In 1965 Eugene D. Genovese ignited a debate over the character of slave-based society in the American South with his declaration that “the planters were not mere capitalists; they were precapitalist, quasi-aristocratic landowners … [whose] society, in its spirit and fundamental direction, represented the antithesis of capitalism, however many compromises it had to make” (The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. New York: Knopf, 1965: 23). Genovese's larger purpose was not simply taxonomic, but to argue that long-term conflict between North and South was indeed irrepressible.

Genovese's characterization sparked a paradoxical dispute. His original challenge ultimately boiled down to a stale battle of definitions: if “capitalism” meant an economy based on the exploitation of waged labor then slavery obviously fell short, but if the term applied to any acquisitive economy based on markets and private property, then slavery qualified, along with most other systems. Few U.S. historians would accept the Marxist categories and analysis that Genovese then employed and most rejected his characterization of the South as “precapitalist” (See James Oakes. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Knopf, 1982). But thanks in part to his prodding, specialists also tend to agree that the antebellum North and South were both very similar and very different, so much so that their conflict now seems much more “irrepressible” than it did 40 years ago. Whether it was capitalist or not, for example, slavery clearly made an enormous difference in the ways that northern and southern voters interpreted core common values such as liberty and equality, and those differences were strong enough to drive both sides to arms (See for example James M. McPherson. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988: vii–viii. J. Mills Thornton III. Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978: 456–61).

The original debate over southern capitalism has thus lost much of its force in recent years, but has not disappeared entirely. Economic historians continue to discuss how slavery may have affected the relative economic strengths of the North and South in the Civil War, and how the legacy of slavery may have shaped the South's long postwar poverty (see Peter A. Coclanis. The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989: 111–60. Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss. A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Gavin Wright. The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton, 1978). At the same time, other historians have come to believe that a simple “capitalist” label may also violate the complicated reality of the northern economy in this period, and speak of a “transition to capitalism” during the first half of the nineteenth century (for example, see Charles Sellers. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

In effect, our understanding of the northern and southern economies has come to parallel what we know about northern and southern politics and culture: both were similar in important ways and also significantly different. The most recent literature tends to avoid broad-brush generalizations in favor of fine-grained studies of local conditions and nuanced descriptions of the distinctive character of all developments in the antebellum economy (e.g., Christopher Clark. The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Charles B. Dew. Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).

Tom Downey's Planting a Capitalist South is a thoughtful and well-researched contribution to this recent literature. He begins by situating his work within the existing debate over southern capitalism, but disclaims any intention to settle that wide-ranging controversy. He desires instead to examine “the interaction of agrarian, commercial, and industrial capitalists” in one corner of the Old South and to see how that interaction “shaped the local political economy and in whose favor” (p. 7). His geographical focus is on the Edgefield and Barnwell districts of South Carolina, two inland plantation counties that were also home to substantial cotton factories that were some of the Old South's largest industrial facilities.

Downey immediately makes clear that South Carolina capitalism was thoroughly proslavery and made no veiled or overt threats to the state's institutions of human property and racial control. This much is consistent with Genovese's original declaration (Political Economy: 180–220). But neither were the region's planters inherently hostile to economic development. Prospering from the cotton boom of the early nineteenth century, they welcomed roads, bridges, ferries, and mills and even state-sponsorship of a market town at Hamburg to compete with Georgia's Augusta. As one thing led to another, the new town spawned a railroad to Charleston, which in turn begat more rural stores and eventually a pair of major textile factories at Vaucluse and Graniteville. Like their postbellum counterparts, Edgefield and Barnwell planters initially agreed that factories could benefit the existing system by giving employment to needy white families and strengthening the state in its growing rivalry with the North. They were later chagrined to discover that factories, towns, and a vigorous railroad corporation could successfully pursue their own rival interests in state government, sometimes over loud protests from the agrarian community. These clashing interests produced no epic showdowns between rival aspirants to hegemony, but seemed to push South Carolina towards an ordinary competition between rival sectors in a developing pluralistic society.

Tom Downey has carefully traced the emergence of a commercial and industrial order inside the world of South Carolina's slave plantation economy. His findings suggest that commercial and industrial institutions were more compatible with slavery than some have suggested, even though certain clashes were predictable. Although he does not claim to settle grand questions, Downey's work certainly suggests that politics and culture had more immediate relevance to American sectionalism than irreconcilable differences between the northern and southern economies.