Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley Gregory A. Hargreaves (bio) Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation By Michael S. Frawley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 195. Down in Dixie (the southern United States) they did things differently. Or did they? Twentieth century historians, from Ulrich B. Philips to Eugene Genovese, argued that industrialization was incompatible with the antebellum (pre-Civil War) Southern economy of enslavement. Misled by the comparative scale of Northern industrial capital, or convinced of the essential backwardness of slavery, they wondered, where were the mills and mines, the foundries and factories of the slave South? Michael S. Frawley insists that, in fact, they were everywhere. In his concise reassessment of Southern industrialization, Frawley demonstrates how incomplete data and generations of misinterpretation have clouded our perception of the scope and significance of antebellum Southern industry. Marshalling new evidence and methods, he argues that industrial concerns in Gulf Coast states were more numerous than previously documented, and that industry and manufacturing were not aberrations but "firmly integrated" into the landscape and society of the antebellum South. In so doing, Frawley contributes to a growing body of scholarship that places the capitalist economy of enslavement in the mainstream of United States history—and debunks the myth of the Lost Cause. Frawley defines his study area as three Gulf Coast states: Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. Historians of technology may take interest in this geographical choice. Antebellum industry in the Upper South is comparatively well attested in the scholarship; this book breaks new ground in the less-familiar Deep South. The close association of this region with cotton monoculture has obscured its early industrialization. Frawley's portrait of [End Page 1289] industry in the Gulf South would be familiar to those who have studied contemporary industry in the Northeast or Midwest: urban and rural manufacturing, water- and steam-powered processing of food and fiber crops, and extraction and processing of primary materials, laced together by a system of riverine and railroad transportation. By 1860, the three-state region possessed 1,922 miles of railroad and employed around 20,000 manufacturing workers. Plantation capitalists invested in textile milling to convert the region's cotton staple into finished goods. Coal mining and iron production marked their move toward heavier industry, and Alabama served as the focus of the Gulf South iron and coal complex. In terms of scale, Southern industry ca. 1860 was on par with Northern industry ca. 1850, a significant gap, but one that shows the regions shared a developmental trajectory. Frawley frowns upon direct comparisons between North and South, since it has led prior scholars to overlook Southern industrialization, but his work demonstrates that technical and economic development in the antebellum Deep South was part of the United States mainstream. Rather than compare it with the North, Frawley prefers to measure the Southern industrial base against the mythologized belief in an entirely agrarian antebellum South. It is notoriously difficult to combat myths with data, but Frawley does useful work when he tracks Southern apologists creating the myth of a pastoral South through generations of Lost Cause obfuscation. Architects of the Lost Cause myth, like Edward Alfred Pollard, explained away battlefield losses by imagining a pastoral Confederacy steamrolled by an industrial Union. Prior to the war, however, Southern industrialization had advanced sufficiently to support four years of fighting. Slavery introduced no significant barriers to capital-intensive industrialization. The purpose of slavery was to create reserves of inexpensive labor, a key factor in industrial production. As Frawley demonstrates, Gulf South locations with high capital investment in enslaved people also had high capital investment in manufacturing and industry. Enslaved workers built railroads, mined ores, and toiled on factory floors. Specialists may not need this reminder, but the continuing influence of the Lost Cause myth in American politics makes Frawley's autopsy valuable. The most appealing aspects of this book are Frawley's meticulous attention to sources and innovative methods. Prior scholars relied heavily upon the 1860 Census manufacturing schedules, which Frawley found to be incomplete in his study area. Combining census data with information from...