Policy Cut Chap 8
Much of this contrasts with Puritan New England and Quaker Pennsylvania. To me an obvious and important distinction was Carolina/Tidewater macro-plantation agriculture in stark contrast to individual land-holdings common in the North. Meaningful local centers, towns, developed in the North and created a much stronger tradition of local government, although the involvement of the state government in local affairs was different in Pennsylvania than Massachusetts. The disposition to urbanize, I suggest, resulted not just because of the plantation economy, but also by the political culture of the migrant groups predisposed migrants into hinterlands and individualistic traditional agricultural life.
In 1789 both North and South were overwhelming agricultural, but hints of pre-industrial innovation came quickly for both: the 1793 first factory in the North, and the 1794 cotton gin in Georgia. Therein lies a obvious distinction in innovation’s path: manufacturing (North) and agriculture (South). Interestingly, both indigo and the cotton gin were plantation-innovations, and were more “tinkering/experimentation” than capital-laden innovations.
The factory was a construct of a British immigrant-entrepreneur which did not “take off” until a generation later when Brahmin elites invested capital into a new enterprise of serious scale and infrastructure. Capital in the South was heavily invested in slave holdings, which paid/collateral for new lands, and the acquisition of more slaves to produce more crops. The investment of capital in humans/workforce in the North was marginal, and hence capital was available for investment in new “ventures”.
The relationship of discretionary investment capital to slavery required for profitable plantation agricultural economics is particularly pivotal to the future path of industrialization in the two regions. The role culture, especially elite cultures, played in that relationship is also pivotal. The economic base (and its business model), political culture and political/policy processes of the two regions were not only starling, contrasting by 1800, but over the course of the next half-century became perceived by both as not merely competitive, but zero-sum. That regional competitive hierarchy was not “settled” until the 1865 with the surrender at Appomattox.
As we shall see, westward expansion movement was shared by both regions. The Yankee-Midlands Diaspora was matched by the Carolina “cotton boom”, the Virginia Ohio-Illinois Tidewater–and the relentless drive of the Scots-Irish into the central interior of east-of-the-Mississippi America is quite remarkable. It will be impossible to understand the Early Republic period without appreciating disruption engendered by large-scale population migration–fueled after 1840 by increasingly sizable new immigrants. The values, hopes, and the embedded legacies of each of these population migrations impacted heavily on the economic base and governance/policy outputs in the new areas in which they settled–setting the stage for the great Civil War.
Seldom thought of as an innovation equivalent to that found in the industrial North, the cotton gin was every bit a platform innovation as the steam engine. The cotton gin made large-scale cotton production possible. Growing cotton rather than tobacco, sugar or indigo, led to the development of the multi-state Cotton Belt, whose economic base, dependent on plantation-slave labor-cotton-export economy.
Over several generations these immigrants gravitated, then flooded to embrace their dream by means of a new agricultural “gazelle” “created by a new technological innovation. The 1794 cotton gin innovation, made large-scale cotton production possible; a cotton-export economy in turn created an avenue not simply revitalize the Virginia “cavalier-plantation” model, but to revolutionize it in scale and intensity.
The tragedy for America, the South, and certainly for African and Native Americans was the business plan for the proposed new agricultural “gazelle” required slavery and large expanses of land. This “cavalier-plantation business model” institutionalized slavery, expelled southeastern Native American tribes to Central States scrub lands, and eventually threw us into our horrific Civil War. The legacy of that continues to this day.
From the perspective of this Online ED History, the success of this agricultural transformation–and it was economically successful-meant the South became consumed with the development of a slave-based agricultural-export economic base, installing a quasi-medieval society (“way of life” it was called) that displaced industrialization and manufacturing, and pushed the South down a path that changed the course of our history. Not unsurprisingly, it set in place a political culture (the Deep South culture) that from time to time and place to place dominated its state and local ED policy-making, in so doing making ED serve the interests of preserving a way of life and economic institutions hostile to humanity, morality and progress. There is truly a Darth Vader-like side to sector innovation, entrepreneurism, and the Empire of Cotton that persisted to the 1950’s Civil Rights M
Redeemer policy systems clearly preferenced selected business and commercial sectors. Railroads, utilities, and insurance companies were frequently awarded franchises, often with low assessments (particularly true for railroads) on their property, or outright tax abatement. While not universal to all Redeemer policy systems, most municipalities and states exempted new relocated manufacturing firms–in some states Reconstruction Era manufacturing preferences were simply continued (South Carolina). An 1882 Mississippi law, copied by Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, excluded railroad-related investment, but new factories and their machinery were exempted from state, county, and local taxes for a period of ten years. The earliest pioneer in new manufacturing tax exemption may have been Texas, which state approved in 1879. [] Woodward, Origins of the New South, p. 60
schools and ED link Woodward p.60 ff–possible link to southern Redeemer CD p62
Ron W. Coan 