Class Origins of the "New South": Planter Persistence and Industry in North Carolina

A conventional view shared by sociologists and historians asserts that an ascendant middle class led the American South along a new path of capitalist industrial development in the early decades following the Civil War. This paper challenges this class interpretation of southern postbellum modernization, asserting instead the centrality of cotton planters in building key sectors of southern industry. A comparison of class relations in the textile, coal mining, and tobacco industries reveals the historical patterns which shaped industrial relations and ideology in planter-dominated southern industries.