Modern Cronies: Southern Industrialism from Gold Rush to Convict Labor, 1829–1894 by Kenneth H. Wheeler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modern Cronies: Southern Industrialism from Gold Rush to Convict Labor, 1829–1894 by Kenneth H. Wheeler Scott Reynolds Nelson Modern Cronies: Southern Industrialism from Gold Rush to Convict Labor, 1829–1894. By Kenneth H. Wheeler. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. [x], 187. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5752-2; cloth, $114.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5750-8.) For Eugene Genovese, slavery doomed southern industrialization: "Southern banks," he tells us, emphasized "the movement of crops, the purchase of land and slaves, and little else" (Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South [New York, 1965], p. 21]. In contrast, scholars of the new history of capitalism see no conflict between slavery and industry. By their lights enslaved workers in cotton, sugar, and tobacco fields made capital accumulation possible, and indeed fueled industrialization outside the South. Modern Cronies: Southern Industrialism from Gold Rush to Convict Labor, 1829–1894 pokes holes in both arguments. From the 1820s to the 1850s, as Kenneth H. Wheeler shows, an iron industry flourished in the coal and iron fields of Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama that relied on crony capitalism. While Genovese is right that political power flowed to enslavers who relied on southern banks, these were not the stereotyped aristocratic planters of the black belt but temperance-obsessed Southern Baptists looking for gold. It was these men who persuaded the U.S. government to force Creeks and Cherokees from the mountain South. These slave-owning miners, flour millers, iron manufacturers, and railroad builders helped build up Atlanta before the Civil War. For these cronies, the end of slavery was only a hiccup, as Governor Joseph E. Brown and his teetotaling Baptist compatriots turned from enslaved people to convict laborers to build out the New South. The argument is interesting, not least because it forces the new history of capitalism historians to confront the intersection of slavery and Indian Removal. [End Page 557] For Wheeler, these lawyers, land speculators, and iron molders instigated removal when gold was discovered in Cherokee lands. Committed to railroads and urban progress, they next persuaded the Georgia legislature to fund building state-supported railroads into their gold, iron, and coal fields that they also happened to appoint themselves to run. Having used the federal government for Indian Removal, they then wheeled the southern states toward self-sufficiency, internal trade, and secession. Interestingly, John C. Calhoun was a player in this drama. Calhoun's high-yielding gold mines in Georgia's Lumpkin County built the fortune and political career of the man who became the architect of nullification. It was Calhoun who first suggested to Joseph E. Brown that Georgia's future prospects lay in the then little town of Atlanta, provided that railroads could link the Chattahoochee and Etowah Rivers to a spot at the foot of Stone Mountain, the world's largest granite mountain. While Modern Cronies spoils Genovese's story of a backward-looking slave society, I hoped that Wheeler could provide some quantitative evidence of how much iron and flour came out of Georgia's northwestern counties along the swiftly flowing Etowah River. Brown did extremely well, but as Wheeler's own work shows, his cronies' iron foundries, rolling mills, and flour mills failed with disturbing rapidity between the 1840s and the 1860s. And while surely the Western and Atlantic Railroad that connected the Etowah River to Atlanta did bring a boom to flour milling in the 1850s, the completion of multiple railways to the sea appears to have turned those same flourishing forges and flour mills into a mini rust belt by the late 1860s. Georgians could blame Union general William T. Sherman for burning their towns, but he did not cause flour and steel prices to drop after the war. An economist might argue that this is precisely the problem with crony capitalism historically, that it often led the state to fund manufacturing that could not last. The new capitalism historians, who are inclined to see Indian Removal as another example of settler colonialism, have much to learn as well. It was not planters but would-be gold miners who painted targets...