State of the Field: A New Historiography for the Old South? Slavery and Capitalism, White Elites and Enslaved Blacks

Abstract

State of the Field: A New Historiography for the Old South?Slavery and Capitalism, White Elites and Enslaved Blacks Lacy Ford (bio) For roughly a decade, historians’ understanding of the antebellum American South has been increasingly influenced by a new burst of scholarship collectively labelled “The New History of Capitalism.” Scholars leading the argument for the New History of Capitalism (NHC) contend with considerable, but sometimes reckless, vigor that the slaveholding South stood on the driving edge of the larger capitalist and imperialist project of the nineteenth century. There is much in these works to recommend an emphasis on capitalism and imperialism as creators of the Old South, certainly as it existed in the late antebellum era, and the region played a large role in the evolution of those two projects. But the core, or rather the heart, of the NHC’s argument places cotton and slavery together as the dominant driving force behind the expansion of both capitalism and imperialism in the nineteenth century world. Yet there are also scholarly cautions that must be acknowledged and even damaging misconceptions and erroneous assumptions that promise to limit the NHC’s influence on the historiography of the Old South over the long term. This new corpus of scholarship characterizes southern slaveholders as acquisitive, expansionist, and possessing a broad ambition for power reaching well beyond their control of enslaved Black people. Collectively, the new NHC literature attempts to radically transform our understanding of the slaveholders’ role in furthering capitalist and imperial designs, not only in the American South but also in other parts of the world. In the NHC’s view, as the South’s slaveholding elite committed itself to pursuing territorial expansion and extending slavery, its aspirations moved beyond mastery and profit toward the building of an empire for cotton and the creation of a truly global economy sustained to a large degree by cotton production in the American South.1 This essay examines the NHC corpus, acknowledging its value, especially as a debating point, but also probes its weaknesses as revealed by existing and contemporary scholarship. [End Page 442] An earlier work, Adam Rothman’s Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005), anticipated the coming turn in antebellum southern historiography by emphasizing the slaveholders’ seemingly unquenchable desire for territorial expansion and the acquisition of more and more enslaved Black people, but this book did not present deep South slaveholders as creators of the international capitalist enterprise. According to Rothman, Southern slaveholders and aspiring slaveholders rushed into the old Southwest (Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana), seeking more land and more enslaved labor (whether via the illegal international slave trade, the legal domestic trade, or in-migration from the upper South and older cotton states). Rothman embraced the notion that the slaveholders of the lower South had embarked upon an imperialist endeavor to establish an ever-growing empire for cotton centered in the lower South.2 Yet at the same time, as one reviewer noted, Rothman was “sensitive to the hundreds and even thousands of individual decisions involved in making the old Southwest a slave country.”3 Those decisions included choices by white people about whether to buy or sell slaves, and decisions by the enslaved over whether or not to run away from a new master in an attempt to preserve a family—and many other decisions large and small made by both slaveholders and the enslaved. Ultimately this sea of decisions led the region’s slaveholders to establish the lower South as a critical plantation periphery supplying needed raw material for the core of the world’s emerging capitalist economy. But the region remained largely on the margins of the industrial revolution that it sustained, Rothman argued, while its planter elite nonetheless developed and retained close connections with the core. The expansionist slaveholders built a new cotton empire in the old Southwest, but it was far less clear that these slaveholders had embarked upon a capitalist project for cotton to drive the world economy. On balance, Rothman’s book endorsed the notion that slaveholders led an expansionist, even imperialist, regime in terms of controlling cotton lands, but it did not endorse the idea that Southern slaveholders...