The South: Sector Innovation, Agricultural Economy and Migration
The Virginia colonial charter established a trading company (a private corporation) not dissimilar to the better-known British East Indies Company. Subsequent colonists from Virginia, and later Maryland, stumbled upon tobacco as their principal crop—one that required lots of acreage and the cheapest of labor. A plantation economy developed resting on an owner class of “land entrepreneurs” who established individual homesteads so large as to be self-sufficient and self-contained. With direct access to rivers or the Atlantic, plantations directly exported and imported from their own piers and harbors. Where the plantation system/economy flourished, urban communities were secondary. Plantation owners felt little need to establish towns or commercial centers.
This plantation system, the pillar of the Tidewater (Maryland/Virginia) culture, spread through the South, reaching as far as the Mississippi River. The South accordingly was characterized by a “dispersed rural population occupied plantations and adjoining small farms [that] relied for community services on crossroad churches, courthouses and markets. These constituted a kind of ‘shredded community’ as scattered focal points for farming, trading, politics and religion” (Russo, 2001, p. 11). The “shredded community” reinforced an inherent Privatist individual self-sufficiency, and what minimal governance was necessary was provided by an almost informal county courthouse patrician elite. The few municipal governments as existed, or were later created, were treated legally as “counties” rather than municipalities. The heritage of this remains more or less intact today, especially in Maryland and Virginia, but is still found throughout the South.
Times were tough in the late 1700s for Tidewater tobacco growers. Tobacco, hard on the soil, meant its continued use produced decreasing yields, and increasing bankruptcies. Scots-Irish tobacco-planting immigrants had moved into areas not suited to the crop, increasing the supply of poor-quality tobacco that depressed prices. The Tideland tobacco economy was in irreversible decline. The situation was little better for South Carolina indigo plantations as market demand dissipated after the Revolution and prices “went south.” On top of all this, the newly adopted constitution required ending the import of slaves as early as 1808 (which happened—although it was “phased in” to 1820). The 1787 Northwest Ordinance precluded slavery, and a movement to incorporate anti-slavery provisions in state constitutions was gathering momentum.
But at this timely juncture innovation sprang into action. Nathaniel Greene, a Connecticut Yankee and Washington’s most consistent Revolutionary War general, stayed in the South after the Revolution. He died in 1786 on his Georgia plantation (named Mulberry Grove), leaving his widow, Cary, to carry on as best she could. In 1792 Cary Greene hired a tutor—a Massachusetts born, Connecticut-educated young man by the name of Eli Whitney—to teach her kids. Her Connecticut-born, Yale-grad plantation manager, Phineas Miller, encouraged the young tutor to fiddle around with the farm machinery to see if the latter could make it work better. The tutor fiddled/innovated machine parts that greatly improved productivity of existing machinery—and the cotton gin was born (1793). Whitney and Miller formed up a partnership and, the rest, as they say, was history.
In 1790 only 3000 bales of cotton were produced in the entire United States. However by 1800 this had risen to 73,000 bales, increasing again in 1810 to 178,000; 335,000 by 1820; 732,000 in 1830; 1,348,000 in 1840; 2,136,000 in 1850; and 4,491,000 bales in 1860 (Barone, 2013, pp. 61–2). To accomplish this production feat cotton acreage had expanded greatly, and a new labor force to plant and harvest the cotton had to be found. Cotton is land and water intensive, an ideal plantation-based crop. Sustained demand for cotton prompted southern entrepreneurs to find suitable locations and start new fields. Suitable locations were found in areas included in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, but the problem was that the Creek and Cherokee Indians who lived on these lands were unwilling to move. Enter Andrew Jackson and the Scots-Irish.
A series of Indian wars started by Jackson after the war of 1812 (Davy Crockett and Sam Houston were in Jackson’s expedition), followed by outright land seizures, expelled the Indians and drove them out on a “Trail of Tears” to Oklahoma (1831–38). Having removed the existing workforce (the first slaves on cotton fields were Native Americans), southern cotton planters who had moved into Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Mississippi required another quickly. The “Passage to the Interior” drove over 1 million former Tidewater tobacco slaves into the nation’s interior by foot, in chains, taking six to eight weeks.13 “Some 85 percent of the migrant slaves were from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas and some 75 percent of them went to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas” (Fogel and Engerman, 1989, p. 46). In 1810, 79 percent of American slaves lived in coastal states; in 1860, 33 percent. In 1810, 10 percent of American slaves lived in cotton-producing states, increasing to 55 percent by 1860 (Barone, 2013, pp. 75–7). Cotton had its workforce.
