generations.¹¹ Ideology may be defined as a system of beliefs that enables the public mind to identify acceptable and unacceptable actions. Wealth of Nations offered such an ideology for society’s management of productive relations and the progress of manners, commerce, and diversification of labor. After that ideology had become public grammar, Southerners who sought slavery’s perpetuation faced a new intellectual constraint.¹²

Classical economists condemned slavery because it violated a fundamental precondition of wealth: A person who can acquire no property can have no interest but to eat as much and to labor as little as possible. Venerable assumptions about the productivity of free labor, now organized in Wealth of Nations, posed a new challenge to Southern society’s reasonableness. A proslavery orientation had to be fashioned within the new definition of political economy.¹³

Twelve years before Wealth of Nations appeared, Adam Smith was already wrenching Southern language on the slavery issue in new directions. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) provoked Arthur Lee of Virginia into a style of argument (in 1764) that would not become fashionable until decades later. In the process of refuting Smith’s aspersion on North America’s slavehold-ing colonies, Lee revealed how Smith’s viewpoints would become a focus for Southern rhetoric. Writing of savage nations’ contempt for death and torture, Smith had expostulated that every Negro from the African coast possessed a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Cruel fortune had subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the gaols of Europe. Lee could not accept this aspect of Smith’s mentality. Africans, Lee claimed, were liars, cowards, and murderers, and Virginia’s noble foundation was incontestable. Even if Virginia’s founders had acted with hope of personal gain, Lee argued, such motivation did not malign their character: he who best promotes the interest of the public with his own, is most laudable.¹⁴

Personal gain promoting the public interest—Arthur Lee in a voice that the author of Wealth of Nations could have appreciated. Lee continued in this Smithian vein by noting that Negro slaves in North America increased rather than diminished as in the West Indies. Not only were slaves well treated, but Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia prospered and flourished. Thus Adam Smith’s outrageous trespass against truth stood naked and shivering.¹⁵

Lee next pounced on an issue of utmost importance to the colonies— whether slavery should be encouraged or abolished. Lee’s answer, surprisingly, was eventual abolition. Some familiar reasons were proposed. Perpetual slavery violated justice and humanity, and danger of slave insurrection hovered over Southern colonies. But one reason was not familiar. Slavery, said Lee, was an enemy to virtue and science. Slaves’ minds were never cultivated. The same reason, he noted, will always render [slavery] unfavorable to trade and manufactures, which have ever flourished in free states. Without improvements in arts and sciences it was morally impossible that a nation be happy or powerful. He concluded that colonists should immediately abolish the slave trade, and since freeborn Britons could stand arduous toil, import Englishmen and Europeans. Slavery would die as free labor became overwhelmingly established.¹⁶

Thus, while Lee, in effect, denied Smith’s contention that blacks could not be as vigorous economic strivers as whites, he affirmed the viewpoint that would become central to Wealth of Nations: slave labor was incompatible with the most advanced economic development. Lee’s solution to this ideological quandary put the black presence in the South on the road to extinction. Only eventual abolition as a solution enabled him to be true to the emerging Smithian economic ethic and still be true to the South’s racist ethic.

Apparently, at this early date no proslavery writer cared to respond to Lee, just as Louisiana petitioners had felt no need to refute economic criticisms of slave labor. The quandary Lee found himself in had not yet engulfed Southern leadership. Lee, Byrd, Jefferson, Franklin, and others fired isolated economic shots at slavery; a concerted volley required systematic organization of terms. Political economy’s ideological sweep had not yet conquered America or England.¹⁷

Lee’s reference to slaveholding colonies’ prosperity underlined the point that material defects of a slave labor system lacked concrete demonstration. Lee described only future material damage to colonies. The slave trade alone, he argued, should be immediately abolished. Lee’s fear was that ignorant slaves and depraved freemen would drown thriving economies at some later date.¹⁸

To this fear, Adam Smith would have nodded sympathetically. Violence alone, he wrote in Wealth of Nations, squeezes out whatever work the slave does beyond whatever is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance. Moreover, a free laborer’s wear and tear generally cost a master less than that of a slave. Appealing to experience of all ages and nations, Adam Smith ventured that in the long run, freemen’s work comes cheaper than slaves’, even in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where the wages of common labor are so very high. Despite their disadvantages, high wages, the effect of increasing wealth, also encouraged industry, and caused population increase. Thus he who complained over such wages in essence lamented the necessary effect and cause of the greatest public prosperity.¹⁹

