CONTINUITY VERSUS DISCONTINUITY. Precapitalist versus capitalist. Race versus class. Oppositional interpretations such as these have been the mainstay of historical work on the American South over the past century. This intellectual sparring has often been most intense over socioeconomic issues. Although historians have generally agreed that the antebellum American South lagged behind the North in terms of economic diversification and industrial development, disagreements emerge over the causes for this lag.¹ Some argue that slavery ensured the persistence of a prebourgeois, paternalistic culture at odds with the individualistic free-market capitalism of the North.² Other scholars have found that differences in industrial...

ASSESSING THE PEOPLE of Spartanburg in 1847, Presbyterian minister Zelotus Holmes found “the old stock generally not very intelligent, but the rising generation vastly improving & numbers entering the various professions from all parts of the District.” As evidence of this improvement, Holmes noted the district’s “three cotton factories[,] 3 or 4 foundries[,] two rolling mills & nail factories[,] & . . . twenty to forty merchant mills.”¹ Although the minister was correct in observing a growing business and entrepreneurial class in the district, the developmental impulse he found in “the rising generation” actually owed much to the early settlement...

IN APRIL 1849 young Spartanburg lawyer JosephWofford Tucker warned his community that they faced a critical moment in history. While speaking in support of the proposed Spartanburg and Union Railroad, Tucker argued that the line was “the only means of increasing the future prosperity of our District—the only means to prevent its impoverishment and agricultural decay and ruin.” The competing railroad interests of the surrounding districts, he noted, left Spartanburg little choice but to fight for a route through its own lands. “Has Spartanburg lost its independent spirit—its proud unbending soul?” Tucker inquired. “Has the Old Iron District...

AS THE POLITICAL CONFLICT over the fate of slavery in the West intensified through the summer of 1849, Spartanburg factory owner and newspaper editor Peter M. Wallace vowed that he was “utterly opposed now and forever to all political compromises” on the issue of slavery. Significantly, Wallace connected the success of such southern resistance to the improvement of South Carolina’s free schools. The Carolina Spartan’s columns, the editor explained, “will be open to the advocates of a more liberal but judicious appropriation of the public money” for common schooling because “an educated and intelligent people, cannot be enslaved.”¹ Wallace was...

PRIOR TO 1850, visitors to Spartanburg District often found basic institutional structures of the region lacking. While riding the court circuit in 1837, Judge Charles Colcock and lawyer Benjamin Perry witnessed a Spartanburg riot that lasted well into the night, with “hundreds . . . fighting by lightwood fires.” An inexperienced attorney on his first circuit, Perry feared the fracas to the point that he fled town before his casework was completed.¹

Observations such as these by judges and lawyers were an increasing Concern for Spartanburg’s rising entrepreneurs. A reputation for lawlessness, drunkenness, and immorality would make the region less...

By 1860 SPARTANBURG BOOSTERS viewed their district as a land of limitless potential. The arrival of the Spartanburg and Union Railroad in late 1859 complemented a small but growing manufacturing sector and an agricultural economy that, despite some market fluctuations, left a larger percentage of the white population better off than they were ten years earlier. This sense of peaceful, progressive development was violently interrupted by secession and the Civil War. Reaction to the initial drive for disunion in Spartanburg was varied. Large slaveholding planters tended to support South Carolina’s immediate secession, fearing that slavery—their economic and cultural lifeblood...

GAZING OUT OVER his lands on Christmas Day, 1867, David Golightly Harris could only reflect on “a year of trouble and disappointment to all, both white and black.” An unusually wet spring had resulted in poor crops at a time when debts ran high. “Much land was planted & high prices expected,” Harris recalled, “and many debts contracted on the faith of the cotton crops to pay them, but the crops have turned out so bad & the prices so low that many have been unable to pay even the expence of making the crop.” Harris found himself squeezed between...

AT AN 1873 MEETING in Asheville, North Carolina, Spartanburg lawyer John H. Evins rose to champion the long-awaited rail connection between Spartanburg and Asheville. Evins, who had supported railroads and manufacturing in the antebellum era, predicted that the completion of the line would make Spartanburg “a great commercial and railroad centre,” following a path similar to Atlanta.¹ The economic engine driving Spartanburg town’s success would be the cotton trade. The town’s location on the expanding rail network would permit merchants to buy and sell cotton in every direction. In addition, railroads would provide greater incentive for factory expansion.

The defeat...

WHETHER VIEWING RECONSTRUCTION as a success, a failure, or an unfinished revolution, southern historians have generally concurred that the creation of a state-supported system of public schooling for both whites and blacks was one of the most visible and lasting achievements of the period.¹ Over the past thirty-five years, studies have focused on the efforts of Freedmen’s Bureau agents, Yankee “schoolmarms,” and missionary societies to establish schools for ex-slaves in black majority areas. These scholars have carefully delineated areas of success along with the challenges of northern while cultural biases, the freedmen’s own educational expectations, and southern white opposition.²

Postwar...

THE CONVENING OF THE Spartanburg Court of Common Pleas and the Court of General Sessions in April 1866 occasioned local editor F. W. Trimmier to rejoice that “the wild and reckless dominion of lawlessness and riot is at an end” and that “society will be improved . . . by the timely and judicious administration of the laws.”¹ Most residents concurred with Trimmier that moral and material improvement would surely flourish in a community committed to the rule of law. After four long years of carnage on distant battlefields and chaos on the home front, families looked forward to a...

IN JULY 1890 writer Edward McKissick surveyed Spartanburg’s progress for the Charleston News & Courier and highlighted the county’s “magnificent railway facilities, its superb educational advantages, and greatest of all, its manufacturing enterprises,” which, he maintained, had earned the region a reputation as the “Greatest Cotton Manufacturing Centre in the South.” McKissick also found unrivaled success in Spartanburg city, where the population had more than quintupled since 1870 and the streets were lined with attractive brick homes and prosperous shops. Even racial tensions appeared resolved, as McKissick noted with pride the election to the city council of Thomas Bomar, “one...