SOURCE: O’Brien, Michael. “Modernization and the Nineteenth-Century South.” In Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History, pp. 112-28. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1981, O'Brien surveys historical treatments of the South from the prewar decades to Reconstruction, emphasizing the theme of historical continuity.]

Students of the South have not infrequently arrived late to historical theory about to go, or just gone, into disrepute. Modernization theory is no exception. Southern historians have begun to flirt with it just when it has come to seem little more than the natural successor to Social Darwinism as a beguilingly comprehensive explanation of historical change. The “Third World” has been treated (and still is by some) as out in the jungle of economic and social history, there awaiting the opportunity of Lamarckian will power to join that happy few who bellowed instructions from well-defended clearings about the appropriate techniques for accelerating evolution. William Graham Sumner did not doubt that the apex of evolution had been reached in his Yale classroom and local church. We did not question that modernity was us: our kind of class structures, nation-states, democratization, standing armies, educational systems, replacement of kinship networks with bureaucracies, our complicities of formal and informal imperialisms. While many of the most energetic proponents of modernization theory, such as Walt Rostow, were Americans, most of the basic theoretical work was European. Indeed, Americans applied the theory earlier and with more zest to societies such as Japan and Korea than they did to themselves: it was only in 1976 that Richard D. Brown, in Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865, applied the concept systematically, and briefly, to the American historical experience. Yet the fount, European theory, never quite took account of the eccentricities of America—its lack of a sufficiently traditional society from which the graph of modernization could be plotted, its lack of aristocracy, its diffuse religion, its migratory and broken kinship networks, its belated and ambiguous centralization. It tended to be considered as a footnote to European history or as the first of the new nations, a rough blueprint for the eager “Third World,” by those historians who had a taste for fitting the United States into an international pattern.¹ Most American historians, of course, the workhorses of the profession, had no such taste and were inclined to cling to the notion of American exceptionalism. Conversely, those who dabbled in European theory were least likely to have an intimate acquaintance with the raw data of American history.

Of late this unsatisfactory schizophrenia has lessened. American historiography, once practiced with a complacent and denuded Rankeanism, has become awash with Annalistes, Russian formalists, structuralists, Hegelians, Marxists both Althusserian and Thompsonian cakes and ale. What Gramsci thought to learn in the factories of Turin and the prisons of Mussolini has been transferred to the slave quarters of Louisiana. American historical writing has become as cosmopolitan as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fascinating and yet mostly borrowed, as international as the jet that carries Harvard and Stanford illuminati to the latest conference in Rome. This bibulous intellectual interchange might be an unmixed blessing were it not for a persistent fact of the relationship between Europe and the United States. Theory has not been an American strength. As David Potter once observed, “If Americans have failed effectively to interpret their experience to people in other societies, it is in part because they have not always been able to explain it to themselves.”² European theory, worked out in and for European conditions, has still a disproportionate prestige for American intellectuals, while American history remains an exotic irrelevance for most European theorists. The circle of intellectual influences is not closed. Harvard brings back from Paris the latest insight and applies it to Massachusetts. Paris brings back from Harvard the comforting memory of men in agreement. La Vendée and Alabama are not created equal in the birth of theory.

If the United States has been the junior partner of European theory, its Southern region has been on the distaff side of American studies. Thus dispossessed, the South has been hard to locate in the curve or curves of modernization and made to do service in a number of theoretical categories—as incompetent American democratic capitalist, as extenuated European traditional, as Third World plantation colonial. One might agree that with the New South at last triumphant, the South has arrived as a modern society, but at a moment when we no longer agree on the definition, inevitability, or permanence of “modernity.” It is little wonder that new books on the South, recently sensitive to the issue, are less than unanimous in their reflections.