For classical economists, the public was the entire population. Smith and his colleagues bestowed their science of morals upon statesmen and legislators. Obedience to that science’s principles would benefit every class. Slavery’s abolition would not only award slaves the fruit of their labor, but would impel the process of machinery improvements, thereby enabling masters to use less labor for the same quantity of work. Society’s productive power would increase. Revenue of the whole people would rise.²⁰

Smith and others acknowledged that the nature of some work can afford the expense of slave labor. Smith pointed to the example of sugar and tobacco planting in English colonies (Both can afford … but sugar can afford it still better…. The raising of com … cannot.). Had he lived ten years longer and written an addendum to Wealth of Nations, he would have included cotton planting. Plantation profits, Smith observed, generally exceeded greatly those of any other cultivation in Europe and America. But Smith also noted that great proprietors were seldom great improvers, least of all when slaves were their workmen.²¹

Herein lay a vital point of danger to the South: the slaveholder could not be an ideal economic man. He would keep himself and his society wedded to a condition of economic and social backwardness. This point, together with Smith’s insistence that blacks, as free men, could help foster the greatest public prosperity, gave antislavery economic persuasion tremendous striking capability in the South. With political economy’s establishment as public grammar, proslavery leaders suffered the anxiety of persuading slaveholders and nonslaveholders that Southern slavery assured the greatest public prosperity.

Appropriately, America’s most noted grammarian, Noah Webster, was among the first to incorporate the language of classical economists into the slavery dialogue. Webster’s purpose in a 1793 speech was to show slavery’s pernicious effects on the moral character, industry, and prosperity of nations. Slavery’s proponents, he stated, make a distinction between abstract points and private interest or policy. He would meet them on their own ground. He would convince Southerners that relinquishment of the slave trade will not be materially prejudicial to their interest. That is, he would challenge what Southerners had always taken for granted, thereby inaugurating a cascade of doubt that would eventually provoke slavery’s abolition and colonization of blacks or their reestablishment as free tenants in America.²²

Drawing primarily from Adam Smith, Webster advanced the following thesis: Slavery discourages agriculture and manufactures, not only by taking from the laborer every motive that God and society give him to prompt him to exertion, but by inspiring the great proprietors of lands with a contempt of all manual labor, and rendering disreputable the very occupations from which they derive subsistence and wealth.²³ Black indolence and white contempt of labor were conclusions that Arthur Lee and Thomas Jefferson had previously touched upon. Noah Webster went one step further: such attitudes led to unproductive use of capital and contempt for business. National industry, he claimed, was the ultimate victim. The happiest nation enjoyed, with industry, a full supply of comforts and conveniences of life. Slavery was hostile to accumulation. Culling figures from Alexander Hamilton’s Reports, Webster compared real value of exports per capita between North and South and concluded that slave states fell behind, just as they would inevitably fall behind in white population.²⁴

As the nineteenth century unfolded, the North’s free population, as Webster had predicted, grew faster than the South’s. In the 1820s, Northern economic development began to substantiate a picture of the South’s economic colonialism. No matter how much individual slaveholders profited, the disparity in sectional prosperity became more obvious. The North began to monopolize foreign and domestic shipping services and its long-standing advantages in numbers of urban trade centers, skilled artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants became strikingly evident. Transportation improvements and manufacturing development advanced more rapidly in the free North. The Erie Canal helped make Rochester, New York, the great inland American city of the 1820s; no hint of a Southern counterpart existed. An image of the South as Prince George County of 1774 writ large began to take form.²⁵

