Black Belt Factory: Antebellum Montgomery, Industry, and Ruling Bloc Construction, 1837–60

A potential dissertation chapter, this paper explores antebellum Montgomery and its place in the industrial landscape from 1837 to 1860 through the lens of the story of the Winters and related families. In making a conceptual distinction between industrialism and industrialization, the paper argues that industrialization in this Deep South interior town arose from a social and political debate in Montgomery, Alabama, and across the South’s ruling class regarding the role of industry in a slave society in the post-Panic period, with industrialism improving its position by 1848’s incorporation of the Montgomery Manufacturing Company. The life of this firm up to 1859 highlights some of the consequences of industrialization in the Black Belt, from its role in local and regional economies to the place of enslaved and free workers within and among the urban environs of Montgomery. By the time the firm finally dissolved in 1859, Montgomery was simultaneously a nascent industrial centre in Alabama and the heart of the controversial secessionist fire-eaters, revealing the myriad unintended political consequences of industrializing a slave society. This story, above all, is one of reconfiguration and consolidation- it is the story and example of how the Southern ruling class attempted, even in the heart of what could become the Confederacy, to remake itself and its society as part of the broader ‘second slavery’ in the Atlantic World prior to the Civil War. In the process, the paper both speaks to older literature on the ‘failure’ of industrialization in the slave South and also enters a recent historiographical trend in ‘slavery’s capitalism’ to examine the ‘factories in the field’ of the great cotton, sugar, and rice plantations by exploring the actual factories and their outsized role in the social and political life of the South in the late antebellum period.