John McCardell's The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830-1860 is a useful starting point, not because it breaks fresh ground, but as a handy and economically written synthesis of traditional approaches to Southern nationalism, that crucial element in any theory or fact of the region's modernization. McCardell, unusual for the young scholar, who is reared to believe that historiography is institutionalized parricide, seems content that tradition needs, not correction, but summary. “So valuable has been the work of … students of Southern history, so thorough their research,” he writes, “that a comprehensive examination of the growth of an ideology of Southern nationalism is now possible.” As befits a student of David Donald, he regards that nationalism as an aberration mercifully defeated, a misreading of the genuine social unity of North and South. “It is incorrect,” McCardell observes, “to think of Northerners and Southerners in 1860 as two distinct peoples. Their intellectual, political, social, and economic beliefs were generally shared and were not determined solely on sectional grounds. But one issue—slavery—gave such an ideological charge to all other questions that by 1860 America was on the verge of civil strife.”³ So slavery became a distorting mirror, turning the sectionalism of the American Revolution into the nationalism of Yancey through the catalysts of the Missouri and Nullification crises. It created the proslavery argument, the demand for and birth of a “Southern” literature, the economic analysis that falteringly sired the Southern Commercial Conventions of the 1840s and 1850s, the defection of Southern religion from national organizations, the “Southernization” of Manifest Destiny, the role of Southern nationalists themselves in secession. All this is familiar, though previously scattered in books such as William Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee, Donald Mathews's Slavery and Methodism, William Jenkins's Proslavery Thought in the Old South, or William Freehling's Prelude to Civil War.⁴ McCardell makes a brief bow in the direction of Clifford Geertz's definition of ideology as a response to social, cultural, or psychological strain, a bow that, as John Higham has suggested, has become almost mandatory for American intellectual historians.⁵ But in McCardell's neutral pages, this definition only serves to reinforce the older view that slavery was the entering wedge of a misperception, that it grew beyond bounds, and that the intensity of Southern nationalism was the mark of that guilty unreality. So we get a narrative conceptually indistinguishable from one that could have been written thirty years ago. Doubtless the book's narrative ambition partly explains McCardell's unwillingness to arbitrate crucial disagreements among Southern historians. He is eager to keep prose smooth, and at each moment of reliance upon historians of divergent perspective he placates and tidies, and we arrive at Fort Sumter in a more benign temper than seems plausible or necessary. It is a progression that usually mollifies, but sometimes ignores, difficulties in the historiography. Not least among these is that the energy spent upon the South's social and political history has not been matched for its intellectual history, which may explain why McCardell tends to treat the region's mind as a simple deduction from its social life. And perhaps greatest among these is that, as with most books on the South, it wishes desperately to explain the Civil War, so the Old South itself, its dynamics and character, becomes obscured by the narrative fixation upon secession and Appomattox.

The possibility that the South was a modernizing society is not considered by McCardell, which is a function of his traditionalism. Thereby he deprives himself of a useful rationale for studying the region's cultural life and of making necessary connections with the “new” social history. Without such links, studies of that cultural life will be condemned to a certain sterility. Scholars of the Old South can usefully weigh Joyce Appleby's recommendation to students of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England that modernization theory has unduly neglected the intellectual response to modernization and that the “particular conceptual bridges men and women build to carry them into the unfamiliar territory of a radically altered future must be examined as discrete developments because there is nothing in modernization theory to account for them as parts of a process.”⁶

Curiously, a clearer lead is given, even for the intellectual historian, in Mills Thornton's Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860. Here the Civil War is regarded as accident rather than substance. The details of state politics are ruthlessly to the fore and considered, not as handy illustrations of Southern or national affairs, but for their own sake, a sake that happens to aid in understanding secession. “To comprehend why,” Thornton writes, “when a stone is thrown into a pond, there is a splash, it is necessary to understand the nature of stone, but it is equally necessary to know something about water.”⁷ And what was the quality of Alabama water, ruffled by the stones of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the election of Lincoln? Muddy and turbulent.

The contention that slavery was at the root of Alabama politics will surprise no one. The claim that those politics were thoroughly Jacksonian in rhetoric and practice will startle a few, reared on quasi-feudal theories of Southern political life, though it should not. Evidence has been abundant for several years that the Old South underwent the same democratization that marked Northern society, and has recently been reinforced by William Cooper's The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828-1856.⁸ Both Cooper and Thornton have helped to resolve a schizophrenia in which slavery and Jacksonianism have been kept discrete. Students of Jacksonianism and the “common man,” such as Fletcher Green and Frank Owsley, have sloughed off the matter of slavery as a cuckoo in the nest of a yeoman Southern society, a bird destined to tumble out. Scholars of slavery, such as Eugene Genovese, have assumed without stooping to proof that the slaveholding elite (itself an extensive body, as Otto Olsen has shown) controlled Southern society. George Fredrickson has made a useful stab at resolving the contradiction by characterizing the Old South as a Herrenvolk democracy, but Thornton is the first historian to provide a satisfactory explanation of the vital connection where it most matters, by documenting the day-by-day, election-by-election pressure of a functioning democracy in a slave society.⁹

