Bogs of Death: Slavery, the Brazilian Flour Trade, and the Mystery of the Vanishing Millpond in...

19The Journal of American HistoryJune 2014

doi: 10.1093/jahist/jau301© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].

Bogs of Death: Slavery, the Brazilian Flour Trade, and the Mystery of the Vanishing Millpond in Antebellum Virginia

Daniel Rood

“Were I living in the neighborhood of a millpond,” wrote a planter in the pages of Virginia’s Farmer’s Register, “I should consider the right of property in [my land] no more than that of a tame bear, that was devouring my child.” The unfortunate landowner whose property abutted one of the upper South’s thousands of millponds (which were used to power small gristmills) was forced “to calmly sit by and see all one’s children and dear companion pale as corpses,” spectral victims of a “violent disease” that would drive them to early graves. “To know that all those heartrending sufferings arise from the malaria of the various millponds in your neighborhood,” the writer reflected, “must evince [in the planter] a degree of forbearance beyond Christian, and an obduracy of heart, in the owner of mills, almost equal to that of cold-blooded murder.”1

Having equated the planter to a submissively bleating lamb of God and denounced the country miller as a villain of near-homicidal proportions, the correspondent de-clared that he would “accept the dictatorship of a country” if he knew such a govern-ment would have “the power to constrain the inhabitants in the bilious fever region to remove all stagnant waters from it.” Recent research shows that many elite antebel-lum slaveholders were strong advocates of the expansion of the federal government, particularly in its military guises. In light of that scholarship, a southern planter claiming to welcome an intrusive central government is perhaps not as surprising as it might once have been. Nevertheless, the writer’s rhetorical excess suggests the degree

Daniel Rood is an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia. This article was supported by the John B. Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society, as well as the Fulbright-Hays Pro-gram, the Social Science Research Council, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Willson Center for Humani-ties and Arts at the University of Georgia. The author would like to thank Alice Fahs, Ken Pomeranz, Lisa Wilson, Kyle Volk, Elizabeth Dillon, Sean Harvey, Scott Nelson, John Majewski, Greg Kimball, Caroline Sloat, John Bezis- Selfa, Camillia Cowling, Tom Kelleher, Claudia Dale Goldin, Caitlin Rosenthal, Allan Kulikoff, Ed Linenthal, Ben Brown, and the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of American History for their encouraging and insightful sug-gestions on earlier drafts. Archivists at the American Antiquarian Society, the Library of Virginia, the Virginia His-torical Society, and the Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia were consistently collegial, helpful, and friendly. Zachary Rojas provided excellent research assistance. Robert Krick of Richmond National Battlefield Park guided the author to online troves of Virginia mill photos. Thanks to the Society for the Preservation of Old Mills for a fascinating mill tour through the Connecticut River valley in 2010. Finally, Lynh Tran Rood was kind and skilled enough to create first versions of the maps and the graph.

Readers may contact Rood at [email protected].

1 Anonymous, “Malaria and Millponds,” Farmer’s Register, 8 (March 1840), 141.

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20 The Journal of American History June 2014

to which rural millponds in the ante bellum South had come to be viewed as “bogs of death”: sickly scars on the landscape signifying an imperfect subduing of nature.2

Environmental and social historians have zeroed in on efforts to drain millponds, swamps, and other bodies of standing water as key “improvement” projects of the nine-teenth century. Mourning over exhausted soil and bemoaning the propensity for young white farmers to seek unbroken soil on the frontier, agricultural improvers along the East-ern Seaboard instead held out the promise of long-term affluence through land-saving progressive-farming techniques that emphasized proper drainage. Northeastern writers such as Jesse Buel and southern ones such as Edmund Ruffin, who urged husbandmen to apply marl to their lands, plant fodder crops, and plow more deeply, also led efforts to criminalize the open ranging of cattle and hogs. The latter project jibed well with criti-cisms of country milling. Improvers detested the open range and the rural millpond, even though, or perhaps precisely because, these sites offered crucial resources to the rural working classes, enslaved and free. Sprawling millponds, with often-slapdash dams re-straining their waters, held fish and attracted small game while also powering gristmills that were utilized by yeoman farmers. Secluded and unfenced millpond areas, moreover, which often occupied the interstices between well-ordered plantation landscapes, pro-vided safe spaces for unsanctioned slave sociability. Whites claimed that everything from illicit commerce to the planning of rebellions occurred there.3

