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The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770-1860

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This book is now a classic mainstay of Southern history. But I must say I read it with a more critical eye than in the past to discover that the myth that slavery would have died out because of modern technology rather than a civil war is indeed that--a colossal myth. Far from making slavery unprofitable, the introduction of new agricultural methods and machinery in the late antebellum period was reaping great profits for slave owners who could get more productivity out of the slaves with the machines and new styles of labor management. Most informative of all was the fact that slaves were being employed in southern factories--some at highly skilled jobs including steam engine mechanics. These slaves were not always the property of individuals but of corporations and the profits reaped by such enterprises were stupendous. I was not aware of the widespread use of slaves in more mechanized agriculture and factory shops and the high productivity and profitability that resulted. And the fact that they could be owned by corporations rather than individual owners reveals an alarming complicity between capitalism and forced labor.
This book is by far the most complete compendium of economic activity in Mississippi in the decades leading to the war. Those who insist that technology and capitalist production are the antithesis of slavery should reassess their view. The more entrepreneurial planters and factory owners were growing ever richer with slave labor. Although it is true that industrialism and modern agricultural might have evolved into a wage system for free blacks, there is certainly no guarantee that it would have happened or if it did not necessarily so soon. Without the civil war I fear slavery would have remained alive and well as the Peculiar Institution it was in a South that was profiting from the new agricultural and production techniques of modern technology and industrialism.