Va-Hist:

This review of a new book comparing nineteenth century economic development
in Virginia and Pennsylvania recently appeared on H-Net's electronic
discussion list for the Early American Republic.

Please respect the letter and spirit of the copyright notice at the end of
the review.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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Visit the Library of Virginia's web site at http://www.lva.lib.va.us


-----Original Message-----
From: Robertson, Stacey [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 18 December 2001 3:53 PM
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Subject: H-SHEAR Book Review: Rilling on Majewski, _A House Dividing_


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (December, 2001)

John Majewski.  _A House Dividing: Economic Development in
Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War_.  Studies in
Economic History and Policy.  Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.  xx + 214 pp.  Tables, maps, notes, bibliography
and index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-59023-X.

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Donna J. Rilling
<[log in to unmask]>, Department of History, State
University of New York, Stony Brook

In this concisely and well written work, Majewski compares
Pennsylvania and Virginia to elucidate the "roots of regional
divergence" that divided the United States economically and
thence politically by the mid nineteenth century (p. 2).  The
author focuses principally on internal improvements--e.g.,
turnpikes, toll bridges, canals, railroads--to test how each
state approached the problem of building links to markets and
facilitating transportation across each region.  On the state
level, Majewski offers a close read of the political exigencies
behind legislative funding (or denial of funding) for internal
improvement corporations and banks.

Coming down to the local level for Cumberland County,
Pennsylvania and Albemarle County, Virginia, Majewski connects
transportation and banking projects with the investors who
funded them.  He justifies the choice of these particular
counties by noting their similar geography and distance from
market.  At the start of the 1800s, Cumberland supported grain
farms that "vaguely resembled" Albemarle's tobacco, wheat and
livestock mix (p.  4).

Mountains proved obstacles for both areas in attempts to link
western producers with eastern markets, and manufacturers with
farm and plantation households.  Majewski maintains that the
similarities of these counties places slavery--the critical
difference between the two areas--and its impact on economic
development in sharp relief.

The author focuses on economic issues between 1800 and 1850.  He
offers greater chronological scope, however, to demonstrate that
paths charted early on in Pennsylvania's and Virginia's past
affected the success of nineteenth-century internal improvement
strategies.  Hence the title, he explains, which acknowledges
the long and dynamic process of economic change.

This long-term perspective also enables Majewski to emphasize
the gradual and cumulative process of market development and
avoid the misleading cataclysmic concept of market revolution.
Market development, Majewski demonstrates, was a goal that few
historical participants rejected, even while they vigorously
contested its specifics.  It is on this latter point that
Majewski makes his most significant contribution to the
historiography of capitalism in the early republic.

The author exploits stockholder lists and corporate records for
transportation companies and banks.  He links investors to
census and tax records in a sampling process that he demystifies
in a short appendix.  (With only one brief explicit use of
regression analysis in the text, this is political economy
accessible to a general academic readership.)  Complementing the
quantitative research is a range of letters, periodicals and
legislative materials.  These diverse sources enable Majewski to
explore not only how contemporaries invested their money, but
also their motivations for supporting internal improvements,
their ideological justifications for doing so, and the
ramifications these projects had on the welfare of Cumberland
and Albemarle residents.

In both Albemarle and Cumberland counties, early turnpike
companies, toll bridges, canals and navigation companies
attracted widespread local support from individuals.  Few
investors expected these "development corporations,"  as
Majewski denotes them, to return dividends or for shares to
appreciate.  And, Majewski demonstrates, returns were usually
poor.  Shareholders focused instead on the indirect benefits
they hoped would arise from better market connections.  Expanded  trade,
higher real estate values and elevated political
prominence of their town whetted the appetite of investors.
Looking closely at property values in the two rival towns of
Charlottesville and Scottsville, for example, Majewski shows
that developments undertaken by improvement companies
contributed to the prosperity of these towns and the value of
town lots, and to higher property values in rural areas near
improvements.  He finds a close correlation between investors in
development corporations and the location of their real estate,
strengthening his argument that stockholders were motivated by
the benefits they would reap indirectly.

Prominent local planters comprised the majority of investors and
provided the largest portion of capital in Albemarle
developmental enterprises, but smaller shareholders from the
county's towns bought shares as well.  If the prospect of
indirect benefits was insufficient to entice men (and women?) to
throw money into shares, then fear and arm-twisting might.
Majewski ably demonstrates that in the early nineteenth century
white residents of Virginia's Piedmont were obsessed with the
decline of community they read in the trail of kin moving west.
Political power on the state and national level was also
endangered.  Soil exhaustion, white out-migration and stagnant
land values epitomized nothing less than the eventual demise of
plantation society.  To combat this decline, gentlemen planters
in Albemarle County preached the gospel of agricultural reform;
they linked it to the transportation improvements requisite for
bringing in cheap manure and sending out agricultural surplus.
Albemarle planters were anything but complacent and traditional,
Majewski demonstrates; rather, they were driven by a "sense of
desperation" to bring progress to their communities (p. 36).
With appeals to kinship, honor and status, local elites found
themselves compelled and coerced into funding the county's
transportation projects.  Majewski thus portrays the process of
market development as an enterprise requiring cooperation among
local residents.  Competition, at this juncture, focused on
beating out rival towns for charters and funds from Virginia's
legislature.

