“This is a pathbreaking book, well grounded in the
appropriate documentary record. Downey. . . offers an exciting
and fresh perspective on an old problem of vital importance,
the relationship between businessmen and planters in the
Old South.”—American Historical Review
In Planting a Capitalist South, Tom Downey effectively
challenges the idea that commercial and industrial interests
did little to alter the planter-dominated political economy
of the Old South. By analyzing the interplay of planters,
merchants, and manufacturers, Downey characterizes the South
as a sphere of contending types of capitalists: agrarians
with land and slaves versus commercial and industrial owners
of banks, railroads, stores, and factories. His book focuses
on the central Savannah River Valley of western South Carolina.
An influential political and economic region and the home
of some of the South’s leading states’ rights
and proslavery ideologues, it also spawned a number of inland
commercial towns, one of the nation’s first railroads,
and a robust wage-labor community. As such, western South
Carolina provides a unique opportunity for looking at contrasting
economic forces solely within the boundaries of the South—slavery
vs. free labor, industrial vs. agricultural, urban vs. rural.
A revisionary study, Planting a Capitalist South
offers clear evidence of a burgeoning transition to capitalist
society in the Old South.
“A well-written and well-thought piece of historiography
showing in microcosm how a new synthesis of antebellum southern
history should be conceived.”—Enterprise
and Society
“Well written and researched, Downey’s excellent
work will add greater nuance to our picture of the social
and economic life of the Old South, particularly our picture
of the emerging southern middle class.”—Georgia
Historical Quarterly
A native of Ohio and fourteen-year resident of South Carolina,
Tom Downey now lives in New Jersey, where he is assistant
editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University.
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