The Conquest of Labor: Daniel Pratt and Southern Industrialization

Abstract

The Conquest of Labor: Daniel Pratt and Southern Industrialization. By Curtis J. Evans. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. 337. Illustrations. $49.95.) Daniel Pratt, a New Hampshire carpenter's apprentice, sailed to Georgia in 1819 seeking work that would help pay his master's debts. Pratt succeeded and then returned to set up shop in the new capital, Milledgeville. By 1827, the transplanted Yankee become a man of substance and a slaveholder, a development he defended to his father with the commonplace evasion that he had brought no man to bondage (7). Pratt relocated to Alabama in the flush times of the 1830s. There he erected a cotton gin factory and cotton mill in an Autauga County village that would bear his name. By 1860, this sixth-generation New Englander manufactured more gins than anyone in America and owned more than a hundred slaves. He shed his ambivalence about the peculiar institution, as evidenced by several proslavery letters sent to New Hampshire newspapers. His reputation crystallized as a northern man who embraced southern culture and a Whig who urged industrialization aided by publicly-- financed banks, internal improvements, and railroads. Elected to the Alabama legislature in the secession winter, Pratt went with his adopted state and supported the Confederate war effort after his cooperationist views were rejected. After the Civil War, an aging Pratt lent his prestige to the creation of the iron industry in Birmingham before his death in 1873. Throughout, Pratt championed education, the arts, and the cause of temperance in much the same manner of contemporary factory owners in New England. Curtis J. Evans offers his account of the life of Daniel Pratt less as a biography than as an examination of the town, businesses, and public policies that Pratt sponsored. Evans wants to revisit questions that have been on southern historians' agendas since the days of Rupert Vance and Broadus Mitchell: Was the antebellum South hostile to industrialization and urbanization? If so, did such hostility arise from the political domination of planters who rejected an emerging world of bourgeois culture, a la Eugene Genovese? Was putative opposition to state-supported industrial capitalism immutable or was it giving way to new ideas in the 1850s, per J. Mills Thornton's assessment in Politics and Power in a Slave Society (1978)? Finally, what was the tenor of public culture in a southern mill town like Prattville, vis-a-vis such supposedly northern developments as reform movements focused on education or temperance? Evans's analytic framework implicitly regards rural industrialization and its accompanying social evolutions of New England or Mid-Atlantic towns as the norm for the middle third of the nineteenth century. Evaluating what happened in Prattville as comparable, Evans asks whether the town represents a genuinely southern-inspired counterpart or should instead be viewed as an alien growth imported by Pratt and maintained solely by his zeal. …