While some elites sought to drain their countryside by removing dams, other contro-versies over riparian rights pitted powerful factory owners—insisting on the right to build dams—against the protests of small farmers upstream whose lands would be flooded by the dammed waters. Ironically, both the erection of dams and their removal in pre–Civil War America have been understood by scholars as central plot lines in the story of an American enclosure movement that saw men of capital exert increasing control over natu-ral resources. These diametrically opposed actions have been subsumed under a national declension narrative of a disappearing commons and the retreat of the republican promise of an independent livelihood.4

While this framework for understanding nineteenth-century riparian politics may still hold water, it is not the best explanation in every case. In this article, I show that elite-

2 Ibid. For another interpretation of the millpond controversy, see Jack Temple Kirby, Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society (Chapel Hill, 1995), 130–40. On southern elites’ advocacy of an expansion of state and fed-eral government power, see David F. Ericson, Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791–1861 (Lawrence, 2011); John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill, 2009), esp. 53–80; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); and Matthew Karp, “Arsenal of Empire: Southern Slaveholders and the U.S. Military in the 1850s,” Common-Place, 12 (July 2012), http://www.common-place.org/vol-12/no-04/karp/. On millponds as “bogs of death,” see J. F. Edmunds, “Great Improvements Made in Charlotte County, by Substituting Canals for Ponds, to Supply Water Power to Mills,” Farmer’s Register, May 1, 1837, pp. 1–2.

3 On early to mid-nineteenth-century agricultural improvement doctrines, see Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2002), esp. 13–67. On swamps mentioned by slave owners and slaves as clandestine meeting places, see Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Wom-en and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, 2004), 6, 41, 69, 73; and Kirby, Poquosin, 174.

4 On drainage and enclosure as forms of “primitive accumulation,” see E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York, 1991), esp. 97–184; and Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour/Le Travail, 10 (Autumn 1982), 87–121. On the increasingly capitalistic notions of private property rights over land and water in North America, see Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Gary Kulik, “Dams, Fish, and Farmers: The Defense of Public Rights in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Tranformation, ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill, 1985), 25–50; and William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York,



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21The Brazilian Flour Trade and Vanishing Millponds in Antebellum Virginia

driven thrusts toward land concentration (along with public health criticisms) were im-portant but secondary factors in the collapse of the rural grain-milling industry in Vir-ginia between 1840 and 1860. More influential in shaping the increasingly drained and enclosed piedmont landscape were urban bread consumers in Rio de Janeiro and São Pau-lo, Brazil, and planters in the coffee-growing zones of the southeastern part of that nation.

In the decades preceding the secession of the southern states, Brazil became the pri-mary export market for U.S. wheat flour. By the late 1850s, 91 percent of the imported flour that found its way to the tables of residents of Rio de Janeiro and the surrounding coffee estates was made in the United States, and it appears that the millers of Richmond, Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland, supplied nearly all of it. Despite the emergence of

1983). On private property rights in the antebellum South, see Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeo-men Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (Oxford, Eng., 1983); Stephanie McCur-ry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York, 1995); Tom Downey, “Riparian Rights and Manufacturing in Antebellum South Carolina: William Gregg and the Origins of the ‘Industrial Mind,’” Journal of Southern History, 65 (Feb. 1999), 77–108; Joseph P. Reidy, “Obligation and Right: Patterns of Labor, Subsistence, and Exchange in the Cotton Belt of Georgia,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville, 1992), 138–54; Joyce E. Chaplin, “Tidal Rice Cultivation and the Problem of Slavery in South Carolina and Georgia, 1760–1815,” William and Mary Quarterly, 49 (Jan. 1992), 29–61; and Jack Temple Kirby, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (Chapel Hill, 2006), esp. 113–55. For a review of the enclosure and privatization literature at a global level and the suggestion that European takeover of the Americas was accomplished by the superimposition of European commons over native ones, see Allan Greer, “Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America,” American Historical Review, 117 (April 2012), 365–86.

