Builders of a New South
Builders of a New South
Merchants, Capital, and the Remaking of Natchez, 1865–1914
Builders of a New South describes how, between 1865 and 1914, ten Natchez mercantile families emerged as leading purveyors in the wholesale plantation supply and cotton handling business, and soon became a dominant force in the social and economic Reconstruction of the Natchez District. They were able to take advantage of postwar conditions in Natchez to gain mercantile prominence by supplying planters and black sharecroppers in the plantation supply and cotton buying business. They parlayed this initial success into cotton plantation ownership and became important local businessmen in Natchez, participating in many civic improvements and politics that shaped the district into the twentieth century.
This book digs deep in countless records (including census, tax, property, and probate, as well as thousands of chattel mortgage contracts) to explore how these traders functioned as entrepreneurs in the aftermath of the Civil War, examining closely their role as furnishing merchants and land speculators, as well as their relations with the area’s planters and freed black population. Their use of favorable laws protecting them as creditors, along with a solid community base that was civic-minded and culturally intact, greatly assisted them in their success. These families prospered partly because of their good business practices, and partly because local whites and blacks embraced them as useful agents in the emerging new marketplace. The situation created by the aftermath of the war and emancipation provided an ideal circumstance for the merchant families, and in the end, they played a key role in the district’s economic survival and were the prime modernizers of Natchez.
This welcome case study and its important thesis invites new work in general through comparative studies of regional economies and merchants in other postwar cities across the South.
Anderson has produced a careful and well-researched study that continues the new work on the political economy of the nineteenth-century South, while University Press of Mississippi is to be commended for producing a handsome volume containing fascinating and illuminating photographs.
Anderson’s fascinating and in-depth exploration of primary sources provides us with an invaluable window into small southern towns as they transitioned from the world of antebellum plantations into reconstruction, sharecropping, Jim Crow, and, eventually, the early steps toward our more technological and corporate world.
Based upon a truly extraordinary array of primary and secondary sources, this well-written book chronicles the rise of the merchant class in Natchez during the two generations following the Civil War and explains how this group supplanted the antebellum plantation nabobs as the dominant economic and social class in that city. Its rich detail will provide a wealth of new information to specialists in the field.
Aaron Anderson has written a nuanced and detailed study of how the postbellum merchant system originated, operated, and impacted the peoples of the Natchez District in the lower-Mississippi River Valley. Based on thousands of sharecropping contracts and a massive array of public and private records, Anderson brings to life the Natchez District’s mercantile community in vividly written chapters, including its black farmers, townspeople, and their families. What’s more, his book tackles thorny issues in southern economic and social history close up and with deft analysis and compelling evidence, making it a major addition to the scholarship.
Aaron D. Anderson is an instructor of history at Clovis Community College in Clovis, New Mexico. His work has appeared in A Companion to American Military History, Journal of Mississippi History,Journal of Economic History, and Tennessee Historical Quarterly.
