Credit, Collateral and Class Power: Growth and Stagnation in the Cotton South

A standard view of Southern history identifies the Civil War and emancipation as a key stage in the transition to capitalism or “modernization”. This interpretation is closely associated with the work of Charles and Mary Beard, and was epitomized in C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South, a survey of postbellum Southern history that remains highly influential today, more than half a century after its publication.1 For Woodward, the post-war plantation was recast along capitalist lines, with the old planter class adopting the culture of modern businessmen. A more structural version of this interpretation identifies a “market revolution” in the aftermath of the war, in which bondage was replaced by contract in the black belt (Stanley 1998), and subsistence-orientated upland farmers became dependent on markets (Fields 1985; Hahn 1979).