“The Goblin Swamp,” an illustration from a Virginia plantation romance, portrays the slaveholder’s view of the millpond as a space of nostalgia but also of racial disorder. Re-printed from John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn; Or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (New York, 1852), 468. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society. by guest on M

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midwestern wheat-growing powerhouses such as Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, the flour trade between the U.S. upper South and southeastern Brazil loomed large in U.S. national aggregates: of about 2.6 million barrels of wheat flour exported by the United States annually in the mid-1850s, approximately 400,000 barrels went to South America from Richmond and Baltimore combined. This means that more than one in six barrels exported by the United States went from the slave-exploiting zones of the upper South to the slave society of southeastern Brazil. This single export market dominated the balance sheets of Richmond milling firms. For the three-year period of 1858, 1859, and 1860, Richmond sent 87 percent of its flour exports to South America.5

Responding to the robust, consistent, and particularly choosy demand of these South American bread eaters, large-scale flour millers in Richmond built the biggest factories in the nation and used a new system of railroads and canals, as well as mercantile and inter-personal contacts, to draw high-quality wheat out of the reach of rural millers. Robbed of the clean, high-quality wheat they could possibly have used to compete in export markets, and continuing to manufacture a grade of flour that had sold well in Caribbean markets but not in a very different Brazilian one, country millers were squeezed out of the game. Rural millers’ unprofitability made them vulnerable to the moves of expanding plant-ers, who had long complained of the malarial airs wafting across their neighborhoods, to drain area millponds and plant valuable acres of wheat in their place.

Owing to the 1830s emergence of a special commodity relationship between Rich-mond and Rio de Janeiro, the decline of a century-old, small-scale, rural milling sector in antebellum Virginia was sure and swift. In 1840 the state’s 3,478 flour and gristmills produced a value of $7.85 million. In 1860, with only 1,383 “flour and meal” establish-ments remaining in the state, the annual value of their products was $15.8 million. Thus, between 1840 and 1860, the number of flour and gristmills in Virginia decreased by 60 percent while total production of flour more than doubled, rapidly remaking the regional division of labor in the state.6

Milling became concentrated overwhelmingly in the city of Richmond, while the Piedmont region of the state began to focus on the export of raw wheat to the state capi-tal, deindustrializing (and draining) the hinterland in that line of work. Between 1830 and 1840 the share that hinterland mills contributed to the total quantity of flour mar-keted through Richmond decreased by 75 percent. Wheat shipments to the state capital

5 On the development of Richmond, Virginia, as Brazil’s preeminent supplier of flour, see “Commerce of Rio de Janeiro,” Hunt’s Merchant Magazine and Commercial Review, 24 (May 1851), 621. The combined Richmond- Baltimore annual shipment of 400,000 barrels of flour to South America is a conservative estimate based on Rich-mond’s annual average direct export of 247,000 barrels between 1858 and 1860 and Baltimore’s annual average di-rect export of 158,000 barrels per year between 1856 and 1860. See ibid., 43 (July 1860), 97; and Allan T. Comp, “Grain and Flour in Eastern Virginia: 1800–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1978), 167. Emory R. Johnson et al., History of Domestic and Foreign Commerce of the United States (2 vols., Washington, 1915), II, 49. I have seen little evidence of Richmond exporting to other South American countries and am therefore assuming that most flour shipments were going to Brazil. “Virginia Flour Trade,” Hunt’s Merchant Magazine and Commercial Review, 43 (Aug. 1860), 231. In 1859, for example, Chile and Peru each took 2% of Baltimore’s flour exports, while Argentina, Uruguay, and Venezuela took even less. Frank Rutter, South American Trade of Baltimore (Baltimore, 1897), 18, 36.

6 U.S. Department of State, Census Office, Compendium of the Sixth Census: 1840, pt. II, Mines, Agriculture, Commerce, Manufacturing, &c. (Washington, 1841), 154–77; U.S. Department of Interior, Census Office, Manu-factures of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, 1865), 638; U.S. Department of Interior, Census Office, Agriculture of the United States in 1860 (Washington, 1864), 154–65.



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increased over 400 percent during the same decade. By 1848 the six large-scale Richmond mills accounted for half of the total number of flour barrels marketed through the city, up from only one-third in 1819. This proportion would increase substantially over the next decade with the accelerating expansion of railroads, which played an essential role in reshaping Virginia’s regional division of labor. The state’s transformed geography of pro-duction, however, did not unfold in isolation.7

The emergence of a new city-hinterland system between the Richmond and Piedmont areas of Virginia was deeply entangled with an emergent geographic division of labor in southeastern Brazil, reshaping the built landscape in each region. The drained millponds and cultivated lands; the railroads, canals, and telegraph lines; and the abandoned coun-try mills of Virginia found their Brazilian counterparts in deforested hillsides newly plant-ed with coffee; improved transport in the countryside; the rapid decline of wheat produc-tion and flour milling in southern Brazil; and the growth of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The two regions also experienced massive forced migrations of the enslaved: Virginia was the primary exporter of slaves to the cotton South (and the state with the largest number of slaves), while southeastern Brazil was the destination for slaves purchased from the de-clining sugar estates in the northeastern region of the country.8

