I agree with Harold's point about Gray's work ("gold standard"). It certainly does cover more ground than any other single study. Though he disagreed with various parts of it, Gene Genovese required us (in his "Old South" seminar at Rochester in the mid-1970s) to read Gray--all of it!--in the first two weeks of the semester in order to have the necessary background to go on to more specialized studies. 

One of those specialized studies that may have some bearing on the issue Henry Wiencek raised to start this thread is Harold Woodman's King Cotton and His Retainers, which depends critically on a notion of the South's having a "dependent economy" in the 19th century--mainly because of the workings of the "factorage system" in the cotton-growing regions. Like later Populists, many antebellum southern farmers and planters complained, not that outside corporate interests were in control of farm production per se, but that they used their influence over the marketing of southern staples like cotton to extract exorbitant profits and, to a degree, force the producers into a kind of economic dependence on northern firms.

Doug Deal
History/SUNY Oswego

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