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Local Manufacturing in the Antebellum South and Midwest*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Raymond L. Cohn
Raymond L. Cohn
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Economics, Illinois State University
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Abstract

It has been a long time since clichés like “cotton was king” have satisfied historians as an answer to the question of why the American South did not develop a manufacturing industry at least as vigorous as that of the Midwest in the antebellum years. Professor Cohn thinks that the South may well have done just that, and presents an analysis based on location theory that supports such a conclusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , Spring 1980 , pp. 80 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1980

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References

1 North, Douglass C., The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (New York, 1966).Google Scholar The regional groupings used in this paper are the standard antebellum groupings. Generally, the Northeast includes Pennsylvania and Maryland and all the states north and east of these. The South includes the states that seceded during the Civil War plus Kentucky. The Midwest includes the five states of the Old Northwest plus Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. Also, West Virginia is separated from Virginia and included in the Midwest.

The Far West states are left out of this study because the amount of antebellum manufacturing found in these states was small.

2 Ibid., 154. Residentiary industry will be designated as “consumer-oriented” later in this paper.

3 See U.S. Census Bureau, Eighth Census of the United States: Manufactures, 1860, p. 725; and Bateman, Fred and Weiss, Thomas, “Comparative Regional Development in Antebellum Manufacturing,” Journal of Economic History, XXXV (March, 1975), 182–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 North, Economic Growth, 132.

5 Ibid. By implication, this situation is presumed to hold for other southern states.

6 The procedure used to obtain these regions is discussed in Raymond L. Cohn, “A Locational Analysis of Manufacturing Activity in the Antebellum South and Midwest,” (Doctoral dissertation, University of Oregon, 1977). A list of the regions and/or a short explanation of the procedure can be obtained from the author.

7 This is consistent with the argument and approach by Cebula, Richard J., “Our Economic Crisis in the United States,” Economic Notes, No. 2–3, 1976, pp. 3 – 46.Google Scholar See Cohn, “Locational Analysis,” for a complete discussion of the interpretation problems.

8 Cohn, Edwin J. Jr., Industry in the Pacific Northwest and the Location Theory (Columbia University, New York, 1954), 51–59.Google Scholar

9 Clark, Victor S., History of Manufactures in the United States: Volume I, 1607–1860 (1929 Edition; New York, 1949), 315.Google Scholar

10 The same theoretical idea is put forward by Robertson, Ross M. in History of the American Economy (3rd. ed.; New York, 1973), 251Google Scholar, in talking about the iron industry in the 1830s and 1840s. However, Robertson does not develop the idea in discussing all antebellum manufacturing.

11 North, Economic Growth, Ch. 1; Robertson, History, 251–254.

12 See U.S. Census Bureau, Eighth Census of the United States: Manufactures, 1860, pp. 733–742 for the census list of manufacturing industries. Some of these entries were clearly not manufacturing as we now consider it. These industries were deleted from the analysis. The SITC categories used were taken from U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Standard Industrial Classification Manual 1972. A partial list of the census industries grouped by SITC code is given in the Appendix to this paper. A complete list is given in Cohn, “Locational Analysis,” which also includes a discussion of the problems involved in arriving at the classification.

13 For a complete discussion of the coefficient of localization, see Isard, Walter, Methods of Regional Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 251–254.Google Scholar

14 Usually per-capita income is used as the base for the COL, but data limitations forced us to use population instead. This substitution is a common one in the literature, e.g., see Niemi, Albert W. Jr., State and Regional Patterns in American Manufacturing, 1860–1900 (Westport, Conn., 1960), 57.Google Scholar

15 A complete list is available from the author. All industries not listed had COLs greater than 50.00.

16 Since many antebellum industries were concentrated entirely in the Northeast, the actual upper bound on the COL in this study is about 63.00, equal to one hundred minus the per cent of the population in the Northeast.

17 Another implicit assumption made is the lack of, international trade. If all the assumptions hold, the COL can be interpreted as the proportion of the total production of the good which must enter interregional trade to equalize consumption patterns.

18 These five industries were clearly consumer-oriented. Other industries, e.g., Furniture (251), Leather (311), and Boots and Shoes (314), were found in virtually every region yet most of the production still occurred in large cities. This feature perhaps occurred because of our industry definition, e.g., Boots and Shoes could be composed of firms which were very widespread producing low quality shoes and firms mainly in large cities producing high quality shoes. This, of course, means that something is wrong with our industry classification system; however, it is not a problem that can be corrected using the available data. In any case these borderline cases were left out because of the ambiguity; these cases did, however, provide us with a good breaking point in determining consumer and export orientation from the values of the COL.

Any breaking point is to a certain extent subjective. To overcome this subjectiveness, another group of consumer-oriented industries is introduced later in this paper.

19 Fuchs, Victor R., Changes in the Location of Manufacturing in The United States Since 1929 (New Haven, Conn., 1962), 152–153.Google Scholar

20 North, Economic Growth, 154.

21 The nine industries listed in Table 2 are less than 9 per cent of the 107 SITC industries in number, yet accounted for 24 per cent of the total value added in the U.S. The 16 industries Listed in Table 3 are 15 per cent of the 107 SITC industries in number, yet accounted for over 38 per cent of the total value added. On reflection, this result is hardly surprising, as we would expect our procedure to classify many large industries as consumer-oriented. However, it should also be pointed out that many large industries were not classified as consumer-oriented, e.g., cotton mills, boots and shoes, and liquors. Of the ten largest 1860 industries listed by North, we include only four as consumer-oriented. See North, Economic Growth, 160.

22 It should be remembered that even the second definition probably does not provide us with an upper bound for the amount of antebellum consumer-oriented industries. The addition of any more industries to our second group would only serve to increase the importance of consumer-oriented manufacturing to the South, Midwest, and Northeast.

23 North, Economic Growth, 132.

24 An attempt to explain the differing levels of consumer-oriented manufacturing throughout the South and Midwest is made in Cohn, “Locational Analysis.”

25 Herbst, Lawrence A., “Interregional Commodity Trade from the North to the South and American Economic Development in the Antebellum Period,” Journal of Economic History, XXXV (March, 1975), 264–270CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lindstrom, Diane L., “Demand, Markets, and Eastern Economic Development; Philadelphia, 1815–1840,” Journal of Economic History, XXXV (March, 1975), 271–273CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Uselding, Paul, “A Note on the Inter-Regional Trade in Manufactures in 1840,” Journal of Economic History, XXXVI (June, 1976), 428–435.CrossRefGoogle Scholar