Transition to an industrial South: Athens, Georgia, 1830--1870

This dissertation explores the process by which one important Southern town industrialized from 1830 to 1870. During this period Athens, Georgia, transformed its small industrial base of three cotton textile factories from an experiment in political economy to the prototypical Southern mill town. The leadership in these manufacturing enterprises exhibited generational turnovers in the 1840s and again by 1870. The factories experimented with mixtures of slave and free labor, as well as with various technologies and forms of business organization. Seeking to expand markets, Athens' industrialists organized Georgia's initial railroad almost as soon as they finished constructing their factories, and they connected it with other railroads as part of an emerging national system. However, Athens' location proved disadvantageous to becoming a transfer point in this system, and so the town reached the limits of developmental potential in the 1840s. Outside perception of the success of Athens' industrialization set off a mill building boom in Georgia in the late 1840s, and several larger towns superseded Athens as the center of Georgia's textile industry. In the 1850s, local entrepreneurs organized manufacturing and financial enterprises that made Athens a center for supporting textile industrialization throughout Georgia, as well as in adjoining states. The Civil War proved a boon to Athens' industries, making its manufacturers wealthy. Following defeat, the town's industrialists weathered the transition to US currency by providing their goods as items that maintained an intrinsic value independent of the supply of money. They also repatriated funds from overseas to give themselves a greater say in determining the shape of the post-emancipation economy. Ultimately, this dissertation questions the usefulness of historians' definition of planters as a class solely on the basis of the number of their chattels, and it also connects the "new men" of the postbellum South to the planter-parvenue life-cycle of the Old South.