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Book Review
| Bruce Eelman, Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry: Commercial Culture in Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1845–1880, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Pp. xv + 313. $42.95 (ISBN 978-0-8203-3019-8).
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| This book exemplifies the virtues—and vices—of the relatively new field of microhistory. By focusing on a single county, Eelman offers absorbing details of daily life that broader studies might miss. Yet I wanted more context, comparisons, and careful analysis as I read this work. |
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The main message is that the end of the Civil War transferred power from rural planters to entrepreneurial businessmen. No kidding! Eelman defines "entrepreneur" in Schumpeterian terms—a person who uses resources innovatively (6). When your principal resource (slave labor) disappears, losing ground isn't too surprising. I wonder if Eelman would find a similar power shift in Northern communities where labor markets functioned much as they did before the war. |
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Chapter ends summarize Eelman's themes: town dwellers wanted relatively more infrastructure, townspeople advocated more schooling and formal law than country residents but the two groups were equally racist, and supporters of manufacturing and railroads ended up more successful than farmers. I found the summaries essential, as my attention sometimes lagged mid-chapter. |
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Alert readers will find fascinating details. Eelman tells of the slave flattened in a rolling mill whose elongated coffin had to be specially made (40). When slave prices rose in the 1850s, one Spartanburg iron manufacturer imported Swedes to do the work (41). Postbellum importation of guano made cotton a more viable crop (144). Spartanburg educators generated innovative student-loan-program ideas to keep institutions operational (190). Competitions among communities for railroad lines sound like modern squabbles over which town will pay the most to finance a sports stadium (167–68). |
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But some details require more, well, detail. Tables 3 and 4 (33) list values of various Spartanburg assets. Yet how do these compare to similar measures in the rest of South Carolina? The South? The nation? Table 8 (101) reports that from 1850 to 1860 Spartanburg criminal actions concerning property (as a percentage of total crimes) quadrupled whereas crimes against persons halved. But without information about trends or statistical significance, interpreting these numbers is challenging. Another table (Table 15, 237) offers more figures, but the reader must draw conclusions about what these really mean. |
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Eelman misses opportunities, too. He offers interesting information about several Spartanburg textile manufacturers (42–47) and explains why the Bivingsville mill improved productivity; he could have pointed directly to his tables 6 and 7 to quantify this result. These tables, like others, raise more questions than they answer. Why did only two mills survive from 1850 to 1860? In contrast to Bivingsville, why did Crawfordsville quadruple capital (and what does "capital" measure?) but experience little increase in product value? Eelman also states that Spartanburg entrepreneurs desired better public education for all but wanted blacks and whites to receive different schooling (212). He buttresses his argument with school funding data (205) and newspaper accounts (203), and he claims that Spartanburg's postbellum growth in school attendance was "more impressive" (201) than that of the state: only 19.6 percent of South Carolina whites aged 6 to 16 attended school in 1870 but 54.9 percent attended in 1875; the Spartanburg percentages are 29.7 and 83.4. Yet Eelman fails to note that the second figure is 2.8 times the first in both cases—one might argue that the Spartanburg and state figures are in fact comparable. |
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Eelman sometimes draws unsupported inferences. He reports lively discussions about fencing laws (156–60). Yet I don't see why fencing stock in would "retard [entrepreneurs'] progressive goals for the upcountry" (160). He suggests townfolk were more interested in making Spartanburg a trade center than their rural brethren (25) but also acknowledges that farmers wanted markets to sell their crops (13). He claims southerners did not want to accept handouts like free education for fear they would be viewed as paupers (74). But a more compelling reason was that those taxed to support schools would not benefit because they had good alternatives—private schools—and potential beneficiaries would not consider "free" schooling worth the opportunity cost of losing their children's labor. After emphasizing the weakness and irrelevance of Southern legal structures, he invokes the statistic that 72 percent of Spartanburg cases were brutal crimes to show that the county was violent (90–91). If courts were irrelevant, why is this good evidence? |
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If Eelman uses economist Joseph Schumpeter to define terms, he could have exploited economics more explicitly to frame his work. For instance, despite their apparent racism, Spartanburg leaders resented attacks on freedmen grading railroad lines (226). Why? Because these violent acts ate into profits in the short run—in the long run, too, if the North reacted by imposing martial law. Eelman alludes to these connections but does not articulate them fully. Alternatively, he could have followed Fox Butterfield's (All God's Children) example by constructing his South-Carolina-county microhistory around an individual, such as Spartanburg's delightfully named David Golightly Harris. |
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| Jenny Wahl
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| Carleton College |
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