Thornton argues that Alabama politics, popular and Jacksonian, were imbued with the republican ideology of fearing enslavement by a centralizing tyranny. If here Thornton sounds like the Bernard Bailyn of the Black Belt, the implication is not unjust and would not be resisted. Much interesting work upon early nineteenth-century America has of late been mining Bailyn's insight into the Revolution.¹⁰ That Alabamians should have seen an embodiment of tyranny in the Republican party and the free-soil movement, which challenged their right to export their slave version of American republican democracy to the West, or that the North posed the challenge of a modernization that agitated the quintessential Jacksonian fear, the extinction of individual social autonomy, are not entirely novel insights. What is novel and striking is Thornton's suggestion that the pressure of modernization came not only from the North but from within Alabamian society, was posed not merely by Northerner upon Southerner but by Alabamian. “The boom in cotton prices during this decade [the 1850s],” Thornton explains, “generated investment capital, permitting the construction of a rail network. Areas of the State previously isolated began to move into the market economy. The banking system, essentially abolished during the depression [of the late 1830s], was recreated. Cities grew rapidly, and a portion of the electorate, dazzled by the new prosperity, began to vote for candidates who advocated aggressive governmental programs to develop the economy and to assist the citizenry. Government at all levels became much more active; its expenditures increased enormously. A statewide public school system was created. Control of the political mechanism began slipping away from the hands of poorer citizens, as the influence of great planters in the state's political life assumed significance for the first time. These events, refracted through the remaining elements of the state's political ideology, assumed a profoundly menacing appearance and this intensified the fears which had been the raw material of Alabama politics from the earliest days.”¹¹ These fears the Southern Rights movement, led by William Yancey, exploited. Secession became a flight not merely from ominously modernizing Notherners but from the confusions of a changing Alabama as well.

This is an ingenious and satisfying argument, rich in implications not only for antebellum and Civil War historiography but also for Reconstruction, for it helps to locate some of the roots of Reconstruction legislation in the 1850s.¹² The ingenuity can be gauged from its reconciliation of historiographical viewpoints previously deemed defiantly at odds: Owsley's common man, Bailyn's revolutionary ideology, and, not least, David Donald's contention that the pell-mell growth of American society combined with an “excess of democracy” to create the conditions for civil strife.¹³ Equally it gives flesh to the bare hint in Richard Brown's book that the “growing tension between the eager modernization of the North and the incomplete, reluctant modernization of the South was influential both in bringing on the war and in determining its outcome” and makes less puzzling the clear evidence, adduced by Raimondo Luraghi and Emory Thomas, that the Confederacy managed a modern war with remarkable thoroughness and little ideological discomfort.¹⁴

The main difficulty with Thornton's case lies not with Alabama. Here he has been thorough to the point of redundancy, as though conscious that only by bludgeoning his reader into submission can he make so unorthodox an interpretation successful. But he suggests that Alabama may be said to stand for the South, thus yielding to that old and almost honorable weakness of the state historian, the guilty feeling that state politics are not quite enough. It almost always comes in the dying paragraphs of such histories, and one would have hoped that Thornton, usually sensible and properly aggressive at the volume's opening about the greater significance of state over national politics in the early nineteenth century, would have resisted temptation. Here one is skeptical. Not all Southern states participated so richly in the boom of the 1850s to generate the investment capital, whose use was so beguilingly menacing to Alabamians. Not all Southern states, least of all South Carolina, secession's catalyst, participated so thoroughly in the Jacksonian revolution, though all were heirs of the Revolution's republican ideology. Not all Southern Rights leaders were young men seeking a place in the political sun. In short, not all Southern states made so abrupt a transition from a decentralized Jacksonian political economy to a modernizing one, nor were all so unused to having great planters, booted and spurred in the manner of George Fitzhugh's daydream, in the saddle. And the tension of that abruptness is so crucial to Thornton's case, so lovingly demonstrated by statistics of suicides, murders, and divorces, that its softening elsewhere in the region casts serious doubt upon the extendability of his thesis.¹⁵ Nonetheless, the synthesis he suggests has profound implications for the study of antebellum Southern society; not the least of its virtues is that it allows social, political, and intellectual historians common ground on which to jostle.