As an Illinois writer put it in 1824, the history of all ages and the experience of our own country attested to slavery’s injurious effects upon a state’s general prosperity. The prosperity of the individual, he noted, does not necessarily increase that of the state. A comparison of flourishing, free Pennsylvania and languishing, slave Maryland buttressed his point. Such comparisons began to disturb Southerners. By the late 1820s, leaders in Charleston, South Carolina, recognized that their city’s economic standing among American cities had drastically declined. In the 1832 Virginia legislature a primary focus of debate was slavery’s economic evils. That the individual slaveholder had the same desire for profits and comforts as any other person with capital to invest was not questioned. But his violation of key principles of profit making supposedly ruined society around him. Eventually he would preside over his own ruin. Charles J. Faulkner contended that eastern Virginia provided a frightening image of lassitude and economic decay to nonslaveholding western Virginia. He implored, "Shall society suffer, that the slaveholder may continue to gather his crop of human flesh?"²⁶

The labor of answering the Charles Faulkners and Noah Websters engrossed the antebellum South. As sectional crisis developed, few Southerners rejected America’s intellectual heritage, and of those who rejected it, fewer still commanded any influence. By the Jacksonian era, the social reality of a relatively stagnant slave economy and the public grammar of the virtue of free labor combined explosively, and during the next three decades Southern leaders continually scrambled to prove the justice of slavery’s cause before the tribunal of political economy, as one South Carolina writer termed it. If productive power and interests did not unseat God and republicanism, they occupied, especially in the 1850s, a good part of the bench.²⁷

Proslavery ideologists cited special circumstances—climate, crops, and black laborers without the capacity to become or remain industrious when free—to justify the regional labor system’s divergence from the national pattern. This divergence did not, they stressed, constitute violation of classical political economy’s major tenets. In the South, slaves were the most desirable property for a remunerative income. Investments in land and slaves, given the South’s special circumstances, reflected the reign of self-interest. Like the Northern capitalist, the slaveholding capitalist sought and realized accumulation of wealth. And by following his personal interest, the slaveholding capitalist brought Southern communities the most comforts for the largest number.²⁸

Moreover, the slaveholding capitalist enjoyed the role of directing labor; his work involved mental culture and creation of refined society. In developing their own theory of the leisure class, proslavery leaders were again guided by political economy’s precepts. Adam Smith’s ideal capitalist, it must be recalled, was not a monomaniacal money-maker. Instead, he was an intelligent individual who survived in the competitive struggle and strove, every step of the way, to use prosperity to minimize his labors. Common people, who spent their whole lives performing a few simple operations with their hands, had no opportunity or capacity to consider improvement of self and society. Because the successful capitalist enjoyed leisure to acquire improved and refined understanding, he had the capacity—and responsibility—to spread the polish of refinement over his society’s surface of rudeness.²⁹

Thus, when proslavery leaders emphasized planters’ leisure and refinement, they extolled qualities central to classical political economy. They depicted Northern farmers as beasts of burden who, however commendable their industry and frugality, devoted themselves to the drudgery of physical toil. The peculiar institution, as Southerners called slavery, enabled planters to enjoy leisure that only Northern manufacturing/mercantile capitalists enjoyed. Ultimately, the peculiar institution supposedly received political economy’s legitimation because of the peculiar advantages it afforded capitalists in rural society. Northern farmers might derive greater short-term pecuniary benefits from intensive cultivation of family farms, and from investment in manufacturing centers of nearby towns, but slaveholding capitalists provided their families with escape from drudgery and themselves and their region with sustained, long-term profits and refinement. The slaveholding capitalist therefore deserved the title of great improver.³⁰

The jury of white Southerners would give the verdict on the proslavery solution to the South’s Adam Smith problem. Nonslaveholders, not great proprietors of lands and slaves, constituted the jury’s majority. These farmers and laborers, for whom escape from drudgery was to be a reward for current drudgery, needed to see the reward within reach if they were to come to a proslavery decision. As slave prices rose precipitously in the 1850s, the opportunity for ascendance to slaveowner status became more and more remote for the South’s white majority, and economic distance between the two groups in the jury box widened. That distance, combined with the increasing strength of the Republican party and its free-labor appeal, further complicated an already strained proslavery economic orientation.³¹

This book’s opening chapters attempt to show how and why a proslavery orientation took shape amidst tremendous strain. The first chapter describes the way politicians, journalists, and other ideologists sought to make slaveholding capitalist the character type basic to the Southern cultural order. The second chapter focuses on two crucial political episodes—the movement to reopen the African slave trade, and the publication of Hinton Rowan Helper’s The Impending Crisis (1857)—that occurred while the Southern economy’s performance and a rising Republican party threatened to crack Southern leaders’ economic orientation. Chapter three covers the war years, when efforts to keep fault lines from widening collapsed.

