From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880.

• Author: McCandless, Amy Thompson

Using six counties in central Georgia as a microcosm of economic development in the U.S. cotton belt, Joseph P. Reidy describes the social and political repercussions of the transformation from slave to free labor in the years between 1800 and 1880. Reidy, an associate professor of history at Howard University, compares economic developments in central Georgia to those in other slave holding areas of the Americas, arguing that "events in the South can only be understood in the larger hemispheric context of slave emancipation". Thus, he places slavery in the U.S. South in a global historical framework in order to explain the economic, social, and political changes which accompanied its abolition.

Reidy begins by examining the antebellum economic relationships of yeoman settlers, cotton planters, and slaves during central Georgia's frontier period. In the pioneer phase before the cotton boom of the 1830s, class differences were muted, as whites and blacks worked side by side to eke out a subsistence from the soil. Labor relations were precapitalist; the mutual exchange of goods and services among friends and family was common; the task system gave slaves free time to grow their own food and to produce artifacts for barter or for sale. Yeoman were proud of their economic and political independence. Even the cotton planter was "in the world market but not of it". Although planters were involved by necessity in the international cotton trade, they generally opposed capitalist institutions and relationships.

The expansion of cotton production and the concomitant importance of the capitalist world market led to changes in economic organization. Gang labor replaced the task system. Small subsistence farmers lost out to large commercial planters. The slave holding elite gained increasing control over the economic and political institutions of central Georgia.

As economic differences among whites increased, planters pointed to slavery as the savior of republican equality. Unlike the North, where differences between labor and capital threatened to tear asunder the social fabric, Georgian planters such as T.R.R. Cobb argued that the South united diverse economic interests into one by combining labor and capital in the person of the slave. Because black slaves provided a mudsill class, all whites were equal.

Reidy questions the egalitarianism of slave society. Although U.S. planters did not control Southern yeoman as the Brazilian planters did their...