William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

SYNOPSIS:

William and Jane Pease develop a wide array of data drawn from censuses, city directories, newspapers, church records, and municipal records to compare Boston and Charleston in the antebellum period. They are most concerned with class structures and the activities and social structures of the elite leading the cities. They conclude that significant differences characterized these places. First, they find that Boston was a city of greater human capital, taking full advantage of resources and free labor to energize and develop a dynamic capitalism. Second, they find that Charleston languished in the satisfaction of slavery's social benefits to white elites, no matter that its profitability suffered on worn-out soil and in depressed cotton and rice markets. The Peases describe an aggressively industrial North, where the ambitious sorts of men had set aside agrarian values and agricultural profits.

The differences the Peases find between these cities generally fit a larger framework of Yankee dynamism and Southern languor in society and economy. Boston's Unitarian establishment, for example, the Peases claim, set a tone of liberalism that "encouraged innovative responses to new economic forces without at the same time threatening social or political stability," while Charleston's Episcopalians and main-line Presbyterians "reinforced traditional values" that "limited the city's ability to seize and exploit new opportunities." (137)

EXCERPT:

"Behind all the calculations and statistics, the counting of bales and the totaling of horsepower, the assessment of resources and the evaluation of experience lay critical differences in values. Share the same plans for urban growth they might. But the business ethic which shaped Boston's dedication to achieving that growth was central to her entire culture, while it was only peripheral in Charleston." (219)

"Boston developed a complex network while Charleston pursued a simpler model. Preoccupied with the benefits of a direct trade with Europe in which southern staples would be exchanged for products manufactured abroad, Charleston pursued, in a publicly subsidized western railroad and an eastward shipping line, the means to expand her function as a hinged tollgate through which imports passed in one direction and exports in the other." (54)

"The same physical and economic realities which limited Charleston's shipping potential also shaped her railroad venture. Her agricultural hinterland promised it only one major cargo--cotton. The paucity of manufacturing throughout Carolina limited the demand for two-way transportation of raw materials and finished products as it also restricted Charleston's potential to become a center for diversified regional marketing." (55)

"The economic development of each city was defined by conditions which no exchange of investment alternatives, management styles, and political strategies could have reversed completely. Boston could be a hub city despite her perch on a small and precipitous peninsula because she was surrounded by a populous and growing hinterland whose manufacturing potential was stoked by the immigrants and commodities which ships brought into her fine harbor. Charleston, by contrast, was an urban oasis in an agricultural land whose soil was deteriorating and whose population was leaving. Charleston's backcountry, no less than her social values and her remoteness from shipping lanes, limited her ability even to be a hinge city." (70)

"It does seem plausible that while Charleston's powerful Episcopal and orthodox Calvinist churches reinforced the traditional values which, in large measure, limited the city's ability to seize and exploit new opportunities, the theological liberalism of Boston's powerful Unitarian establishment encouraged innovative responses to new economic forces without at the same time threatening social or political stability." (137)

"Charleston's justification of education was therefore largely put in individual rather than communal terms. Fathers of high as well as of middling rank, like their Yankee equivalents, urged their sons to study that they might, in future, support themselves." (110)

"Certainly Bostonians shared Charlestonians' eagerness to offer their children the means for upward mobility; and even more surely they offered their city's youth extensive access to free or cheap schooling. But no similarity can hide their fundamental disagreement about the social and economic function of education and the consequent imperative for public schools. In Boston, no matter what one's rank, the primary value of knowledge was its utility." (112)

RELATIONSHIP:

The comparison between North and South of these cities offers an excellent basis for beginning to examine differences and similarities. The Pease's study also offers an excellent appendix on methods and data analysis. In many ways, it seems, the Pease's study sets out to find differences and finds them, then attributes them to slavery and differing attitudes toward modernization. Our study examines some of these same questions but within the context of geographical relationships and finds that the differences are not the ones that the Peases identified. We see little difference in elite views of modernization and we find a dynamic developmental view in the Southern county. We also see a vibrant agricultural Northern community where the connections between commercial agriculture and skilled industrial development make the Northern economic and social logic distinctly different from the South's.

"Although Franklin's wealth was concentrated in its rural agricultural commodities, the county was a commercial hub with numerous businesses and shops more densely concentrated than its Southern counterpart."

"Newspapers in Franklin were little different from those in Augusta, but the orientation of the Repository and Transcript as the lead Republican paper set the county apart from its neighbors and from those in the South."

"Newspapers in Franklin championed agricultural production as the means to future wealth and prosperity."

"Staunton newspapers bore visual and textual markings of slavery, as they regularly contained ads for runaway slaves, slave agents, and slave sales."

"The white literacy rates and educational opportunities in both places were relatively high, but substantially better in Franklin."

"Franklin was slightly more churched than Augusta. Its denominations were more concentrated in the German traditions, but Augusta's churches were larger and more expensive."