| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Chad Morgan. Planters' Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia. (New Perspectives on the History of the South.) Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2005. Pp. xi, 163. $55.00.
In this book, Chad Morgan concludes that Georgia's wartime modernization, far from representing a break with its antebellum past, was instead a "remarkable industrial metamorphosis" that had been "a long-sought goal of the state's planter elite." Planter support for modernization was in part enlightened self-interest, for the South needed to industrialize rapidly to have a chance to defeat the North and preserve the institution of slavery. Morgan contends that Georgia's effort was unique and represented "a singular historical process: a nonrevolutionary modernization overseen by a landed elite" (p. 1).	1
Wartime industrialization could not have taken place at such a rapid pace if antebellum barriers to manufacturing had not been lowered. These barriers included planter dependence on cotton's profitability, natural resources (such as coal and iron) that were almost inaccessible, and fall line manufacturing towns that were remote from coastal markets, particularly before railroad construction linked these interior cities to seaports. However, with the depression in cotton prices during the 1830s and 1840s and the arrival of railroads, late antebellum industrialization gained some momentum. The movement was symbolized by the rise of large textile mills, some of them employing 200–400 operatives in fall line cities like Augusta, and the construction of state-owned railroads.	. . .

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