7 Comp, “Grain and Flour in Eastern Virginia,” 147; and Thomas S. Berry, “The Rise of Flour Milling in Rich-mond,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 78 (no. 4, 1970), 401. For a survey of the economic debates about slavery, see Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge, 2006). The spatial un-derstandings of capitalism that have most influenced this article are Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century (3 vols., 1979; Berkeley, 1992); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World Economy, 1730–1840 (San Diego, 1989); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000); Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); and William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991). On the idea that a qualitatively distinct form of slavery emerged on new “commodity frontiers” between 1800 and 1860, see Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske, “Introduction, the Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World-Economy and Comparative Microhistories,” Fernand Brau-del Center Review, 31 (no. 2, 2008), 91–100; Reinaldo Funes Monzote, De bosque a la sabana: Azúcar, deforestación y medioambiente en Cuba, 1492–1926 (From rain forest to cane field: Sugar, deforestation, and environment in Cuba, 1492–1926) (Mexico City, 2004); Jason W. Moore, “‘The Modern World-System’ as Environmental His-tory? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism,” Theory and Society, 32 (June 2003), 307–77; Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History, 75 (Aug. 2009), 627–50; and Edward E. Baptist, The Half That Has Never Been Told: The Migration That Made Af-rican America, the South, and the United States (New York, forthcoming).

8 For recent scholarship on slavery within “complex agroecosystems,” see Paul S. Sutter, “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of American History, 100 (June 2013), 107–8. On the inter-action between slavery and the transformation of land, space, waterways, or the environment, see S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Mart A. Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (Athens, Ga., 1996); Philip D. Curtin, Grace S. Brush, and George W. Fisher, eds., Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem (Baltimore, 2001); Kir-by, Mockingbird Song; John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, 2003); Joyce Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill, 1993); Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in the South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (New York, 1990); Megan Kate Nelson, Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (Athens, Ga., 2005); and William M. Mathew, Edmund Ruffin and the Crisis of Slavery in the Old South: The Failure of Agricultural Reform (Athens, Ga., 1988). For an assessment of new developments in the field, see Christopher Morris, “A More Southern Environmental History,” Journal of Southern History, 75 (Aug. 2009), 581–98. Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900: The Roles of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society (1958; Princeton, 1985); Gregory Brown, “The Impact of American Flour Imports on Brazil-ian Wheat Production: 1808–1822,” Americas, 47 (Jan. 1991), 315–46; and Alcir Lenharo, As tropas da moderação: O abastecimento da Corte na formação política do Brasil, 1808–1842 (The troops of moderation: The provisioning of Rio de Janeiro and the political formation of Brazil, 1808–1842) (Sao Paulo, 1979). On the U.S. domestic slave trades, see Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford, Eng., 2005); and Wal-ter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven, 2004).



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The entwined trajectories of these two pan-American nodes of slave-based commod-ity exchange should encourage us to reimagine antebellum history as a place of entangled empires and nation-states, as well as a location of back-and-forth flows of capital, influ-ence, power, commodities, and labor; it should also lead us to reconsider the upper South, where little cotton was grown, as still being of large importance to the fortunes of the Re-public. Most importantly, the Richmond–Rio de Janeiro circuit should be placed within the ongoing evolution of global capitalism as a whole: an increasingly stark regional di-vision of labor in Virginia facilitated a global division of labor by allowing Brazil to spe-cialize in the production of coffee. Seldom-studied antebellum Virginia agriculture and manufacturing thus underwrote the flows of one of the nineteenth century’s most impor-tant commodities. But this was not simply a question of abstract “energy exchange.” An economistic framework within which Richmond flour could be couched as non essential to the expansion of Brazilian coffee cultivation because citizens of Rio de Janeiro could have acquired those calories from elsewhere would ignore the fact that Brazilians of differ-ent social classes were quite choosy about where their nutrition came from. Concrete and specific, culturally determined preferences thus shaped this piece of an emergent, shifting, global division of labor.9

Beyond their importance as simple materializations of digestible caloric energy, cof-fee (often with sugar) and white bread were important aspects of bourgeois, industrial capitalism and the formation of middle-class and urban working-class identities as each took shape throughout the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The mystery of the vanishing millpond, plumbed in the pages of this article, suggests that slavery is imbricated in these deep aspects of the nineteenth-century world economy more profoundly, and in more complicated and surprising ways, than previously thought.10