In Cumberland County, too, development corporations offered poor
returns, but local residents were again drawn to invest by the
prospect of indirect gains.  Compared to Albemarle, investors in
Cumberland comprised a wider range of occupations and economic
status, and shares were concentrated in fewer hands.  The
contrast stemmed from the character of Cumberland's economy,
which featured numerous small farms dependent on household labor
and not, as in Albemarle, large plantations run with slaves. The
proximity of Cumberland County farmers to two large cities,
Philadelphia and Baltimore, gave the region a market for
diversified agricultural production and a motive for supporting
developmental corporations.  Once again this quest for better
transportation took the form of entrepreneurship in the context
of community; in the northern instance, a large pool of
"middling"  investors shared the risks of development.  Pitching
developmental corporations in republican language of the public
good also enabled Americans in the early republic to mesh the
self interested prospects of gain with communal standards of
appropriate economic behavior.  Actors in the market economy,
consequently, are not caricatured as possessive individualists
or as watchdogs of community values, but are understood for the
ways they reconciled these presumed contrary behaviors.

Railroad building presented an even bigger challenge.
Virginia's projects were seriously plagued by intra-town
rivalry, which ultimately constrained the flow of legislative
funding and led to a disjointed and inefficient network of
tracks.  As was the case in the county's development
corporations, private citizens bought shares in the Virginia
Central motivated by boosterism and indirect returns.  By the
time the company really got off the ground in the 1840s,
Albemarle County was home to a group of professionals, merchants
and artisans who joined wealthy planters in a still skewed, yet
more egalitarian distribution of shareholders.  Their investment
did pay off indirectly, Majewski demonstrates, through the rise
in real property values and increased commerce for "most
citizens"  (p. 70).  And for non-citizens?  On this question
Majewski is much more tentative, suggesting that, while slaves
did not share in better living standards, they might at least
have avoided sale and forced migration when circumstances of the
county's planters improved.

In Pennsylvania, the Cumberland Valley Rail Road (CVRR)
attracted eastern capital.  Motivated by expectations of
dividends as well as long-term returns, a small group of
Philadelphia capitalists bought up the majority of shares in the
road.  Urban financiers became active managers of the company,
serving on its board, lobbying for political privileges and
monitoring operations.  The CVRR promised to connect
Cumberland's fertile valley with Philadelphia markets, securing
the region's trade away from Baltimore merchants.  Majewski
suggests that access to eastern markets strengthened
agricultural diversification, increased crop production, and
enabled Cumberland's residents to purchase more manufactured
goods.  Using Carlisle tax lists (1838) and census returns
(1850), he argues that the CVRR brought increased wealth to the
town's middling taxpayers.  The pie was getting bigger, even
though Carlisle residents at the top were getting proportionally
bigger slices.

Cumberland investors in the CVRR were often local professionals
with links to Philadelphia capitalists.  Their status placed
them on the front lines when Cumberland County voters and other
Pennsylvanians criticized the political and economic influence
of monied interests; Democratic tempers flared, for instance,
over the close overlap of major stockholders of the CVRR and the
Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania.  But even
Pennsylvania Democrats, Majewski asserts, joined a "widespread
consensus in favor of commercial expansion" (p. 109).  In
Pennsylvania and in Virginia, voters disputed particulars,
exploiting the malleable language of republicanism to support
their positions, and yet "nobody seriously questioned the
desirability of commercial progress" (p. 110).

Despite enthusiasm for "economic modernization" (p. 113) in both
Pennsylvania and Virginia, the northern state was clearly more
successful in building a viable and profitable rail network.
Virginia's small cities spread capital and political sway among
fairly evenly matched towns that put local interests ahead of a
critical trunk line.  Although the Virginia legislature
out-spent that of Pennsylvania, the money was dispersed and
inadequate overall for expensive transportation projects.
Virginia's basic problem, Majewski argues, was that the state
lacked centers of population to produce urban wealth and
concentrate political clout.  Pennsylvania, however, had two
large and increasingly powerful cities--Philadelphia and
Pittsburgh--which negated such difficulties.  The aggressive
lobby of Pennsylvania Railroad's large, mostly
Philadelphia-based, shareholders, for example, "resulted in a
more efficient and reliable trunk line" between Philadelphia and
Pittsburgh (p. 122).

Ultimately, Majewski asks, why did antebellum Virginia (and by
extension, the slave South) fail to develop a large commercial
center?  Here his explanation neither solves the chicken-and-egg
problem, nor charts new ground.  Slavery, plantations, and
staple crops were to blame, he proposes, because the
agricultural regime that developed spread population sparsely
throughout the region.  Majewski rejects the notion that
Southern fears of concentrated slave populations deterred urban
and industrial growth, citing evidence of Richmond's modest
manufacturing success.  By the antebellum era, he resolves,
plantation slavery simply continued to make "better sense" (p.
166). The "absence of large, nearby markets"--a situation that
grew out of policies and decisions made in Virginia's colonial
past--"doused the economic incentives to move resources out of
agriculture and into manufacturing" (p. 167).  In contrast, the
"root cause of Philadelphia's economic success was a densely
populated hinterland that provided the city's entrepreneurs with
a large market for manufactured goods in the nineteenth century"
(p. 171).  Readers can excuse the author for painting
comparative economic development with a broad brush.  This
chapter, however, might have served better as an introduction to
the economic development of the two regions than as a final
statement on the contributions of an otherwise fine study.

_A House Dividing_, despite its ambitious title, works best as
two contrasting case studies of the role of farmers, townsmen
and elites in fighting for and financing market development.
Majewski is at his finest when developing nuanced portraits of
seemingly irrational or conflicting economic group behavior.  He
has crafted a compelling case for the pro commercial orientation
of economically, regionally and politically diverse Americans,.
His focus on property values and aggregate production
convincingly documents the positive wealth effects of internal
improvements for many taxpayers.  But what other measures of
well being did free and bonded labor apply to assess the changes
in their societies?  Readers might crave a closer look on the
micro level--into individual households, gender dynamics and
labor allocation, or at individual plantations and slaves--to
understand additional consequences of market access.  These
criticisms, however, merely demonstrate that Majewski's study
has laid an important foundation for future understanding of the
nation's early economic development.

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