Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).

SYNOPSIS:

Bateman and Weiss seek to explain the lack of Southern manufacturing and industry on the eve of the Civil War. They conclude that Southern manufacturing was not entirely backward or lacking in capital formation, but that planters and slaveholders did not participate in industrial enterprises at a high rate, despite the high returns that manufacturing produced for investors. They argue that Southerners were "exceptionally averse to risk, were not knowledgeable about the benefits of diversification, failed to alter their expectations in the light of accumulating evidence on the greater profitability of manufacturing, or attached unagreeably high social costs to industrial diversification." (161)

EXCERPT:

"To the extent that theoretical or applied economic analysis can imply something about the subtleties of human behavior, this study suggests that southerners indeed were different from their Yankee brethren. But it need not imply, as generations of scholars have claimed, that they were irrational beings or that theirs was a precapitalist economy mired in an ignorant devotion to slave agriculture. . . Their differences were a matter of degree, of speed of response and adjustment." (163)

"There is enough evidence of racially integrated factories to discredit any belief that whites universally shunned firms that employed slaves. . . integrated work forces occurred commonly in the extractive and transportation industries, but were also found in "textile mills." (88)

"Fortunately, we need not rely on opinion, qualitative arguments, or scattered evidence to see that slaves were successfully employed in manufacturing and, more important, that many who were not employed in manufacturing were nonetheless capable of being so. There is ample evidence of their being used in manufacturing. (82)

"The absence of available substitutes gives a firm monopoly power whatever its absolute size in the market it serves. When buyers have no alternatives from which to choose, the seller gains price control. In this sense, monopoly power probably existed throughout the antebellum southern manufacturing markets." (145) "While the aggregate size of [the South's] industrial economy may have been sufficiently large, the region was not a unified market, but was composed of many small, local markets." (144)

"Given the antebellum South's poor overland transport facilities, its widely dispersed and predominantly rural population, the nature of most of its manufactured products (heavy, low-valued relative to weight, natural resource intensive), its sales distribution methods, and the imperfect information channels, one could anticipate in this era that for most products even a state market definition would overstate actual market size as viewed by most buyers and sellers." (146)

RELATIONSHIP:

Bateman and Weiss adopt methods similar to ours for examining the linkages between slaveholders and industrial enterprises. We agree with Bateman and Weiss that Southern industry was far from backward or lacking in capital formation, but we find no evidence to support the idea that Southern leaders were averse to risk or that they perceived a social stigma to investing in industries. In our study the most successful planters were also engaged in related low-skill industries, such as distilling or lumbering.

"Enslaved labor was integral to Augusta's industries--woolen mills, distilleries, flour mills, lumber mills, and iron foundries--while skilled white artisan shops were small in number and scale and virtually free of enslaved labor."

"Chambersburg was a larger place than Staunton, but no more vibrant or connected to the market than its Southern counterpart."

"Franklin and Augusta exhibited different spatial organizations, with a more organized and commercial approach in Franklin and a settlement in Augusta that followed the contours of soil and land more closely."

"The Chambersburg newspapers sold a greater range of products than their counterparts in Staunton, and businesses there faced greater competition as well."