https://cwba.blogspot.com/2019/09/review-industrial-development-and.html
Yet another author claims to correct all that went before. We have other references that range from slavey was no hindrance to slavery had advantages over free labor in industry.
According to both contemporary northern critics and the works of later scholars, the antebellum American South's agrarian export economy based on slave labor was incompatible with modernizing industrial development. Even many southerners at the time publicly extolled this view, some seeing it as a point of pride. Popular and scholarly traditions together hold that the antebellum South was lacking in every important prerequisite for industrial establishment and growth, namely the availability of locally-sourced raw materials, excess labor for skilled and unskilled factory work, sufficient capital investment, adequate transportation networks, and markets (local or regional) for native-produced goods. A fascinating and highly illuminating study, Michael Frawley's Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluationexamines all of these alleged hindrances to modernization in turn and arrives at a series of very different conclusions.
Of course, the South's workforce percentage employed in industry in 1860 was dwarfed by the North's, but Frawley found little evidence to show that worker availability or willingness to toil in factory environments were limiting factors. Even so, just because the South's working population outside of agriculture was adequate for industrial growth does not mean their workers were good at their jobs. However, on that point as well, the book finds that southern workers compared favorably with their northern counterparts. Using one traditional measure of productivity (output per worker), Frawley's calculated Gulf South figures were in line with the national average (just slightly lower), demonstrating that southern whites were willing and entirely able to perform industrial work of all kinds
Other authors suggest that the industrialization started much earlier and then stalled and declined.
No one, including the author, will argue that the industrial capacity of the American South of 1860 had any hope of directly competing with the North's in the coming Civil War, but that's arguably an unfair basis of comparison. Just on manufacturing rankings that use the already demonstrably flawed census data, the states that comprised the Confederacy were already fifth in the world in cotton product manufacturing and eighth in iron production. Thus, though still in its infancy in terms of scale relative to the North, southern industry was already flourishing and regionally integrated by the end of the decade preceding the Civil War. Though much in the way of finished manufactured goods and armaments passed through the blockade, it says something about the South's native manufacturing base that it was able to help the Confederacy stave off the full might of the United States for four full years of industrialized warfare before being ultimately exhausted and overwhelmed. Though still small-scale in absolute terms, Gulf South industry is amply demonstrated through Michael Frawley's formidable corrective to be much more widespread and modern than traditionally supposed. Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South builds a powerful case that the industrial renaissance commonly presumed to have been a product of the postwar New South actually began much earlier during the 1850s.
At $45 it is targeted at a specialized audience, perhaps a captive audience such as an economics student. At some point I may get lucky and find an ex-library copy.
