1. society
2. unrest and war

The Journal of the Civil War Era
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volume 5, number 2 june 2015
Contents
Editor’s Note william blair, 193
Tom Watson Brown Book Award
ari kelman
Remembering Sand Creek on the Eve
of Its Sesquicentennial, 195
Articles
cathal smith
Second Slavery, Second Landlordism, and Modernity:
A Comparison of Antebellum Mississippi and
Nineteenth-Century Ireland, 204
d. h. dilbeck
“The Genesis of This Little Tablet with My Name”:
Francis Lieber and the Wartime Origins of
General Orders No. 100, 231
millington w. bergeson-lockwood
“We Do Not Care Particularly about the Skating Rinks”:
African American Challenges to Racial Discrimination
in Places of Public Amusement in Nineteenth-Century
Boston, Massachusetts, 254
Review Essay
scott reynolds nelson
Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery?, 289
Book Reviews, 311
Books Received, 343
Notes on Contributors, 346
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cathal smith
Second Slavery, Second Landlordism,
and Modernity A Comparison of Antebellum
Mississippi and Nineteenth-Century Ireland
In May 1839, John A. Quitman, a planter from Natchez, Mississippi, set out
on a journey to Europe. His first destination was supposed to be England,
but when his ship encountered storms off the south coast of Ireland, he
disembarked near Cork and completed his journey by traveling overland to
Dublin and sailing from there to Liverpool.1 Soon after reaching London,
he attended a session of the House of Lords and subsequently wrote of his
experience, “Some of their first orators spoke and I assure you they are not
equal to our first men.”2 While he compared Americans favorably with the
British aristocracy, Quitman might also conceivably have reflected upon
some of the striking parallels between southern planters and Irish landlords. Both groups were conservative, regionally distinctive, agrarian elites
deemed “backward” during the 1800s by many influential contemporaries,
including John Elliott Cairnes and John Stuart Mill.3
Arguably, the perception that American planters and Irish landlords
were backward classes resulted from their implicit comparison with a
particular understanding of modernity that took England as its exemplar.
Since nineteenth-century political economists usually considered industrialization and urbanization indicators of “progress,” most agrarian regions
fell short of classically defined modernity and accordingly won “backward”
status. Backwardness, in this sense, implied deviation from a “normal” pattern of economic development. Yet, that industrial capitalism was the only
form that modernity could take is open to question. As Walter Johnson
has written, “to ask why Mississippi wasn’t more like Manchester . . . presupposes that there is a reason it should have been, that there is a natural
course of historical development.”4
Instead of pursuing such teleological narratives, it is more helpful to
consider modernity as Christopher Bayly does: as a process of believing
oneself to be modern and an active attempt to keep up with the times.5
If this provides a definition of modernity, then it is possible to recognize
that many supposedly backward agrarian elites—including American
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slaveholders and Irish landlords—attempted to modernize their socioeconomic systems during the nineteenth century. Since they did so while
simultaneously endeavoring to retain traditional, hierarchical social relationships, their efforts were often dismissed at the time and in subsequent historiographies. Despite their qualified and selective nature, elite
attempts to effect forms of agrarian modernization deserve to be considered on their own terms, rather than in negative relation to a British
standard.6
Viewing the antebellum U.S. South and nineteenth-century Ireland
in comparative perspective reveals that, to a greater or lesser extent, the
elites in both locations attempted to modernize their economic behavior
in response to transformations in global capitalism associated with the
Industrial Revolution. From the late eighteenth century onward, British
industrialization and urbanization increased demand for agricultural raw
materials and foodstuffs, which affected agrarian regions throughout the
Euro-American world. Since U.S. southern plantations provided most of
the cotton used in British textile mills and Ireland’s landed estates provided much of the grain, dairy, and livestock that fed the populations of
Britain’s cities, these regions both facilitated and were affected by the
Industrial Revolution. Competition on international markets and fluctuations in prices for the different agricultural commodities produced in
either location prompted responses from the elites, who embarked on systematic drives for economic reform during the nineteenth century.
As a result of these developments, a modern form of slavery emerged
throughout the New World beginning in the 1790s—in a rejuvenation of
American slave-worked plantation agriculture that recent scholarship has
called “the second slavery.” This geographical expansion of slavery went
hand in hand with the adoption of capitalistic behavior on the part of
those slaveholders who engaged in cotton, sugar, and coffee cultivation.7
In Ireland, however, landlords increasingly sought to reform their estates
in the decades after 1815.8 Representing a break with their behavior during the eighteenth century, when Irish landlords often relinquished the
direct management of their properties to middlemen and played a more
passive rentier role, it can be said that this trend constituted a “second
landlordism.” In other words, transformations in global capitalism, related
to the Industrial Revolution and its consequences, fostered an improving
mindset among the elites in the U.S. South and Ireland, prompting them
to rationalize their estate management practices, modernize agricultural
production, and diversify their economic interests. In many respects, these
drives toward improvement constituted modern behavior, notwithstanding that their societies also retained arguably archaic features.
