The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. By Gavin Wright. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978.)

            Gavin Wright’s The Political Economy of the Cotton South, published in 1978, provides a detailed quantitative analysis of the Southern economy from the antebellum period up to the end of Reconstruction. The stated themes of this book are the profitability of the slavery, the effect it had on Southern development, the cause of the Civil War and the decline in cotton markets following the conflict. Wright provides historians with a wealth of analysis that helps them to better understand King Cotton, slavery and the South.

            Wright errs on the side of caution when discussing slavery’s profitability. He begins by reiterating the traditional argument that the labor-poor and land-rich South needed free labor to become profitable and would not survive in a wage labor. However, he points out that the purchase of slaves was based on a world market in which slave labor was used to produce the more valuable commodity of sugar. Intuitively, it must have been profitable. Furthermore, his analyses show that wealth was generally more concentrated by the people holding more slaves concluding that much of that wealth was based in the slaves themselves. However, Wright adds the caveat that the system was nearing a point where it would soon become unavailable and unprofitable for the majority of Southerners.

            Like other historians, Wright argues that slavery impeded the development of the Southern economy. Agriculture was by far the most profitable endeavor in the antebellum South and therefore southerners seeking to maximize their profits invested heavily in farming and exporting cotton. He uses the lack of growth in southern cities and the lack of manufacturing in the region as his indicators that this was the case.

            Wright reincarnates economics as the causal factor of the Civil War. He argues that as slaves became more valuable, this increased their owner’s economic stake in the continuity of slavery. Therefore, every threat to the institution became a threat to the economic well-being of the southern cotton planters and the region as a whole. During the 1850’s, slave prices soared and more territory was quickly becoming settled which led to a perfect storm of economic factors that spilled over into the political arena erupting into the Civil War.

            Finally, Wright investigates how the South became backward and undeveloped in the years following the Civil War. Rather than attribute this to the immediate devastation brought on by the conflict and Reconstruction, he asserts that a decline in global demand for cotton was more responsible for the decline in Southern fortunes. In an effort to rebuild, southerners increasing relied on their old standby to provide for them again but the demand simply was not there and pushed them further and further into underdevelopment. Tenancy and backwardness became the norm until after the New Deal.

            At times, Wright’s conclusions could be stated in a more clear and concise manner. As an economic historian, he relies heavily on data and statistical analysis however his conclusions contain a great deal of economic jargon peppered with erudite prose often referring the reader back to a table or graph to make his point. Such an approach can be useful, especially when dealing with complex ideas, but in many cases a more direct summarizing statement would have been beneficial to readers without a strong background in economics and statistics. This point aside, he provides a great investigation of the cotton-based economy of the South.    

Michael Green

 

 

The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century.  By Gavin Wright.  New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 1978.

        Gavin Wright, professor of history at the University of Michigan, produced in 1978, an economic analysis of the antebellum South. The author echoes the conclusions offered by historians like Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman in their work Time On the Cross.  These scholars find that southern slavery was a profitable institution and that the region as a whole enjoyed great economic prosperity. However, Wright broadens his inquiry and questions how the South, in the years after the Civil War, devolved into a largely colonial economy. The South increasingly became dependent on northern investment and until the advent of the New Deal and World War II endured cycles of perpetual poverty. The author’s narrative explores this change.

        Wright contends that labor shortages did not concern southerners of the antebellum era.  The South suffered none of the economic turmoil that plagued the North during the first part of the nineteenth century.  Slavery insured that a stable and perpetual labor force was available to service the largely cotton economy of the region.  Wealthy planters because of the costs of maintaining a labor force were the only Southerners that had to produce for a larger national and international market. Cotton prices stayed, for most of the antebellum period, stable and insured a steady profit for planters.  The South also saw increasing divides in wealth between slaveholders and non-slaveholders.  In addition, a smaller number of planters came to own most of the labor force employed in the Cotton South.    Capital increasingly came to rest in the hands of a small group of elites. However, despite this trend the southern economy continued to grow unabated.

        Yeoman farmers, who comprised the majority of the antebellum South’s population, did not suffer major periods of economic dislocation.  Wright finds southern yeomans actually survived and thrived in the Cotton South economy.  These small independent landowners while not plugged into the market economy were largely self sufficient. These farmers produced enough cotton to meet their own needs which might entail paying land taxes or servicing a mortgage.  In addition, a yeoman farmer might produce enough cotton for his local markets.  These farmers also largely produced their own food by maintaining vegetable gardens and livestock herds.  Southern yeoman farmers, during the antebellum period, generally equaled the farm income generated by their northern counterparts.  However, the Civil War and its aftermath would alter the political economy of the South.