Brand Loyalty among Brazilians/Chandlerian Growth among Virginians

In 1857 a Virginia railway engineer traveling through the Paraíba Valley of southeastern Brazil noted that coffee planters “do not buy flour but the bread already baked, for there are very few persons if any in Brazil who bake their own bread.” Loaves were typically supplied by “bakers who are established all through the country & in the cities it is the same case.” In southeastern Brazil, as the engineer suggested, most bread baking was done not by individual families in the home but by artisan bakers in businesses with

9 On the idea that the tastes of faraway consumers in supposedly peripheral zones can have transformative effects on metropolitan industries, see Jeremy Prestholdt, “On the Global Repercussions of East African Consumerism,” American Historical Review, 109 (June 2004), 755–81. Other world historians have emphasized how consumer de-mand from the plantation sector and from slave-exporting zones of Africa shaped English industry. See Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (London, 2002); and Wallerstein, Modern World-System, III. For attempts to theorize world ecology under capital-ism through the lens of energy exchanges, see Edmund Russell et al., “The Nature of Power: Synthesizing the His-tory of Technology and Environmental History,” Technology and Culture, 52 (April 2011), 246–59.

10 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985). All but the poorest Parisians expected white bread by the late eighteenth century, and they protested in its absence. See Ste-ven L. Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade during the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, 1984). For works that craft new categories and entertain new forms of causation for transnational histori-cal phenomena, see Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Significance of the “Global Turn” for the Early American Republic: Globalization in the Age of Nation-Building,” Journal of the Early Republic, 31 (Spring 2011), 1–37; Matthew Pratt Guterl, “Comment: The Futures of Transnational History,” American Historical Review, 118 (Feb. 2013), 130–39; and Karen Halttunen, “Grounded Histories: Land and Landscape in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 68 (Oct. 2011), 513–32.



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as many as eighteen employees. These skilled individuals, many of them slaves in the employ of master bakers, demanded and knew how to recognize high-end raw materials. While individual consumers in a different sort of market might unknowingly purchase inferior flour, the expert hands inspecting each barrel of imported product in the wheat flour warehouses of Rio de Janeiro would have made U.S. milling firms’ consistent qual-ity control indispensable. An American merchant with a large cargo of flour to unload in Brazil warned his consigners back in Richmond that Brazilian buyers “are very fastidious as to quality.”11

These purchasers consistently paid higher prices for and bought larger quantities of Richmond-milled goods. The bakers of Rio de Janeiro preferred Virginia flour partly be-cause of the raw material that Richmond millers were using. Containing more gluten and less water than northern wheat varieties, southern wheat was supposed to be less vulner-able to rotting on the lengthy and humid trip over the equator. Owing to its lower water content, furthermore, Virginia wheat yielded more bread per pound of flour since it ab-sorbed more water during baking. During Rio de Janeiro’s bread shortage of the 1850s, when bakers were frequently accused of selling undersized loaves, Virginia flour’s reputa-tion for high yield would have made it particularly desirable. Finally, the soft red winter wheat grown in warmer climates was easier to grind than the harder varieties, meaning that the bran of each grain did not fracture and speck the flour. Southern wheat thus came out of the mill looking especially white. However, Brazilian bakers did not clamor simply for flour made from southern wheat. Consistent quality became associated with the brands of particular Richmond flour mills, such as Haxall & Crenshaw or Gallego.12

One Richmond millowner pointed out that the grade stamped on barrels by govern-ment inspectors mattered little in Brazil. Country flour graded “Richmond extra super-fine,” he noted, sold for less than the Gallego brand given the lower inspector’s grade of “superfine.” The strength of known city brands, moreover, was no figment of the self- serving imaginations of Richmond millers. A price list of the flour exports in New York City in 1855 reported 1,500 barrels of the “Rialto” brand, made in Richmond, for ex-port to Rio de Janeiro. As the “favorite brand” in that city at that particular moment—as a New York commercial daily newspaper reported—the prized Rialto label pushed up the price of fellow Richmond products by mere association. Indeed, the power of flour brands such as Gallego was so influential in the Brazilian market that merchants from other foreign ports may have resorted to shady practices to capitalize on it. New York

