@Book{ majewski2009,
    author = {John Majewski},
    title = {Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation},
    address = {Chapel Hill},
    publisher = {University of North Carolina Press},
    year = 2009,
}

p. 3:

The central argument of Modernizing a Slave Economy is that many secessionists envisioned industrial expansion, economic independence, and government activism as essential features of the Confederacy. Secessionists imagined that an independent Confederacy would create a modern economy that integrated slavery, commerce, and manufacturing. … Far from endorsing laissez-faire, most secessionists believed that some form of collective action would strengthen the long-term prospects for slavery and the southern economy.

p. 4: focus on Virginia and South Carolina

Majewski revises assumption of many scholars (he names James McPherson and John Lauritz Larson) that “secession represented the logical outcome of an antigovernment, antimodern southern mindset.” That view only reinforced by popular culture image of “southerners fighting against centralization and modernization” (p. 6), partly thanks to the efforts of Lost Cause portrayals of the Old South. On these views, the strong central state that Confederates actually created was born of the revolutionary exigencies of war, and was unintended and unforeseen by secessionists. Majewski argues instead that we need to reject the idea of secessionism as a “limited government” movement along with the idea of slaveholders as pre-capitalist, anti-modern, and anti-development.

“I argue that the strong Confederate state was not a radical disjuncture but a natural outgrowth of southern attitudes established during the antebellum period” (p. 7), though Majewski concedes that secessionists did not foresee the Confederacy’s sprawling bureaucracy or experiments in economic planning. But they “believed that government policies should manipulate (as opposed to supplant) private interests to build a stronger economy. … Such policies reflected the widely held belief that individualism alone could not create a modern slave economy, but they still left much of the economy in the hands of private interests” (p. 9), envisioning a hybrid “state activism” that was somewhere between total laissez-faire and an authoritarian central government (basically “constructive liberalism” of heath1954, though the comparison Majewski draws is to Hamiltonian political economy). One of the most striking examples was the strong support in Virginia and South Carolina for a “Confederate revenue tariff of 15 to 20 percent” to protect and encourage Southern industry (p. 20).

p. 21: The state activism vision of secessionists was not incompatible with slaveholders’ worldview: “Slaveholders came to believe that they could manipulate and control the economic destiny of other regions and nations in the same way they controlled their slaves” (p. 21).

Chapter 1

Explains why “slavery and shifting cultivation [instead of improving more acres of land], working in tandem, depressed local manufacturing” in the antebellum South, especially in comparison to the North (p. 42). Southern agricultural reformers increasingly condemned the South’s neglect of land improvements and manufactures as the War approached, but unlike Northerners, they did not blame slavery for the region’s sluggish development: “they attributed shifting cultivation to an unfortunate traditionalism that rational reform would soon correct” (p. 52).

Chapter 2

These reformers also embraced state activism, believing that private individuals and voluntary associations could not be trusted entirely to complete the important agricultural reforms they desired: “synthesizing both the modern and the traditional, [they] viewed state support for agricultural research as the hallmark of civilized government (p. 54). Yet in the antebellum period, these agricultural reformers largely failed because”the southern environment made reform measures unprofitable" (p. 54), and reformers failed to capture state legislatures.

Nonetheless, the reformers’ condemnation of excessive individualism and insistence that only collective regional action could defeat abolitionist threats laid the groundwork for wartime government activism aimed at protecting agricultural and manufacturing interests. “The rhetoric of the agricultural reformers suggests that the basic principle behind the growth of the Confederate state—that energetic government action was sometimes needed to save slavery—had deep roots in secessionist thought” (p. 56). Indeed, Majewski attributes to some of these reformers pseudo-Progressivist ideas: they “looked forward to a more rational and scientific future in which collective action sometimes trumped individual interests” (p. 80).

Chapter 3

The rise of public investment in railroads shows that while Southerners resisted “federal expenditures on internal improvements,” they did not oppose such state investment on the local and state levels, and in fact recognized that it was required because of slavery and shifting cultivation, wich “meant sparse free populations and limited urban growth, thus preventing railroads from generating revenue and profits” (p. 82). Yet the failure of railroads to transform the Southern economy as their supporters hoped only embolded secessionist modernizers who believed the region would not shift fundamentally as long as traditionalists could fall back on dependence on the North. And ultimately (p. 84):

the logic of the southern railroad supporters helps explain the tremendous growth of the Confederate government during the Civil War. If the defense of slavery required activist state governments during the antebellum period, then surely the defense of slavery justified an activist national government during a time of war and crisis. For Virginians and South Carolinians, public support of large-scale enterprise was hardly a revolutionary experience born of wartime exigency. It was, in fact, the norm of the antebellum period.

Indeed, what railroad development did occur in the antebellum period basically required state support because tracks ran so far ahead of demand, thanks to the sparse population (much of which was enslaved). Yet those problems, along with shifting cultivation, doomed most antebellum railroad ventures: “Failing to correct the region’s fundamental economic problems, state activism produced a boom in railroad construction without revolutionizing the southern economy” (p. 104). Yet this, like the failure of agricultural reformers, ultimately helped secessionists.

Chapter 4

Tariff and trade policy.

Chapter 5

When war came, long secessionist support for an activist state in defense of slavery paved the way for Confederate interventions, “war socialism” (p. 143), and “centralized control of the economy” (p. 141). (Majewski says there was “surprisingly little opposition” to this, but I wonder if Texas case supports.)

While Majewski concedes that some politicians drew on states’ rights and limited government rhetoric, he argues that they did so instrumentally: “When secessionists perceived that states’ rights doctrines would not serve their purposes, they readily abandoned them” (p. 144). He uses Texas senator Louis Wigfall as a prime example; while nominally states rights and anti-manufacture and development, he “called for the creation of a free public university … supported federal subsidies to encourage railroads,” including the proposal of two national railroads through “extensive land grants and sweetheart loans totaling $70 million” (145).

The “Prussian road” taken by the Confederate state during the War, for Majewski, represented the culmination of these nationalizing impulses; like mccurry2010, Majewski concludes by arguing that instead of Confederate nationalism being too weak, it was too strong to unite the conflicting interests of those (Upcountry farmers, slaves, etc.) who did not benefit from state activism as much as the secessionist class did.