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As he surveyed the aristocracy of the United Kingdom assembled at
Westminster in 1839, Quitman may have observed Robert Dillon, third
Baron Clonbrock, a young member in attendance and a landlord who lived
and owned estates in the west of Ireland.9 These two individuals were
prominent agrarian elites whose behavior did not align with the backward
stereotypes with which they have often been identified, for both attempted
to manage their estates profitably, pursued agricultural improvement, and
invested in speculative ventures. As such, they can be taken as representatives of the economically progressive milieus that emerged in the U.S. South
during the second slavery and in Ireland during the second landlordism.
To illustrate the comparable effects of these phenomena in two local
contexts this essay first delineates the theoretical basis for the comparison
of a society based on slavery and plantation agriculture with one based
on free labor and tenancy, by considering U.S. southern slaveholding and
Irish landlordism as labor systems that participated in global capitalism.
Second, it examines similarities and differences among some modern features exhibited by Quitman and Clonbrock—modern in the sense that they
represented adaptive responses to international market developments.
Comparing the management of Quitman’s and Clonbrock’s estates, their
pursuits of agricultural modernization, and their nonagricultural investments will demonstrate that both progressive southern slaveholders and
Irish landlords embraced certain capitalistic attitudes during the nineteenth century. Recognition of this moves beyond ahistorical dichotomies
that posit “backwardness” in fixed and diametric opposition to “modernity”; rather, modern features could and did emerge in supposedly “backward” contexts, including the American South during the second slavery
and Ireland during the second landlordism.
■ The U.S. South has been usefully compared with agrarian regions of
Europe by Peter Kolchin, Shearer Davis Bowman, and Enrico Dal Lago,
who have respectively examined similarities and differences with Russia,
Prussian East-Elbia and the Italian South.10 Much can be learned from
adding Ireland to this list, especially in light of the historical tendency
to equate Ireland’s free peasantry with slaves.11 This agenda is aided by
the fact that, in A Sphinx on the American Land (2003), Kolchin has discussed the possibilities for comparing the American South with what he
calls “other Souths”: regions external to the United States with which the
U.S. South is comparable.12 Nineteenth-century Ireland can be seen as one
of several “other Souths,” especially if we accept the proposition that—with
important distinctions between the free and unfree nature of the agrarian labor systems and the crops produced in either region—its landed
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estates, oriented toward the export of agricultural commodities, fulfilled
a comparable peripheral role within global capitalism to that of American
plantations.
This assumption relies on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, according to whom a capitalist world economy emerged, starting in the sixteenth
century, with the Euro-American world divided into core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral regions, each defined by its economic function within
a transnational system of trade. By this view of history, peripheries were
regions geared toward the growth and export of agricultural commodities
and provided markets for manufactured goods produced in economically
and politically stronger core regions. In the eighteenth century, England
emerged as the core of the capitalist world economy, with its ongoing industrialization thereafter. These developments affected, and were affected by,
agriculture in the U.S. South and Ireland, both of which, in a fundamental
economic sense, functioned as peripheries.13
It would be a mistake to reduce the U.S. South and Ireland to undifferentiated peripheral status, however, and this is not necessary if we follow
Dale Tomich’s suggestions on how to refine Wallerstein’s model.14 While
American slavery and Irish tenancy both owed their origins to the expansion of the capitalist world economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, they were very different agrarian labor systems: one based on
slavery, the other on free labor. In the New World, with land abundant and
labor scarce, plantations were established from the late 1500s onward as a
suitable means of mass producing staple crops in demand on world markets, and, through a process of elimination of other labor arrangements,
African slaves were increasingly favored to work them. Although there
were many important variations within New World slavery in different
times and places, it was everywhere a form of legal servitude characterized
by racial exploitation, compulsion, and violence.15
Irish landlordism, by contrast, relied on more indirect methods of labor
control. In Ireland, landed estates—based on an English model introduced
during the 1500s and 1600s—saw a bipartite division between the landowner’s demesne and tenancies. While landlords sometimes engaged in
commercial farming on a portion of their estates, most of their wealth
derived from the cash rents that they charged free tenants in return for
access to land. To pay these rents, tenants subsisted mostly on potatoes and
farmed grain and livestock as cash crops; they sold this produce at local
markets and fairs, from whence the majority was exported, primarily to
Britain from the 1750s onwards. In general, Irish peasants had no property
rights to the land they farmed and were subject to a variety of exploitative leasing arrangements.16 This arguably rendered them a dependent
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workforce and called into question the practical significance of their legal
freedom.
Despite the many differences between unfree plantation agriculture
and “free” tenancy, then, American slavery and Irish landlordism are comparable as systems of rural subjection that operated within global capitalism. The raison d’être of these systems was to generate wealth from
the production of agricultural commodities in demand on international
markets—markets dominated by industrializing Britain during the nineteenth century. As such, the common dependent status of American slaves
and Irish peasants was a function of the development of global capitalism.
Put another way, African American slaves and Irish tenant-farmers were
exploited in very different ways, but they were also part of a wider system
of exploitation that characterized a global and capitalist division of labor.17
Yet, despite the commercialized nature of agriculture on their estates, U.S.
slaveholders and Irish landlords were considered by many nineteenth-century commentators to have been “backward” groups.
*****End of excerpt *****
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