To turn from Thornton's book to Kenneth Stampp's essays in The Imperiled Union is to move into a different moral world. Thornton is a Southern conservative of the younger generation, Stampp a Northern liberal of the older, though both, even as they might disagree about the merits of democracy, are proponents of the republican tradition. Now that David Potter is dead (and the posthumous publication in 1976 of Potter's The Impending Crisis is a reminder of the depth of that loss), Stampp is the senior student of the Civil War: soundly in the tradition of American liberal nationalists, unwilling to enter into full sympathy with the dilemmas of the South and its peculiar institution (and nothing has marked recent historiography more than the willingness to take seriously evidence from Southern sources, previously deemed irremediably tainted), sanguine about the merits of the Union and its preservers, possessed of a vision that still radiates from the Whiggery of Abraham Lincoln, conscious of detractions from that position but robustly capable of response. Only such a figure could have written the first and most useful essay in this collection, “The Concept of a Perpetual Union,” to outline the notion's tentativeness in 1787 and ambiguity in the controversies of the early nineteenth century, the early strength of the secession argument, the lateness of an adequate defense of the federation's perpetuity. One says only such a figure because this essay is haunted by the moral responsibility of the war and the old question whether the Union had the right to insist upon survival at the price of such havoc, and recent scholarship has shown itself uninterested in the moral rationale of the Union, even as it has been engrossed by the reprehensibility of aspects of American society. Such an engrossment, exemplified in works like Eugene Berwanger's Frontier Against Slavery, Leon Litwack's North of Slavery, and George Fredrickson's Black Image in the White Mind, has, as Stampp admits, destroyed the Republican party's “pristine image as the political arm of the northern crusade against slavery and racial injustice.” But one cannot but be impressed by Stampp's essay “Race, Slavery and the Republican Party,” which insists with cogency that northern Republicanism, from whatever motives, was more moderate in its racism than the Democratic party of Stephen Douglas, a small comfort for blacks but crucial in the context of mid-nineteenth-century politics. Equally useful are Stampp's reflections upon that econometric dodo, Time on the Cross. Less interesting, almost a curiosity, is his attempt to enter that most ancient of Civil War controversies, the repressibility or irrepressibility of the conflict, which had mercifully faded from view as a teleological circumlocution. The essay hazards a first-rate discussion of the historiography of Civil War causation, no mean feat, since so many others have done it, before it launches into a variant of what Stampp has dubbed the “slavery-cultural interpretation,” deployed to demonstrate irrepressibility. To reach that dull conclusion, Stampp does contrive an interesting and novel gambit. It was crucial to the argument of historians such as Charles W. Ramsdell that the “excesses” of abolitionism unnecessarily created the sectional conflict. Stampp neatly turns the argument around by asking, not that abolitionism should have been softened, but what Southerners would have had to do about slavery to ensure an atmosphere of sufficient political tranquillity within the Union. They would, in his opinion, have had to avoid aggressive proslavery positions, adopt reforms of slavery, accept a federal policy of excluding slavery from the territories, and open the peculiar institution to criticism and proposals of gradual manumission. Since none of this happened, or logically could have happened, Stampp concludes upon the irrepressibility of the war. In so doing, for reasons (I hope) of rhetorical symmetry, he uses language about Southerners as intemperate as that of a Ramsdell or an Owsley upon abolitionists. He writes of the “reckless Southern agitation of the slavery expansion issue,” speaks with horror of their encroachments upon freedom of speech, the right of petition to Congress, and, almost most heinous, their violations of the U.S. mails.¹⁶

Stampp's essays imply that there are certain problems a historian is condemned to explain, that no American historian may be said to have earned his laurels until he has hazarded the Civil War, just as the French historian has the French Revolution, and the classical actor, Hamlet. Perhaps the reader may be forgiven for chanting the familiar lines of standard historiographical soliloquies as the historian declaims them and be content that the occasional word has a different emphasis. What is implicit for Stampp is explicit in the collected essays of Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. Foner's work is distinguished by an attempt to keep in balance the new findings of social historians, both European and American, with the older questions of sectional conflict. He seems dissatisfied with the older historiography of the Civil War, yet he is discontented with a new social history that deals in units of historical analysis—the family, ethnic groups, childhood—that are difficult to mobilize in the service of questions like Why was there a Civil War? In modernization Foner finds a useful analytical link, while being aware of the term's imprecision. The Democratic party, he suggests, might be viewed as the representative of two premodern groups, the immigrant Irish and the white South. But among those groups associated with the Republican party that came closest to an ideology of modernity Foner finds great ambiguity. Indeed, it appears easier to locate modernization than to pinpoint modernizers. The abolitionists, although promoting models of internalized self-discipline fit for an industrial society, also obscured the necessity for industrial reform by concentrating upon slavery, not as a social crime, but as the aggregate of individual slaveholders' transgressions against morality. And Northern labor leaders, initially opposed to abolitionism as a distraction, latterly supported the free-soil movement as the reservator of the frontier's safety valve, as, indeed, an escape route from modernization. Foner shrewdly observes, “Lincoln's Union was one of self-made men. … If modernization means the growth of large-scale industry, large cities, and the leviathan state, northerners were no more fighting to create it than were southerners.” Thus the Civil War becomes an irony, because each side “fought to defend a distinct vision of the good society, but each vision was destroyed by the very struggle to preserve it.”¹⁷ For, as Foner sees it, modernization, though implicit in antebellum Northern development, was immensely accelerated by the war itself.

But Foner and Stampp tend to accept Genovese's characterization of the Old South as premodern, ruled by a planting elite opposed to and appalled by the evident modernization of the North and needing secession to evade a modernity that would crush them. But Thornton's analysis, if it proves true not only of Alabama but also of the South, demonstrates that modernization was not something that started north of the Potomac and was only permitted South by the failure of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery. It was present in the Old South and generated the same tense ambivalence that Foner has documented in the North. If so, we glimpse an irony even more savage. It may be that if modernization was a fear of both sections, the origins of the war lie partly in each projecting the dark ground of their trepidations about themselves on to the other, and fighting at Gettysburg private demons in the reassuringly tangible form of a palpable enemy.