        The 1860s signaled great changes in southern economic structures. The market economy expanded and engulfed classes who had remained apart from the system during the pre-Civil War era.  Freedmen, who had never acquired land, and yeoman farmers who had lost their land during the war turned to tenancy to survive. Planter landlords insisted that their tenants produce cotton as they sought to recover their lost labor force and economic status with the advent of emancipation.  Self-sufficiency disappeared and cotton production increased during the Reconstruction era.  New cotton producers actually over stimulated the market and caused a massive drop in the price of the commodity. 

        The region also struggled to diversify, after the Civil War, because antebellum planters had largely invested their excess profits into acquiring additional land and slaves.  Southern elites had largely disdained investments that would have led to manufacturing and internal improvements.  These decisions caused the South to remain dependent on agriculture.  The South lagged far behind as the North quickly industrialized and emerged as a modern economy in the years after the Civil War. The region was largely excluded from the economic boom of the late nineteenth century.

        Wright’s work is impressive in its coverage of the economy of the Cotton South.  He uses extensive charts and formulas to illustrate his conclusions.  The author’s prose is quite dry and may lose readers not schooled in the details of micro and macro economics.  However, the work remains an important contribution to the historiography of the economy of the Old South.

 Robert H. Butts

 

The Political Economy of the Cotton South:  Households, Markets, and  Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. By Gavin Wright. New York:  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,  1978.IBSN 0393056864 HC 107 A13 W68
 
Gavin Wright, an economist who studied at Yale and the University of North Carolina, examined the existing data concerning Southern production to address the effects of slavery on agricultural profitability, economic and urban development, secession and war, and the postwar depression of the cotton economy.  In The Political Economy of the Cotton South:  Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century Wright, relying heavily on charts and statistics, attacked the idea that large plantations offered economies of scale that made them more efficient than free farms.
 
Thesis:  Wright argued that large plantations were not more efficient than free farms and that the Southern commitment to a one-dimensional economy based on cotton retarded the mechanization of agriculture, the growth of urban areas, and immigration.  Further, Wright asserted that the war was the result of the economics of slavery, a critical defense of what had become the dominant form of Southern wealth.  However, by 1860 the Southern cotton economy tottered on the verge of economic collapse due to overproduction.  The depression after 1865 was due more to that overproduction than to the ravages of war and emancipation.
 
Wright began with the idea that slavery in the South was not ordained by fate, that it developed anywhere profitable export staples existed and that Northern abolition was simply the political embodiment of regional economic realities that favored free farms.  The growth of cotton agriculture gave the South a unity and prosperity it otherwise would have lacked but at the cost of a single facet economy that stymied immigration, urbanization, the mechanization of agriculture, and the development of a Southern implements industry.  The advantage of slavery was its elasticity of labor supply, something free farms lacked, but it offered no economies of scale in large plantations, despite Fogel’s and Engerman’s conclusions.  The low level of cotton production for small Southern farms occurred because they diverted much of their effort to subsistence production of foodstuffs but medium-sized plantations (16-50 slaves) were more efficient than larger enterprises.
 
A basic divergence in economic focus grew between the two regions.  The North augmented wealth by acquiring land, which promoted development of roads, canals, schools, urbanization, and immigration.  The South focused on acquiring more slaves, resulting in a rapid increase in the worth of slave property that pushed their value above reproduction costs.  Although average slave holding increased very little the average value of slave property doubled between 1850 and 1860, leading Southerners to react radically to perceived abolitionist threats. The North did not seek abolition, just to limit expansion of slavery, but the South reacted violently because even implied threats affected the price of slaves.  Southerners passionately protected slavery by responding as homeowners do to protect property values.  In that light secession became a reasonable alternative to protect values.
 
Three major developments in the 1860s—war, emancipation, and decline in growth of demand for cotton—had serious ramifications for the South.  In 1860 the textiles industry approached a crisis of overproduction that surfaced after 1865, the salient factor in the decline of the Southern economy.  Therefore, slavery would have faced difficulties after 1860 if the war had been avoided but Wright suggested that the institution would have survived for years.  The postwar Southern economy turned to tenancy, a flawed system that destroyed subsistence farming by its emphasis on producing a cash crop plagued by low prices, producing economic slaves who could only escape servitude by leaving agriculture.
 
Wright’s work is exemplary in scope and vision but numbing in detail for those unfamiliar with statistics.  Much of the pain occasioned by the numerical studies may be avoided by concentrating on Wright’s conclusions rather than his analysis.

Harold Rich

The Political Economy of the Cotton South:  Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. By Gavin Wright. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, c. 1978. Pp. xv, 205. HC 107 A13 W68.)