11 On coffee planters buying prebaked bread, see “Richard Morton Diary, March 30, 1857–May 11, 1858,” Aug. 15, 1857, accession Mss5:1 M8465:1 (Virginia Historical Society, Richmond); and Stein, Vassouras, 178. Eul-lia Maria Lahmeyer Lobo, História do Rio de Janeiro: do capital comercial ao capital industrial e financeiro (The his-tory of Rio de Janeiro: From commercial capital to capital of industry and finance) (2 vols., Rio de Janeiro, 1978), I, 284. A few African-born former slaves engaged in the food trade were able to accumulate enough wealth to open businesses and buy slaves. See Richard Graham, Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860 (Austin, 2010), 20. On the predominance of enslaved men among the bakers of Rio de Janeiro, see Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, 1987), 195–96. “Extract of a Letter Dated Rio de Janeiro,” Richmond Enquirer, Feb. 10, 1823.

12 William Carter Hughes, The American Miller and Millwright’s Assistant (Philadelphia, 1855), 152–65; John C. Brush, A Small Tract Entitled, A Candid and Impartial Exposition of the Various Opinions on the Subject of the Comparative Quality of the Wheat and Flour in the Northern and Southern Sections of the United States, with a View to Develope the True Cause of the Difference (Washington, 1820); Juliana Texeira da Souza, “A autoridade municipal na Corte imperial: Enfrentamentos e negociações na regulação do comércio de gêneros (1840–1889)” (Municipal authority in the imperial court: Conflict and negotiation in the provisions trade [1840–1889]) (Ph.D. diss., Uni-versity of Campinas, 2007).



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traders, for example, allegedly were buying up the coarse flour also made by the big Rich-mond mills, scraping the inspector’s stamps off the barrels, and reselling them in Brazil with only the brand of the miller to identify the product.13

Richmond had only seven firms in 1860, all of them large, and they accounted for an increasing share of Virginia’s total output. The city’s unusual pattern of firm concentra-tion was rooted in the competitive advantages that brand recognition and quality con-trol bestowed upon their products in the Brazilian market. These strengths could not be shared by the thousands of anonymous country mills scattered throughout the hinter-land; their barrels showed up at the port bearing only an inspector’s grade.14

Small mills also found it difficult to keep pace with a cascade of innovations transform-ing flour milling in the late antebellum period. Each of these technical changes, within the reach of well-capitalized Richmond firms, would have been especially important for mills exporting to the tropics. First, new bolting cloths made regrinding unnecessary; the cloth acted as a filter, separating the meal more cleanly into different grades of fineness, making whiter flour with less bran and less propensity to spoil. A second innovation was a winnowing machine that cleaned the grains before grinding. Another was an automatic packing machine that enclosed export wheat flour more securely and cleanly. A fourth in-novation was an improved grinding stone quarried in France and finished in Utica, New York. Recently invented smut machines, which scraped the grains clean of mold or fungus before grinding, forestalling spoilage, were also important. Thanks to their investment in the latest grain-processing equipment, the U.S. Commissioner of Agriculture declared that “the flouring mills of Richmond are probably equal to any in the world, both in per-fection of their machinery and in the quantity and quality of the flour produced.”15

The Haxall & Crenshaw mill was able to fill 160,000 barrels per year by 1860. It had “18 pair of five-and-a-half foot burr stones turned by latest iron gearing and shafting” instead of the one or two pairs of stones used by mills elsewhere in the country. Using the latest water-power technology to harness the falls of the James River, their mill was “powered by overshot wheels 18 feet in diameter and fourteen-and-a-half feet wide.” Meanwhile, in the years prior to the Civil War, the Warwick & Barksdale mill of Rich-mond (formerly the Gallego mill) conducted business under the roof of the “largest brick building in the United States,” which stood at a towering (for that time) twelve stories. Incorporating recent advances in hydraulic engineering, its six “huge wheels designed to use water twice over” spun thirty-one pairs of millstones. Their impressive structure was thought capable of putting out 190,000 to 200,000 barrels per year by 1860.16

Millwrighting had also changed. Instead of fashioning all the individual parts himself, one observer pointed out, the modern millwright placed orders with “the large machinery

13 [Lewis D. Crenshaw], Flour Inspection Laws (Richmond, 1860), 8, 23. An inspector of flour [pseud.], Letter to Dr. J. H. Claiborne, Member for Petersburg, from an Inspector of Flour (n.p., 1856), 10.