Indian displacement and slavery beclouds discussion of an economic sector. In function, the plantation was an agricultural factory, and cotton, the raw material of the textile sector, was exported as a national and international commodity. Plantation planters were a self-perceived economic class, surprisingly entrepreneurial and sometimes innovative, and the principal sector of the southern economy. Planters from South Carolina financed startups in Alabama and Mississippi; and, scale being advantageous, larger planters were economically successful. In 1860, Adams County Mississippi was the wealthiest county per capita in the nation. The dynamism commonly associated with present-day emerging industry-technology sectors was not absent in the new cotton industry; considerable turnover in plantation owners occurred as incompetents were replaced by young startup owners.
Who bought this stuff? The world textile industry was chiefly located in Old England and New England. Here was a marriage made in heaven. Francis Cabot Lowell—a Newburyport (MA) born, Harvard grad, Boston Brahmin whose dad served in the Continental Congress—established his Boston Manufacturing Company (1814) to operate factories that converted raw cotton from the South into textile products. These factories, pioneer of the American factory with its famous “mill girls” or “Lowell system,” launched the American industrial revolution, the rise of manufacturing and the famous textile industry of Massachusetts and New England. Lowell—founder of the eponymous city of Lowell in Massachusetts, and the industry sector he established— was yet another instance of innovation and entrepreneurism.
Cotton was king in the pre-Civil War era, and with it an agricultural southern economy based on free trade/export dependent on a workforce composed of slaves and near-subsistence white farmers. Originally founded in what would be labeled the “cotton belt” (Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina), this economy/ culture spread into the Mississippi valley, Arkansas, northern Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, eastern Texas and southern Missouri. It was stopped in Nebraska and, most brutally, in Kansas during the 1850s. The plantation/export-based southern agricultural economic system deeply impacted the South as a region and defined future southern economic development—and the American nation.
Among these consequences was that northern industrial city-building was virtually non-existent in the South. Aside from New Orleans, an old French–Spanish creation with its own distinctive Creole culture, the South developed no real industrial cities before the Civil War. Another important consequence of the plantation economy was that southern internal transportation infrastructure (railroads) was underinvested. Southern transportation was by sea, on Massachusetts’ Yankee ships. So, as of the early 1800s, the two regions had developed separate yet interrelated economic systems. Each, as if independent of the other, walked down two different paths—destined, as we now know, for war.
The Deep South Political Culture
Woodard labeled the culture that underlay the southern agricultural plantation-export economy “the Deep South.” The origins of that culture, colonial South Carolina (Charleston), had been settled by “Barbados [West Indies/Caribbean] slave lords.” Its defining systemic values included racial supremacy and aristocratic privilege, derived from “a version of classical [i.e. Greek-Roman] Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many” (Woodard, 2011, p. 9). The overlap with the Royalist Tidewater plantation elites allowed Carolina’s Deep Southerners to assume the Tidewater patrician image (Taylor, 1993) or the “Southern Cavalier” personified in Gone with the Wind. If so, the Deep South culture does not fit into our Privatist model based on individualism, liberty and free enterprise. This is not Jackson’s or Jefferson’s farmer yeoman. The pre-Civil War Deep South was a feudal culture.14
From an ED perspective this culture rested upon plantations, each autonomous economically and geared to one export crop. Grow and harvest the cotton, and process/ship it to the export market were all that were required of sub-state ED. The system required minimal land-based infrastructure. The price of cotton did the rest. Port towns and cotton towns were its urban manifestations. Deep South government capacity was minimal indeed; and, regretfully, often was fixated upon preservation of a political and economic system that ran counter to human decency, national democracy and industrial development. Policy-making was private, although private in a sense not contemplated by our Privatist model of political culture.
Ron W. Coan 