Such a suggestion has, of course, formidable difficulties. The potential of the slave economy to evolve into an industrial society has usually been denied, dogmatically by Genovese on the ground that slavery is inherently premodern, more persuasively by Gavin Wright with the contention that the cotton economy did not in the long run generate enough investment capital to make “takeoff” possible.¹⁸ Yet evidence has long been abundant that planters often invested in factories and that slavery did not seem incompatible with manufacturing. Urban life did loosen the shackles of the institution, but many seemed willing to pay that price to reap profits. Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that slavery cannot be regarded as an anomaly in a capitalist system, a point that the Southern planter Frederick Porcher asserted before the Civil War: “When the labouring class is a body of slaves, and only so much capital, its destiny depends upon the decision of the Capitalist.”¹⁹ But the suggestion does not, strictly speaking, require that full modernization (whatever that may be) was possible within a slave society, merely that there should have been enough evidence to persuade contemporaries that it might be. It is well to remember that, outside the North and Britain, the South had the fastest rate of urbanization and industrialization of any “Western” society.

The best answer to the question, What might have happened to the Old South? is, after all, what did happen. It is an answer too often neglected in the eagerness to keep Old South and New discontinuous. War is usually regarded as an aberration by American historians, the fratricidal war especially. Yet if we accept the irrepressibility of the Civil War, there is small reason for regarding the social changes created by the conflict as bearing other than an organic relationship to the society that entered the struggle. If secession was a desperate gamble not merely to keep the North at bay but to hold off change within the South itself, we should not be surprised that change came anyway. The Old South was truly a parent of the New, however unwillingly, the more so for begetting from need and not desire. The Civil War is intrinsic to Southern social development, not extrinsic.

Reconstruction, of course, played a vital part in Charles Beard's case for the Civil War era as a modernizing Second American Revolution, a contention long since abandoned. It is ironic that, with the issue of modernization reemergent in recent writing, Reconstruction should have come to seem weak and ineffective. Black history, for one thing, once intoxicated by the commitment to equality in what C. Vann Woodward called the Second Reconstruction, has taken on a Burger Court gloom. The civil-rights movement has come to seem, not blacks' definitive leap to parity, but only another useful but limited move in their old search for a place in the American sun. One is startled by a sense of déjà vu. Did not Ralph Abernathy, endorsing Ronald Reagan in Detroit in 1980, sound like Booker T. Washington treating circumspectly with the triumphant white South in Atlanta in 1895? Has not the cadaverous Strom Thurmond, restored to power as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, talked of repealing the 1965 Voting Rights Act?²⁰ In such a context, Reconstruction historiography has become, in William Gillette's unimaginative phrase, “post-revisionist.” “Post-revisionism does not reject revisionism,” he explains in his Retreat from Reconstruction, “it is certainly not reactionary in the sense of returning to the undeserved abuse and prejudicial condemnation that characterized the views of the Dunningite historians. However, post-revisionism does seek to replace the tendency of certain neo-revisionist historians to overestimate the accomplishments of Reconstruction and provide apologies for its shortcomings; thus the post-revisionist approach attempts to provide a fresh view with which to analyse the limits of legislation and the manifest failure of Reconstruction.”²¹ Bagehot, I think, said it better in 1857: “It is the day after the feast. We do not care for its delicacies; we are rather angry at its profusion; we are cross to hear it praised.”²² The new historians of Reconstruction are very cross.

It is symptomatic that attention has switched from the fleeting egalitarian moments of the late 1860s, and we now have, for the first time, a systematic account of the Grant administration's Reconstruction policy, to repair an omission scandalous but significant when one remembers that Grant presided over two-thirds of that episode's course. Gillette presents, with mournful enthusiasm, a sorry tale of broken promises, petty cronyism, indifference, abrupt lurches of policy. Most clear is that Grant, whatever tactics he adopted, was doomed to preside over the liquidation of Reconstruction. Most striking is the level of political violence in the Reconstruction South, of government upon government, of citizen upon citizen, of white upon black.²³ If there is merit in seeing the South as a colonial regime, this is when its politics were most those of a banana republic. If ever the coup d'état flourished in the United States, it was during Reconstruction.

In Alabama in 1872, for example, the Democrats lost the governorship, while retaining both houses of the legislature. Republicans charged fraud and, with the connivance of federal judges, jailed several Democratic congressmen, whom Washington released reluctantly. So the Republicans organized their own legislature in the federal courthouse, while the Democrats held the statehouse, and federal troops were stationed warily between them. The new Republican governor, David P. Lewis, ungratefully repudiated the Democratic legislature that had ratified his election and recognized the rival Republican assembly. Grant, having troops, dictated that the Republican legislature would be accepted by Washington unless the Democrats expelled enough of their own party to ensure Republican control of the lower house. To add insult to injury, the Republicans even managed to wrest control of the state senate, a coup that preserved Republican control of Alabama for an extra two years.