14 On the number of firms in Richmond’s milling industry, see “Commercial and Industrial Cities of the United States. Richmond, Virginia,” Hunt’s Merchant Magazine and Commercial Review, 40 (Jan. 1859), 56. On the increas-ing share of Virginia’s total wheat product being milled in Richmond, see ibid., 6.

15 Charles Byron Kuhlmann, The Development of the Flour-Milling Industry in the United States (Boston, 1929); George Terry Sharrer, “The Merchant-Millers: Baltimore’s Flour Milling Industry, 1783–1860,” Agricultural His-tory, 56 (Jan. 1982), 138–50; Louis Hunter, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930 (3 vols., Charlottesville, 1979), II. Hughes, American Miller and Millwright’s Assistant, 156. “Report of the United States Commissioner of Agriculture for 1864,” p. 18, quoted in Arthur G. Peterson, “Flour and Grist Milling in Virginia: A Brief History,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 43 (no. 2, 1935), 105–6.

16 Peterson, “Flour and Grist Milling in Virginia,” 106. Comp, “Grain and Flour in Eastern Virginia,” 128–30. Berry, “Rise of Flour Milling in Richmond,” 406.



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establishments with which our country abounds,” enabling well-capitalized mills to make a more consistent product. With a robust, expanding, and increasingly centralized iron industry in their city, the Richmond millers had access to the best hardware and afford-able frequent maintenance—very important in the machine-dependent flour business.17

0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

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Central Piedmont Northern Piedmont Shenandoah Valley

189mills

75millsN/A

382mills

128millsN/A

194mills

169millsN/A

1840 1850 1860

Bush

els o

f Whe

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n m

illio

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Each bar in the graph represents the bushels of wheat produced in the leading wheat counties in each zone in a particular year; the text within the bar shows the number of mills operating in the region during that year. In the central Piedmont (zone 1), the trend is toward more wheat and fewer mills, while the northern Piedmont (zone 2) shows decreases in both categories, and the Shenandoah Valley (zone 3) demonstrates no clear trend. While zones 2 and 3 were more significant in absolute terms, zone 1 fed the Rich-mond mills and, therefore, the Brazilian baking industry. (Mill counts were unavailable for 1850.) Data from U.S. Department of State, Census Office, Compendium of the Sixth Census: 1840, pt. II, Mines, Agriculture, Commerce, Manufacturing, &c. (Washington, 1841), 154–77; The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850. Embracing a Statistical View of Each of the States and Territories, Arranged by Counties, Towns, etc. (Wash-ington, 1853), 274–82; U.S. Department of Interior, Census Office, Manufactures of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, 1865), 638; and U.S. Depart-ment of Interior, Census Office, Agriculture of the United States in 1860 (Washington, 1864), 154–65.

17 On the growth of Richmond’s iron industry, see Midori Takagi, “Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction”: Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782–1865 (Charlottesville, 1999), 71–96; and Charles B. Dew, Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works (New Haven, 1966), esp. 2–3. The growth of mecha-nized industries in a particular locale often depended on a preexisting critical mass of machinist, blacksmithing, and woodworking skills. See Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 2003); and David R. Meyer, Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 2006).



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Many of Richmond’s skilled ironworkers and woodworkers were enslaved African Americans, and the milling firms’ increased investment in slaves shows continued de-pendence on manual labor despite the ideal of total automation. Frequent construction projects, routine maintenance, and large arrivals of wheat and departures of flour called for a labor force of about eighty workers per firm for the four largest Richmond com-panies. Dressing all the stones (sharpening the grooves cut into the grinding faces) and resetting them was required every day to ensure consistent grinding and to prevent fires, which could be caused by the two stones accidentally rubbing together and giving off sparks. Dressing and resetting were particularly onerous tasks, since they required lifting each of the half-ton stones. Maintaining and lubricating the giant waterwheels and the complicated gear systems that transmitted their power to the stones were also necessary to ensure uniform grinding tempos. Enslaved workers remained the employees of choice in the integrated Richmond mills, and with the increasing prices for slaves in the antebellum years, they also tended to be concentrated into larger urban firms. In addition to the slaves directly owned by the firms, the companies could take advantage of a bustling urban mar-ket in bonded labor by renting and hiring enslaved workers. Mills in rural Virginia coun-

On this page is an 1865 photograph of the Ellerson mill, in Hanover County, Vir-ginia. Railroads would have brought mills such as this one, functioning with the most basic technologies and at the smallest of scales, into competition with the Haxall & Crenshaw mill, shown on the facing page in an 1859 photograph. Ellerson mill information provided by Robert Krick. Photographs courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Civil War Photographs LC-USZ62-105374 (Ellerson mill) and LC-DIG-cwpb-00392 (Haxall & Crenshaw mill).



