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Factors, Bankers, and Masters: Class Relations in the Antebellum South

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Susan Feiner
Susan Feiner
Affiliation:
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia 23284.
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Abstract

The paper will show how the Marxian concept of class can be applied to the processes of slavery in the American antebellum South. The use of the notion of classes, and particularly the reconceptualized concepts of fundamental and subsumed class processes, provides an alternative to the received non-Marxian categories of plantation capitalism and planter hegemony. These concepts are developed and applied to Southern class conflicts over both state banking and national monetary policy. Competition among various classes is shown to have had significant influences on the nature of these conflicts.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 61 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1982

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References

1 The owners of human chattel property need not be the same persons as those who extract from human chattel property. When and if membership in the subsumed class of owners is conjoint with membership in the fundamental class, then the direct extractors make chattel available to themselves from their position as subsumed owners. In this case they pay themselves an implicit rent for securing their own conditions of existence. When these positions are not conjoint, then masters pay explicit rents to subsumed chattel owners. The payment of these rents represents a transfer of a portion of the slave surplus to subsumed chattel owners. In the American antebellum South the practice of slave-hiring exemplifies the flow of surplus to subsumed owners of chattel in exchange for securing conditions of existence.Google Scholar

2 Although I have listed primarily economic conditions of existence, there were also many political and cultural conditions of existence of the slave fundamental class process. Some of the political conditions of existence included the rights to private property in human beings as well as a state that could enforce and protect these rights. Some of the cultural conditions included practices associated with displaying the accouterments of civilized life, such as filled wine cellers and charming spouses to ornament the balls, soirées, picnics, and foxhunts of the Southern gentleman's life style.Google Scholar

3 A slave commodity is not the same as a capitalist commodity since it is not produced as a consequence of the purchasing of labor-power by capitalists and does not therefore contain surplus-value. For a discussion of slave commodity production see: Feiner, Susan, “The Financial Structures and Banking Institutions of the Antebellum South, 1811–1832” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1981), pp. 129–32.Google Scholar

4 Evidence supporting this point can be found in the following sources: Haskins, Ralph, “Planter and Cotton Factor in the Old South, Some Areas of Friction,” Agricultural History, 29 (1955), 1–14;Google ScholarStone, Alfred, “The Cotton Factorage System of the United States,” American Historical Review, 20 (1915), 558–65;Google ScholarWoodman, Harold, King Cotton and His Retainers, Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South 1800–1925 (Lexington, Kentucky, 1968), pp. 43–48, 98–125.Google Scholar

5 This is described at length in Lawrence, Joseph, Banking Concentration in the United States (New York, 1930), p. 44.Google Scholar These and many of the other practices of state bankers are discussed in Dewey, Davis, State Banking before the Civil War (Washington, D.C., 1910).Google Scholar

6 Most histories of the Second Bank of the United States see the motivating forces behind this institutional development as either the wisdom and foresight of financiers and politicians or as the natural development of an institution whose time had come. Both views transform the Second Bank into an essence which embodies the goals of and determines economic development. Consequently, debates focus on the extent to which the Second Bank did or did not promote economic development. The essentialist notion of institutional change which underlies these views reduces the concept of economic development to the concepts of emerging capitalism and capitalist institutions. The reductionism is also teleological; economic change and institutional development are then evaluated in terms of the extent to which they help or hinder the emergence of capitalism. The possibility that noncapitalist fundamental and subsumed class struggles were influential disappears, and the histories of the Second Bank, Southern state banking, or the factorage system can be written in terms of the costs and benefits of these financial institutions for the development of capitalism. For examples of this sort of essentialism see the following: Genovese, Eugene, The Political Economy of Slavery (New York, 1967), pp. 19–23;Google ScholarGreen, George, Finance and Economic Development in the Old South, Louisiana Banking 1804–1861 (Stanford, California, 1972);Google ScholarHammond, Bray, Banks and Politics in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, New Jersey, 1957);Google ScholarRedlich, Fritz, The Molding of American Banking (1951; reprint ed., New York: 1968);Google ScholarTemin, Peter, The Jacksonian Economy (New York, 1969);Google ScholarWoodman, Harold, King Cotton and His Retainers (Lexington, Kentucky, 1968).Google Scholar