Planters' Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia.

Planters' Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia. By Chad Morgan. Foreword by John David Smith. New Perspectives on the History of the South. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2005. Pp. xii, 163. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-2872-8.)

The scope of Chad Morgan's thoughtful study Planters' Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia is unexpectedly ambitious. An examination of a single Confederate state during the Civil War, it is equal parts economic and intellectual history. Morgan contends that Georgia's relatively substantial economic development before the war, as well as its location "at the nexus of the older and newer Old South," provides an excellent case study of a state where the planter class developed an increasingly dynamic industrial economy in peace and war (p. 3). Specifically, building upon trends present before secession, the war offered the hegemonic planter class the opportunity to employ "state power to promote progress." Though their effort collapsed along with their revolution, the attempt "represented a singular historical process: a nonrevolutionary modernization overseen by a landed elite" (p. 1). Morgan maintains that planters, unlike more entrepreneurial, individualistic northern businessmen, relied upon the state and Confederate governments to develop and control industrialization. Furthermore, the planter statist project that existed in Georgia, and in relative levels elsewhere across the South, confirmed what southern intellectuals like Henry Hughes and George Fitzhugh had argued before the war, namely that slavery and modern economic development were quite compatible.

Morgan offers several persuasive examples of where the state and, eventually, the Confederate governments promoted industry either through economic and legal incentives or through outright ownership. Josiah Gorgas, Confederate chief of ordnance, and, at the state level, Governor Joseph Brown spent considerable energy building munitions facilities, expanding textile mills, and making other wartime installations in such cities as Macon, Columbus, Augusta, and Atlanta. This "Confederate state industrialization" spurred the development of private manufacturing and, more important, consolidated the power of the planter class by eliminating the state's dependence upon northern goods and capital (p. 45). Of course, as the war turned against the Confederacy, the role government played in southern society moved well beyond the organization of industry to include the reallocation of industrial labor and the creation of a welfare program. The latter effort, though largely a failure in alleviating the dire living conditions that threatened the growing ranks of poor Georgia families, was of particular concern for state political leaders, and, according to Morgan, it "broke new ground and fundamentally changed the role of government in a southern state" (p. 100). By the end of 1864 the destruction that Union forces had inflicted brought this experiment in wartime statism to end.

This work is extensively researched and generally well written. In places, however, the often conflicting voices of the Georgia planter class are lost amid the government documents and newspaper editorials that tend to focus upon bureaucratic matters or abstract economic arguments. Furthermore, Morgan's discussion of antebellum Georgia contains little to no discussion of party politics and the economy. Finally, some might question whether a case study of a single southern state contending with the extreme conditions imposed by the Civil War can reveal much about how most members of the planter class, beyond the unusual views of intellectuals like Hughes and Fitzhugh, envisioned the role of the state during peacetime. Nevertheless, Planters' Progress grapples with several fundamental questions about southern identity and economic continuity over the course of the nineteenth century. Morgan has written a fine work that should be read by anyone interested in the Civil War's economic impact upon the South.

FRANK J. BYRNE

State University of New York at Oswego