In Louisiana in 1872 violence was used to decide the rivalry of Republican factions, when Grant deployed the advantage of 150 soldiers and two Gatling guns. In the same year the president generously provided a federal cutter, amply supplied with cigars and champagne, to detain fourteen senators upon the Mississippi River and prevent a quorum favorable to Grant's Republican opponents. Again rival legislatures appeared, one encamped in the agreeable surroundings of the bar of the Gem Saloon, and throughout 1873 rival Republicans fought each other violently throughout the state. In 1874 the struggle shifted to that between Republicans and Democrats. In September the White Leaguers, a paramilitary cadre of Democratic persuasion, attacked New Orleans with eight thousand men; seized the city hall, the statehouse, the arsenals, and the police stations; cut the telegraph wires; and barricaded the streets, at the loss of thirty-two lives and seventy-nine wounded. Grant sent five thousand troops and three gunboats to crush the rebellion.

In Arkansas in 1874 the Democratic and Liberal Republican claimant of the governorship, Joseph Brooks, seized the armory, the statehouse, and the governor's office in Little Rock. The state saw a minor civil war between rival militia before the coup proved successful, with Grant's acquiescence. Reconstruction was the continuation of Civil War by other means; it was also, it seems, the continuation by the same means. In this context, the settlement of the disputed presidential election of 1876 by peaceful, if disreputable, negotiation was the ending of Reconstruction with a whimper and not a bang.

It cannot be said that Gillette's study, though it is detailed, useful, and truculent, helps much in assessing the social purpose and consequences of Reconstruction. Save in some recent writing upon the history of blacks, society has taken a second place to the chronicle of political shenanigans, which are the burden of the essays in Reconstruction and Redemption in the South, a recent and convenient symposium about events in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, and Louisiana. Much more helpful are Jonathan Wiener's Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 and Dwight Billings's Planters and the Making of a “New South”: Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900.

If recent historical literature has slighted the matter of racial and social equality, that is not a tendency in which Weiner acquiesces. His book, whose title echoes that of C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South with a conscious challenge, makes social oppression central to Southern history. Wiener's Alabama is launched upon a “Prussian Road” to industrial modernity, a road sponsored by a conservative agrarian elite, in the interests of their survival at the price of repression. “Reconstruction,” Wiener writes, “was the culmination of a bourgeois revolution, a life-or-death struggle over the nature and extent of the nation's transition to modern society. In this conflict, northeastern businessmen formed an alliance with urban workers and small farmers in the Northwest, against southern planters; the victory of this bourgeois coalition destroyed the national power of the planter class and thereby abolished the principal obstacle to democratic capitalist development. In so doing they ruled out the possibility that the nation would take what Barrington Moore has called the ‘Prussian Road’ to modern society, based on a coalition of northern industrialists with southern planters, against small farmers, urban workers and slaves, in a society which developed by preserving and intensifying the authoritarian and repressive elements of traditional social relations.”²⁴ As for the South, things were, it seems, Teutonically otherwise. At least they might have been. In fact, Wiener's book is not about the South at all, not even about Alabama, but mostly about the Black Belt of Alabama. In this he is using synecdoche in a way as traditional in Southern historiography as it is absurd.

Several propositions are crucial to Wiener's case. The planter elite, he claims, survived the war diminished but intact, still in control of Alabama society and politics, but with a new relationship to the “social relations of production.” The abolition of slavery posed a new problem of the social control of labor, both black and white. For whites, the solution was sharecropping. With the rise of tenancy, however, came the economic challenge of the merchant, “who tried to use the crop lien to gain control of plantation agriculture.” By discriminatory legislation, planters succeeded in confining merchants to the hill country, away from the Black Belt. So planters necessarily became planter-merchants, and merchants became merchant-landlords. The greatest challenge, however, was the iron, steel, and coal city of Birmingham, the New South's most conspicuous industrial achievement. According to Wiener, this innovation was moderated and disciplined by the planter regime to make Birmingham not a challenge but an adjunct. Squeezed between planters who restricted corporation law, hindered local aid to industry, and reduced the social mobility of black and white labor and Northern steel manufacturers who feared competition, Birmingham behaved itself, especially when populism made a planter-industrialist coalition necessary. There was, Wiener concedes, a genuine ideological challenge in the New South creed, but the mythological Old South, so integral a part of that creed, was a sign of weakness on the part of the new bourgeoisie, a necessary concession to the still powerful planter regime. “By accommodating their position to the Old South myth,” Wiener writes, “the New South ideologists lost a crucial battle in their attempt to win hegemony for their view of society, and betrayed their own class interests.”²⁵

