West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies

Local histories have long ceased to be dominated by studies of New England towns, just as they have long proved to have more than local significance. Clearly, this is the case in Bruce W. Eelman’s story of progressive Southern businessmen in Spartanburg, South Carolina, who were struggling to act as modern capitalists in a hostile world. Beginning during the late antebellum years, they sought to develop railroads, join national banking and trading networks, devise a modern legal system, and establish a public education system based on northern models. Eschewing southern prejudices against most things northern, Spartanburg merchants and entrepreneurs wanted to link up with northern markets and financial and trading systems to achieve economic modernization in the most ossified state in the South. More than most states in the South, South Carolina planters were the dominating force, shaping a society and economy based on slavery and, after the Civil War, on the subjugation of the freed slaves.

Focusing on representatives of the “developing middle class of the nineteenth-century South” (5), Eelman contributes to the ongoing historiographical debate about the extent to which the South was capitalistic. Drawing on the manuscript and newspaper collections in more than a half-dozen libraries, and buttressed by extensive use of census reports and wide reading in published primary and secondary sources, he discusses the chief concerns of this progressive business community, first as they emerged in the fifteen years before the war, and then as they appeared in the fifteen years that followed. Throughout, Eelman convincingly demonstrates that the business community in Spartanburg city and county were independent actors attempting to create and join a free-market economy.

What emerges is a narrative in which little changed over a thirty-five year span in a society defined by a debilitating racism. Time and again, Spartanburg’s business class abandoned their economic goals to support the agenda of the reigning planter class. They worked to establish a public education system for whites only, just as infrastructural initiatives chiefly benefited commerce. The burden of racism appears most strikingly in their efforts to create a modern legal system, where they developed separate magistrate and freeholder courts for blacks. Ironically, as the formal courts created for whites accommodated vigilantism and extra-legal methods during the years of war and reconstruction, the courts devised especially for [End Page 123] blacks continued to operate, differing from the prewar years only in that judges found more blacks guilty and exacted harsher punishments than in the antebellum years.

Although solidly researched, Eelman’s narrative could have been enlivened by comparative information on comparable small southern cities. Travel accounts, personal stories, maps, and images could have been better used to develop a more vivid portrait of the people, a clearer picture of the countryside, and the physical character of the town.

Yet he achieves his goals, even if, in the end, the capitalist ways of these southern progressives proved to be a thin gruel, made the more so during fifteen years of war and postwar economic and political disruption as they bowed to the demands of planters and their own shared racist attitudes. This presents, then, not a narrative of change or transformation, but of the absence of change. In this well-researched and well-organized study of a southern business community, the underlying theme is racism, or, concretely, the deep need to keep blacks on the lower rungs of society and the economy, leading these middle-class strivers to avert their eyes to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during the Reconstruction era. Not only did racism satisfy the prejudices of the businessmen, but it also stifled class issues that always lay beneath the surface in relations between white elites and the white working class and poor. Eelman has made not only a solid contribution to the debate over capitalism in the South, but he has also demonstrated its fundamental flaws.