Antebellum Natchez (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS83 complain about; they were milking the underdeveloped South. Resolutions of the many southern commercial conventions amply demonstrate that the colonials thought they had serious sectional grievances and that a real economic conflict existed in their minds, despite the sweet-talk of prosperous Yankee mill owners. Frank Otto Gatell University of California, Los Angeles Antebellum Natchez. By D. Clayton James. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Pp. 344. $10.00.) Local history (especially municipal history) emphasizing the social and economic developments of a particular society, but not at the expense of the political details, has been given a tremendous boost by the publication of Antebellum Natchez. Professor James is to be commended also for not concentrating all his attention on the grand and romantic aspects of the Old South and its landed gentry. He focuses much of his attention on the Natchez of ordinary citizens, small businessmen, and free Negroes, and the Natchez-under-the-Hill of brawling boatmen, professional gamblers, and bold-faced strumpets. He traces the history of the settlement from the days of the Natchez Indians through the plotting and intrigue of the French, British, Spanish , and Americans. The first seventy-six pages are as clear and concise an explanation of the French, British, and Spanish periods in the Lower Mississippi Valley as one is likely to find anywhere. Professor James has a most impressive bibliography of primary and secondary sources. In fact this is, in the opinion of this reviewer, the most praiseworthy feature of this volume. The author has not neglected to consult any possible source of information relating to Natchez before the Civil War. He has used a wide range of primary sources, including manuscripts found in different collections throughout the country, records in the Natchez City Clerk's office and Adams County Chancery Clerk's office, newspapers, periodicals, public documents, and published sources. In the list of secondary works, this reviewer was impressed by his use of twenty-seven unpublished theses and dissertations in addition to the usual books and articles. Students engaged in research in Mississippi history are urged to examine this bibliography carefully before engaging in any projects of their own in the antebellum period. Mississippi history, particularly social and economic, from 1817 to 1860, has been neglected by writers and scholars. Maybe Professor James' study will encourage young scholars to reexamine or examine for the first time the society that was created in the state of Mississippi prior to 1860. 84CIVIL WAR HISTORY We have needed such a study as Antebellum Natchez for years. And we are indeed fortunate that Professor James' scholarly efforts have resulted in so readable a volume as this one. John Edmond Gonzales University of Southern Mississippi The Textile Industry in Antebellum South Carolina. By Ernest M. Lander, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Pp. vii, 122. $5.00.) This book has the distinction of being the first written about the significant textile industry in the antebellum South. The extent of southern manufacturing, impossible to calculate from unreliable census returns, is demonstrated in this study of South Carolina textiles to have been considerably more than many may have anticipated. By 1849 the Palmetto State had twenty-one cotton mills in operation, and by 1860 the mills were capitalized at $820,000 and contained 26,000 spindles. Professor Lander finds in South Carolina a pattern of growth similar to other southern states. The end of the Napoleonic Wars and the panic of 1819 destroyed a factory system only slightly removed from primitive handicraft. Built back slowly, with some difficulties in the depression of 1836, textile mills underwent a great boom in the 1840's, only to fall prey to stagnation in the next decade. The reasons for this general pattern are not explained. Nor is the book's general thesis substantially defended. In concurrence with Eugene Genovese, Professor Lander argues that although a large supply of liquid capital was available and although profits for southern mills were superior to comparable mills of New England, southerners viewed industry as a threat to the slave plantation economy and shunned it. One suspects that competition from England and New England determined the success of fledgling southern...