In search of "industry": Slavery, manufacturing, and the language of political economy in the antebellum South, 1820–1850

• Main Author: Carlander, Jay R
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2003
• Subjects: African American Studies; American Civil War; American history; Antebellum period; Biographies; Capitalism; Copyright; Core curriculum; Cotton; Economic development; Economic history; Economic theory; Economists; Editorials; Free trade; Humanities; Industrial development; Language; Manufacturing; Middle class; Politics; Profitability; Science; Slavery; Social sciences; Society; Tariffs; Teaching assistants; Values; Writers
• ISBN: 0496603795; 9780496603794

This dissertation examines the economic thought and ideological language of a group of antebellum southern political economists, including Jacob Cardozo, George Tucker, Thomas Dew, and Thomas Cooper, who were among the ablest practitioners of economic analysis in the United States during the antebellum era. Not only did these southern political economists laud the productivity and profitability of slave labor in agriculture in ways that anticipated the revisionism of the “cliometric” studies of slavery, some of them also confidently predicted that the South's slave based economy must inevitably industrialize or face ruinous poverty in the face of western agricultural competition and faltering foreign markets for staple crops. Moreover, these southern economists conducted their analyses in a language of “industry” that embodied such mainstream, nineteenth-century middle-class values as the “Protestant work ethic,” the belief in the social efficacy of individuals' pursuit of self-betterment, faith in progress, and the virtue of competitive striving. Such an interpretation is at odds with prevailing scholarly interpretations of the culture and society of the antebellum South, but it holds out the possibility that southern elites had little difficulty reconciling slavery with the spirit of capitalism.