Overview

This title features a forward-looking town's early embrace of modernization. In """"Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry"""", Bruce W. Eelman follows the evolution of an entrepreneurial culture in a nineteenth-century southern community outside the plantation belt. Counter to the view that the Civil War and Reconstruction alone brought social and economic revolution to the South, Eelman finds that antebellum Spartanburg businessmen advocated a comprehensive vision for modernizing their region. Although their plans were forward looking, they still supported slavery and racial segregation. By the 1840s, Spartanburg merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, and other professionals were looking to capitalize on the area's natural resources by promoting iron and textile mills and a network of rail lines. Recognizing that cultural change had to accompany material change, these businessmen also worked to reshape legal and educational institutions. Their prewar success was limited, largely due to lowcountry planters' political power. However, their modernizing spirit would serve as an important foundation for postwar development. Although the Civil War brought unprecedented trauma to the Spartanburg community, the modernizing merchants, industrialists, and lawyers strengthened their political and social clout in the aftermath. As a result, much of the modernizing blueprint of the 1850s was realized in the 1870s. Eelman finds that Spartanburg's modernizers slowed legal and educational reform only when its implementation seemed likely to empower African Americans.

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9780820330198

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Reviews

Recent, compelling works by Mark Smith, Chad Morgan, and Jonathan Daniel Wells have revealed tremendous economic, social, and even political antecedents for the postwar South in its formative antebellum years. Eelman's book builds upon this literature to establish quite convincingly how so much that seemed new or 'modern' in the postwar South originated decades before secession.--American Historical Review

Recent, compelling works by Mark Smith, Chad Morgan, and Jonathan Daniel Wells have revealed tremendous economic, social, and even political antecedents for the postwar South in its formative antebellum years. Eelman's book builds upon this literature to establish quite convincingly how so much that seemed new or 'modern' in the postwar South originated decades before secession. -- American Historical Review

Recent, compelling works by Mark Smith, Chad Morgan, and Jonathan Daniel Wells have revealed tremendous economic, social, and even political antecedents for the postwar South in its formative antebellum years. Eelman's book builds upon this literature to establish quite convincingly how so much that seemed new or 'modern' in the postwar South originated decades before secession.-- American Historical Review

Author Information

Bruce W. Eelman is an associate professor of history at Siena College.

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