Defeat and emancipation shattered the antebellum orientation—but not antebellum rulers. They could not put Humpty Dumpty together again, but they made a new Humpty. The most influential political leaders and shapers of public opinion in the postbellum period had held similar positions in the antebellum South. The second part of this book, chapters four through seven, shows that although new men did not make the new South, neither did old men maintain the old ideology. New conditions, old leaders perceived, required a new system of meanings, a new orientation. Ownership of a large plantation with dozens of black hands was no longer a possibility. The black hands were now detached. Thus, Southern leaders needed to persuade white minds that white hands working the land would no longer be a temporary evil only to be endured until black hands could be purchased, but would become a permanent good. Postbellum Southern leaders felt an unqualified need to build a white work force.

As Southern Republicans observed, Democrats stole their economic program. To keep the white South unified and under the direction of old leaders, Democrats had to show that they could adapt to new conditions. By instilling attitudes that would enlist all white Southerners, they would make the South great again—this time regardless of and not because of slavery. The new and better South would imitate the Northern model, and even surpass the North; large estates would yield to small proprietorships, and manufacturing would develop, making the South a denser, more competitive society, wherein only the energetic and thrifty would achieve success. Personal devotion to labor would replace mere superintendency of labor performed by others. Northern capitalist, in short, would replace slaveholding capitalist. The psychology of production would prevail over the psychology of consumption.³²

Throughout the South this new form of persuasion did prevail. Southern leaders had a choice: they could build a wall against the new by reaffirming the old, or they could perform a loosening and incorporate the new. A significant number chose to incorporate, and to a remarkable degree, used rhetoric that sounded the same in North Carolina or South Carolina as in Georgia or Mississippi. As H. C. Nixon later observed in I’ll Take My Stand, the Civil War brought to the South an appreciation of the common man and the dignity of labor with an accompanying loss in the appreciation of the uses of leisure.³³

The dignity of labor, Nixon failed to appreciate, did not necessarily elevate the common man. Nor did he mention that black labor had paid for that much lamented antebellum leisure. The historian Marcus Cunliffe reminds us that Northern employers, not employees, were anxious to emphasize the dignity of labor—what better way to build a pliant work force?³⁴ But if the change from accents and attitudes undergirding slaveholding capitalist to those associated with Northern capitalist created limited benefits for the white common man and only one kind of freedom for the black ex-slave, it did involve a significant transformation in Southern and American political discourse.³⁵ In 1885 Carl Schurz could announce that a distinctive Southern policy no longer existed. Economic interests of South and North were becoming more and more alike. He noted that silver’s friends in Texas were no different than its friends in Colorado; fiat-money men in Mississippi borrowed arguments from fiat-money men in Ohio. The South Carolina free trader or the protectionist in North Alabama were substantially of the same mind as the Minnesota free trader or the protectionist in Pennsylvania. Without slavery’s cohesive power, nothing bound Southern divergences on economic questions.³⁶

Schurz’s analysis touched on a crucial change in Southern identity. Before the war, to be Southern and white was to have expectations of a future that no other American could hope for—residence as a republican capitalist in a slaveholder’s Garden of Eden. After the war, Southern identity had nothing to do with a unique American future; rather, it entailed memory of a lost identity that could not be regained. But some Southerners conveniently forgot—and some historians continue to forget—how much of the new ideology had been present in the old. The New South’s Horatio Alger myth of praiseworthy work leading to exalted rise was already there in the Old South, albeit twisted and tangled in an antiwork mentality. The vision of a modem industrial economy was central to many proslavery spokesmen, even if that vision was not always accepted in the antebellum South. A subtle shift in tone and emphasis brought the new ideology out of the old.³⁷

There is something appealing in the idea of glaring discontinuity, in the clash of mighty opposites, just as there is something appealing in the idea that a culture can defeat time.³⁸ There is also something profoundly unhistorical in