Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation.

• Author: Thornton, Mark
• Position: Book review

Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation

By John Majewski

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Pp. 256. $39.95 cloth.

Given slavery's worldwide extinction, the topic of modernizing a slave economy seems irrelevant. Nevertheless, in his new book Modernizing a Slave Economy, John Majewski answers some important questions, such as: Why did the Southern states secede, and why did the Confederacy fail? He presents a picture of some antebellum Southerners that many readers will find surprising. Although I have done a great deal of research on antebellum slavery and the Civil War, Majewski's book illuminates some key questions for me.

The key to the book's value is its portrayal of secessionists not as a group of free-trade, states' rights libertarians, but rather as leaders who often had conditional views about free trade and states' rights. Many, for example, did not want free trade; they wanted lower tariff rates in order to build Southern industry. To make matters even worse, some even wanted the tariff revenues to pay for public-works projects, such as railroads. They did support states' rights, but they also wanted a fugitive slave law in order to have the federal government capture runaway slaves.

The South's ideology was therefore much more Hamiltonian, as opposed to Jeffersonian, than I had previously thought. Thomas Jefferson himself promoted building a state university, made the Louisiana Purchase, and imposed a comprehensive embargo on the economy. The secessionists that Majewski focuses on would have cheered all of these nonlibertarian actions. He examines select secessionist leaders from South Carolina and Virginia. This sample may be biased because these two states supposedly had much to gain in an independent Confederacy. Virginia was poised to become the Confederacy's industrial base, and Charleston, South Carolina, aspired to become the leading port for European trade.

How strong was this Hamiltonian-secessionist view? Its proponents probably represented a strong minority. The best evidence in support of Majewski's perspective is that these Hamiltonian secessionists succeeded in getting their way politically until 1865.

Southern secessionism was born out of an ideology that seemed to arise from both the Southerners' successes and their failures. Individuals in the South succeeded in taming the wilderness and making money. Large amounts of land and a slave workforce produced...