| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America. By Sean Patrick Adams. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xvi, 305 pp. $45.00, ISBN 8-8018-7968-X.)
In the 1790s Virginia's coalfields stood on the verge of dominating the emerging coal industry. In contrast, Pennsylvania's coalfields, trapped in mountain locations, faced a bleak future. By 1860 Pennsylvania ruled coal mining, and Virginia had become a backwater. How did such a reversal occur?	1
Sean Patrick Adams explains this remarkable turn of events through a comparative analysis of the legislatures and institutions of the two states. In Virginia the planter elite depended on restrictive suffrage requirements to dominate the state legislature and rule in the interest of slavery and tobacco, the twin pillars of its power. Colliers, who mined the coal, unsuccessfully struggled for representation and were never able to dislodge the planters or to redirect the legislative policies that favored the institution of slavery and its product, tobacco. At the same time, colliers' primitive mining practices and the use of slave labor limited productivity and damaged the mines. Even canal transportation proved inadequate.	. . .

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