 Gavin Wright, an economist on the faculty at Stanford University and  a product of Yale University and the University of North Carolina, sought to explain patterns of resource allocation, production, and economic change in the South in the logic of economic situations and institutions. He relied heavily on economic analyses of slavery, presenting numerous charts, graphs, and statistical models that were compelling but confusing for those largely unversed in statistics. As such, his book can be difficult reading but the weight of his ideas make the effort worthwhile. Wright included an index and a bibliography that, other than the statistical sources, only cited secondary works.

 Wright argued that slavery was deleterious to the South, that it retarded the mechanization of agriculture, the development of manufacturing, the emergence of cities, and immigration. Driven by the slave economy the South prospered, but by 1860 it verged on an economic collapse due to a crop in cotton prices and that crisis was the fundamental cause of the Civil War. Post war the South’s economy did crash, not because of the devastation of the war or the loss of its slaves, but due to overproduction of cotton in the face of a drop in world demand.

 After quickly sketching the background of Southern slavery, Wright described the geographical patterns of cotton production, slave-holding, and wealth in 1860 to explain the paradoxical features of the coexistence of planter dominance and economic democracy in Southern society. He argued that nothing inherent in the South led to slavery and suggested that the increasing profitability of grain crops in the North might have brought slavery it had not been legally banned. Cotton as the commodity crop brought great prosperity to the South but also irrevocably tied it to slavery and led to an inflation of slave price that made slaves the dominant form of wealth. As a result, slaves became concentrated in large plantations. The average number of slaves per owner increased by 10 percent between 1850 and 1860 but the average value of slaveholdings per slaveholder rose by almost 100 percent, going from $4,800 to $9,400. Wright argued that the cutting edge of Southern political economy in the 1850s was this growing division of wealth between slave owners and non-owners.

 Slavery arose in a context in which wage labor was not possible due to the availability of cheap land. The ready availability of land led to a chronic shortage of free labor because workers would only work for others until they acquired their own land. Therefore, the only alternative to slave-holding was the family farm which tended to produce less cotton and more food crops, especially corn which could be used to feed both humans and farm animals.  Family farmers chose to produce foodstuffs to provide the security of subsistence over the risk of a commodity crop. Corn crops only depended on sufficient yield but successful cotton crops required both sufficient yield and adequate prices, making cotton production a riskier enterprise.  The difference between plantations and free farms was not that plantations were more efficient but that they had the resources to allocate labor for the production of a commodity crop.  Therefore, slave plantations, not family farms, took over the production of cotton, further cementing the bond between the slavery and cotton.

 Wright contrasted antebellum South, which was prosperous and growing, to Reconstruction South, which was poor and backward.  He suggested that fluctuations in the rate of economic growth in the nineteenth century were best explained by trends in the world market for cotton rather than by the effects of the war or the loss of slaves.  That effect was compounded by secondary costs associated with slavery that included a slower growth in nonagricultural activity, especially the impulse to mechanize in agriculture; the lack of development of an industrialized labor force; reduced funneling of money and entrepreneurship into manufacturing; and the failure to promote cities and provide internal improvements.  Ironically, the North actually benefited because its relatively infertile farmland encouraged the development of industry, which in turn led to the development of a skilled labor force, and urbanization.  The North’s values were tied to land ownership which led them to devote their energies to developing transportation, increasing immigration (for a labor supply), building towns, and improvements to the infrastructure while the South, given to slave ownership, focused on national politics as the means to safeguard their slaves.  Wright suggested that the value of slaves lay in expectations and confidence (not unlike today’s stock market) and compared Southern feelings to a homeowner today who reacts passionately to defend his largest investment against any decrease in property values. Southern slaveholders even opposed the reopening of the external slave trade for fear that doing so would decrease the value of their human holdings.

 After the war the South faced many problems.  It had ridden the extended cotton boom of the first Industrial Revolution that formed a society organized around the scarcity of labor but now the South faced a labor surplus and turned to tenancy farming.  The rise of sharecropping ultimately led to the demise of both subsistence farming and self-sufficiency in foodstuffs and by 1880 the South could no longer feed itself.

 Wright seemed to be on solid ground when discussing the importance of slavery to the South and how distinctive property values determined differences. His thesis that the drop in cotton prices after the war contributed more to Southern poverty than the devastation of the war or the monetary loss involved with freeing the slaves seemed less secure. No laboratory experiments or mathematical regressions can replicate a late nineteenth century South to remove the war’s cost or the loss of the slaves.  Therefore, any theory that supports one factor over others is subject to eternal argument. However, Wright’s argument seems especially shaky and more a product of an economist’s perspective than a objective study.
 
Texas Christian University
Harold Rich