Morgan, Chad

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Morgan, Chad

PERSONAL:

Male.

CAREER:

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, researcher at the NCSU Library's Special Collections Research Center.

WRITINGS:

Planters' Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia, foreword by John David Smith, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 2005.

Contributor to books, including The Uniting States: The Story of Statehood for the 50 United States of America, edited by Benjamin F. Shearer, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 2004; and The New Georgia Encyclopedia, edited by John Inscoe, Georgia Humanities Council and University of Georgia Press, 2004. Contributor to periodicals, including Atlanta History, Civil War History, and Georgia Historical Quarterly.

SIDELIGHTS:

Chad Morgan is a historian whose research interests include the Confederate South, with an emphasis on Georgia. At a number of conferences, Morgan has been a presenter, commentator, or chair on such subjects as white violence, slaveholding, color and industrial slavery in the South, and entrepreneurship.

Morgan is the author of Planters' Progress: Modernizing Confederate Georgia, a Civil War history that focuses on the little-covered aspect of the impact of that war on Southern industrialization. He provides a case study of the single state that he considers to be "at the nexus of the older and newer Old South," one where the planter class expanded the industrial economy in both war and peace. This growth began in support of the war, subsidized by the state. Josiah Gorgas, the head of the Confederate Ordnance Bureau was responsible for Georgia's standing as the center for military manufacturing. Governor Joseph Brown supported the building of munitions factories and expansion of textile mills in Macon, Augusta, Columbus, and Atlanta, which became a rail hub for the South. Morgan notes that labor was made up of both white and black, male and female, free and enslaved workers. After Sherman's invasion, the role of the state took on a more humanitarian course.

Morgan writes that unlike more independent northern businessmen, the planters relied on the state and Confederate governments. Frank J. Byrne commented in the Journal of Southern History: "Furthermore, the planter statist project that existed in Georgia, and in relative levels elsewhere across the South, confirmed what southern intellectuals like Henry Hughes and George Fitzhugh had argued before the war, namely that slavery and modern economic development were quite compatible." Sean Patrick Adams, reviewed the study for Economic History Services, a Web site of the Economic History Association. Adams wrote: "By focusing on intellectual trends at the expense of political battles, Morgan avoids the sloppy world of legislative policymaking altogether. Yet this leads him to assign a great deal of prescience to Georgia's planters, to whom ‘secession finally gave … an opportunity to pursue a modernity they had long sought.’"

Writing for History: Review of New Books, James K. Hogue called this monograph "a new and welcome addition to the longstanding debate about the attitudes of the Old South's planter class toward modernization and industrialization—in essence, the Old South's vision of its future made on its terms rather than those dictated by an alien race of conquering Yankees…. Morgan will have even more to add to this debate, should he expand his study to other Southern states and industries."