ABSTRACT
Through the first half of the twentieth century, scholars charting the business history of the South began their discussion with the post-Civil War boom in railroads and cotton mills. The Old South, from this perspective, was not a modern capitalist, business-minded society. Instead, it was a rural, almost feudal countryside of small farmers, wealthy planters, and slaves. Ulrich B. Phillips, one of the earliest historians of southern slavery and society, found that the region had little interest in modern business and industry before the Civil War. In his celebrated monograph, Mind of the South, W. J. Cash similarly found a planter-dominated society where business was less important than cultural distinction. “So far from being modernized,” Cash wrote, “in many ways it has always marched away, as to this day it continues to do, from the present toward the past.” 1 Kenneth Stampp’s detailed research during the 1950s offered a different argument that real profits were made with slave labor and at least hinted at a more business-minded South. However, Eugene Genovese’s masterful work of the 1960s employed Marxist theory to reject a business-oriented South focused on profit margins and instead uncovered a region that was pre-capitalist where paternalism shaped work relations as well as business and social exchange. The focus on land and paternalistic labor relations ensured a region with little economic diversity and a lack of investment in human capital. Genovese’s interpretation faced an important challenge in the 1970s from cliometricians Richard Fogel and Stanley Engerman, who used extensive statistical analysis to argue that the southern slave-based economy was very much capitalistic, emphasizing profit maximization and producing a rather successful business model. James Oakes furthered this argument for a capitalist, entrepreneurial South arguing that the accumulation of land and slaves was evidence of acquisitive business mindedness. Yet proponents of paternalism continued to make impressive arguments, with scholars like Bertram Wyatt-Brown arguing for the primacy of honor and social customs over business calculations.