This could be viewed as a healthy step towards placing Southern history into comparative perspective. As a piece of comparative history, however, it is most disappointing. For a book whose avowed contribution is the South's presence upon a “Prussian Road,” it is startling that not a single reference to Prussian or German history can be found in its pages. Wiener relies upon Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy with touching fidelity, yet Moore makes only passing reference to Prussia and is there, by his own admission, most derivative from (though Wiener says nothing of this) Max Weber's early essays upon German social structure. It was perhaps a prudent omission on Wiener's part. The real Prussian road looks rather different from Alabama: the state inherited from preindustrial times a tradition of intervention in the economy and continued that tradition at the moment of industrialization; the banks, as well as the state, were crucial sponsors of social and economic change, in distinction to the English experience of individual entrepreneurship; the Junkers were an aristocracy, demanding and receiving class deference and heirs to a military tradition, itself hierarchical; Prussia retained an explicitly undemocratic political structure; the bourgeoisie were slow to make political claims upon the state, in exchange for the material benefits of industrial profits; Bismarck, to preserve real power, made provision for a system of social welfare to retain the loyalty of the new working classes. None of these conditions is true of Alabama, and none can be deducted from the Prussian analogy without rendering it absurd. Alabama inherited an essentially laissez-faire political economy; the banks played no special role in its industrialization; the planters were no aristocracy, nor did they receive much deference beyond the prerogatives of wealth; Alabama had a democratic political system, notably in theory if less perfectly in practice; the bourgeoisie had no reluctance about making their political presence felt; the “Bourbon” regime developed no system of social welfare, and indeed, it reduced the scale of government activity. As Prussians, Alabamians cut a sorry figure.

Wiener takes no account of Thornton's book on antebellum Alabama, which must now stand as the most significant account of that entity. He does note that Politics and Power in a Slave Society “appeared too late to be included in this study,” which is curious. Thornton's book has been available as a Yale dissertation since 1974, and other scholars, notably Michael Holt and William Cooper, have used it. Certainly the two books bear almost no relationship to one another: Thornton's Jacksonian Alabama, whose politics were “swept constantly by gales of extraordinary fury,”²⁶ abruptly disappears in Wiener's tidily dialectical Alabama, and the distinction is more than chronological. It is Wiener's estimate of the power of state government that most marks him from Thornton. While there is little reason to doubt the social repression of Black Belt planters, it is improbable that they or the state government, through which they exercised their power, had the ability to arrange matters with such precision. Wiener's book is an excellent example of that recent American historiography that borrows European theory without sensitivity to either the origins of the theory or the context into which it must be applied. It is clothing with the label ripped out, picked up at a garage sale.

Dwight Billing's volume on North Carolina is otherwise, written in a spirit less dogmatic and with a range of reference wider and more persuasive, although he, too, poses a challenge to Woodward's interpretation of the New South as a discontinuity from the Old, a society industrially transformed by a new middle class. Billings argues that antebellum North Carolina had begun a serious movement towards industrialization, that there seemed no contradiction between a slave society and modest industry, that postbellum development of cotton mills was an extrapolation from that prewar experience and was chiefly sponsored by planter families who fashioned a conservative modernization in which traditional social controls of both black and white labor were maintained. The only industry significantly created by a new bourgeoisie was that of tobacco, a by no means small exception. Partly, Billings draws upon theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Barrington Moore, though he has bothered to read German history, so that he can highlight the dissimilarities of Prussian and North Carolinian experience. By this admixture, Billings defines North Carolina, not as simply a colonial economy (which was Woodward's tendency), but as “an economically peripheral region within the American economy”—like the colonial economies of the “Third World” but with considerably greater financial resources and options.²⁷ Most of the cotton mills, he establishes, were financed by Southern, and not Northern, capital. Unlike Wiener, Billings extends his analysis substantially to include the Populist revolt of the 1890s, an extension indispensable if Woodward is to be systematically refuted. Populism in North Carolina, as Billings sees it, was a revolt not of the poor and illiterate but of the lesser landed in disagreement with the conservative modernization of those whose power rested doubly upon land and factory. Thus the Republican-Populist fusion of the 1890s was a serious challenge to the conservatives, but the “progressive” triumph of Charles B. Aycock in 1900 was not so much a middle-class assertion as a reestablishment of conservative power, with a weak middle class striking a Prussian deal. The reforms of that progressive regime, in education, in social welfare, in the construction of a highway system, were a genuinely Bismarckian bargain, reforms that modified the techniques of social control, while not surrendering the substance of economic and political power. If this thesis sounds familiar to readers of Wilbur Cash, that is not a coincidence. Cash based his thesis solidly upon knowledge of Piedmont North Carolina, even as he grotesquely overgeneralized from that experience to the rest of the South. Moreover, those who would refute Woodward, the most important proponent of discontinuity in Southern history, have often been obliged to speak kindly of Cash, the advocate of continuity. Here Billings is modestly persuasive, mostly by the quantitative evidence that demonstrates planter involvement in industry, partly by politely indicating that much of Woodward's case rested on shaky and impressionistic evidence.

