The Men And The Vision Of The Southern Commercial Conventions, 1845-1871

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The decades of the 1840s through the 1870s present dramatic evidence of the forces of change and continuity in southern history. In The Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions Vicki Vaughn Johnson traces the magnitude of these forces by examining the delegates and the debates of the Southern Commercial Conventions. From Direct Trade Conventions of the 1830s and Railroad Conventions of the 1840s, the Southern Commercial Convention emerged as a formal organization in 1852. Meeting annually in cities across the South until the eve of the Civil War and resuming during Reconstruction, its sessions drew thousands of southerners and considered a wide range of issues.Johnson details sixteen conventions that met in the tumultuous years between 1845 and 1871. She offers a "quantitatively measured collective biography" of the 5,716 men who took part in the movement and finds that they composed a "Southern Elite," a body of men with distinct economic, political, and social standing who took well-defined roles in shaping the character of the South. Johnson's work is the first to take the story of the conventions beyond the antebellum years. By examining the postwar conventions as well, Johnson is able to show resiliency of both leadership and strategies.As Johnson traces the convention movement through its antebellum phase, she notes a firm commitment to an agrarian economy but yet a receptiveness to limited modernization. The convention participants saw facilitating economic growth as one of the major responsibilities of government. Overshadowing all these concerns, however, was a growing anxiety over the issue of slavery. Johnson shows that old ideas about race and economic strategies remained intact when the conventions resumed in 1869, as this Southern Elite opened their debates to northern delegates and sought economic regeneration in a spirit of national reconciliation. That the conventions ended in 1871 tells us much about the unraveling of Congressional Reconstruction that was soon to follow.Johnson contends that over several decades and with striking consistency in perception, leaders of the Southern Commercial Conventions tendered a vision of the South as a unit with a coherence. For good or for ill, the vision survived the ravages of war, and southerners of the postwar convention movement did not, indeed could not, deny their history. Anyone interested in the Civil War, American history, or American culture will be intrigued by this study.