Producing Poverty: Local Government and the Economic Development in a New South County, 1874-1884

Abstract

In 1852 Union County, North Carolina, cotton planters and merchants sought to develop their local economy by imposing through the county government a special tax that would finance roads, schools, and cotton-weighing stations. The tax would fall on common vehicles not worth more [than] 100 or 120 dollars [and] watches not worth more than 10 or 20 dollars. The county's subsistence farmers, however, viewed the new levy, not the means to a new prosperity, but evidence of a sect of bissy boddys . . . taking the peoples Libertyes away by law power. In a petition to the General Assembly of North Carolina, they argued that as there is no tax laid on waggons [and] clocks we think it rong to tax [less expensive] vehicles and watches. This conflict marked the beginning of an enduring struggle over the shape of capitalist development in the county. After the Civil War local developers would launch a second campaign no less inequitable than the first to transform Union County's economy. ' Throughout the postwar South, planters and merchants actively sought to develop the region's economy, substituting capitalist agriculture for the trade in surplus goods that had been produced earlier by slaves and subsistence farmers. To facilitate that change they built railroads, organized new networks of credit and exchange, and promoted scientific farming methods. Those constructive efforts were heralded by promoters at the time and have been chronicled by historians since. Recently, however, scholars of the New South have focused on a less attractive side of postwar economic development. The Conservatives' accession to power after 1870 ensured passage and enforcement of lien, mortgage, and vagrancy laws that channeled control of land and labor into landlords' and employers' hands. In addition, fence and game laws closed off many persons' access to natural resources that sustained life apart from ties