Billings offers a sensible, literate, and fruitful approach to the social problem of continuity. His modesty of tone is refreshing after Wiener's aggressive and complacent dogmatism, which leads the reader to feel that dissent might be construed as moral turpitude.²⁸ Billings has perhaps the lesser talents, but his tidiness and economy of line have the greater effect. Yet both usefully intimate the same strategic decision that informs the essays of Eric Foner: we have taken the Civil War too seriously as a divide, and the bridge across the psychological chasm of Appomattox may rest upon the uncertain timbers of modernization theory. Much remains undone, not only for Southern history in the nineteenth century but for modernization theory itself, which is best used, not as a way to document how societies approximate to or deviate from a Platonic form laid up in the file cabinets of the Rand Corporation, but as an approach to the varieties of modernity, of which none are conceptually definitive. It would be appropriate that the American South, one of the Industrial Revolution's most important stepchildren, should make a contribution to the latter task through its historians. Too often we have been content to provide—using appropriately for a Southern theme the slogan of a lost cause—an echo, not a choice.

Notes

1. For example, Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York, 1963).

2. David M. Potter, “Civil War,” in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed., C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1968), 135.

3. John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830-1860 (New York, 1979), 8, 3.

4. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York, 1961); Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780-1845 (Princeton, 1965); William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1935); William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (New York, 1966).

5. John Higham, Introduction to New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore, 1979), xvi-xvii.

6. Joyce Appleby, “Modernization Theory and the Formation of Modern Social Theories in England and America,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (April 1978): 261.

7. J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978), xvii.

8. William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828-1856 (Baton Rouge, 1978), is prey to a circular logic, however; it assumes that Southern politics are centrally about slavery, proceeds to document what politicians said on the matter of slavery (with, it must be said, great skill and thoroughness), and then triumphantly concludes that this demonstrates the centrality of slavery.

9. Fletcher M. Green, Constitutional Development in the South Atlantic States, 1776-1860 (Chapel Hill, 1930); Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge, 1950); Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in the Interpretation (New York, 1969); Otto H. Olsen, “Historians and the Extent of Slave Ownership in the Southern United States,” Civil War History 17 (June 1972): 101-16; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971).

10. [Since 1981 this mining has gone on apace, such that Genovese has now felt moved to exclaim, when reviewing Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore, 1985), in the Journal of Southern History 53 (February 1987): 111-12: “In keeping with current fashion, Mr. Greenberg cannot resist casting too much of his argument within the framework of that ‘republicanism’ that has become the hobbyhorse of those who seek to subsume contradictory and even mutually antagonistic political ideas under a single rubric. ‘Republicanism’ has its uses but is now so widely stretched and abused as to justify a sharp reaction. Personally, I cannot even bring myself to paraphrase that fabled Nazi and exclaim, ‘When I hear the word “republicanism” I reach for my revolver.”’]

11. Thornton, Politics and Power, xix.

12. [See, now, J. Mills Thornton III, “Fiscal Policy and the Failure of Radical Reconstruction in the Lower South,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York, 1982), 349-94.]

13. David Donald, “An Excess of Democracy: The American Civil War and the Social Process,” in Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (New York, 1956), 209-35; this was Donald's inaugural address as Harmsworth Professor at Oxford, which may help to explain its Tory tone and willingness to use Henry James as an expositor of American social history.

14. Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (New York, 1976), 183; Raimondo Luraghi, “The Civil War and the Modernization of American Society: Social Structure and Industrial Revolution in the Old South Before and During the War,” Civil War History 18 (September 1972): 230-50; Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865 (New York, 1979).

15. [Now, however, powerful support for Thornton has been supplied in the most unlikely state, South Carolina. See Lacy K. Ford, “Social Origins of a New South Carolina: The Upcountry in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1983).]

16. Kenneth M. Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York, 1980), 107, 235.

17. Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1980), 32, 33.

18. Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1978). But it is important to remember, here as elsewhere, that Wright's analysis applies only to those parts of the South identical with the cotton economy, which are not interchangeable with the whole region.

19. Immanuel Wallerstein, “American Slavery and the Capitalist World-Economy,” American Journal of Sociology 81 (March 1976): 1199-1213; “The Memoirs of Frederick Adolphus Porcher,” ed. Samuel Gaillard Stoney, South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 47 (April 1946): 95.

20. [Though Burger has given way to Rehnquist, Thurmond is relegated to the minority, and the Voting Rights Act survives though diffidently enforced, the times are still Thermidorean.]

21. William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge, 1979), 450.

22. The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot, ed. Mrs. Russell Barrington, 10 vols. (London, 1915), 2:323, quoted in W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (London, 1964), 55.

23. [On this see, now, George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens, Ga., 1984).]

24. Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 3.

25. Ibid., 219.

26. Thornton, Politics and Power, 444.

27. Dwight B. Billings, Jr., Planters and the Making of a “New South”: Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, 1979), 34.

28. Cf. Jonathan M. Wiener, “Class Structure and Economic Development in the American South, 1865-1955,” American Historical Review 84 (October 1979): 970-92, and the indignant comment by Robert Higgs, 993-97.