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ties, meanwhile, could count on only about two workers apiece. Finally, since improper packing and careless transshipment were often cited as causes of damage to exported flour, the fact that the major mills in Richmond had their own shipping fleets probably helped their product consistently survive the trip.18

With automated technology, economies of scale and skill, and a ready supply of labor, Richmond’s flour mills produced in the same league as the leading flour cities of Phila-delphia and Baltimore throughout the 1840s and 1850s. In 1858 the seven mills of Rich-mond, plus rural mills with flour that was inspected in and shipped through Richmond, produced at least 650,000 barrels of flour, rivaling the output of Baltimore’s approxi-mately fifty-flour mills in 1859 of over one million barrels (a lot of this was still milled elsewhere). Greg Brown suggests that when Baltimore merchants “marketed their flour in Brazil they were able to realize such significant profit because of the large differences in the use of capital and technology in American and Brazilian wheat and flour production.” The statement better describes Richmond millers, however, because milling in Baltimore was done in smaller units of production, and Richmond technology was thought to be

18 Takagi, “Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction”; Berry, “Rise of Flour Milling in Richmond,” 406. Pe-ter Joseph Chevallié of the Gallego mill had a “Negro account” in his ledger, detailing his purchases and sales of slaves and his rentals of slaves from local owners. See Peter Joseph Chevallié Journal, 32028 miscellaneous reel 993, Manuscripts Collection (Library of Virginia Archives, Richmond). The Haxall & Crenshaw mill provided worker housing. See Haxall-Crenshaw Company to Gen. M. R. Patrick, April 29, 1865, section 3, accession Mss1 C8635 a38-54, Crenshaw Family Papers, 1807–1977, Manuscripts Collection (Virginia Historical Society). On the advantages and risks associated with flexible systems of labor coercion in southern cities, see Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009); William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slav-ery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Durham, N.C., 2007); John J. Zaborney, Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia (Baton Rouge, 2012); and Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). Census Office, Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 154–65. Hughes, American Miller and Millwright’s Assistant, 116. Comp, “Grain and Flour in Eastern Virginia,” 112, 116. For an enumeration of the clipper ships belonging to one major Richmond milling firm, see Thomas Armstrong, “Mem-oir of William G. Crenshaw,” 1938, typescript, section 4, accession Mss1 C8635a114, Crenshaw Family Papers.



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significantly better. Richmond mills also tended to be larger and better equipped than mills in the northern United States and in England and France.19

The quality control and brand recognition prized in the Brazilian market made major capital investments and unprecedented horizontal integration worthwhile for Richmond industrialists. As the New York Journal of Commerce put it, “increased favor” in Rio de Ja-neiro for all of Richmond’s export brands “has induced the millers to continue their ef-forts at improvement.” A Virginia State Assembly committee made much the same point, acknowledging that “the grade of flour manufactured in the city of Richmond (being much higher than the flour made any where else in or out of the state) is the result of a for-eign demand for a particular quality of flour adapted to the southern or tropical climate.” The more Richmond millers “improved” their product to please the Brazilian market through the application of capital and technology, the more they distanced themselves from their smaller counterparts in the Virginia countryside. “The truth is,” one of the Richmond millers concluded in 1860, rural artisans “cannot grind to the city mill standard, and many of the most intelligent of the country mill owners have made this discovery, and either abandoned the business altogether, or confined themselves to neighborhood opera-tion.”20

Making matters worse for the rural millers, the major Richmond firms were well repre-sented by mercantile associates in Rio de Janeiro, as well as by commercially ambitious ju-nior family members who acted on up-to-date commercial intelligence. As Robert Barks-dale informed his father, proprietor of the Gallego mill, in 1852, “We have advices from Rio as late as the 16th of March—everything very dull there, the stocks are not large still Baltimore & Other brands are so good this season that the bakers buy but sparingly of the Richmond [illegible] Mills, of which the ‘Gallego’ has the preference.” Even though Rich-mond did not always come out on top, the failure of the small-time mills to compete in a flour business increasingly centered on a brand-conscious Brazilian bread-baking sector transformed the built landscape of the Piedmont region of the state. As the infrastructure of small country mills washed away, twelve-story, automated mills spinning as many as thirty-one pairs of millstones rose along the falls of the James River at Richmond.21

Alfred Chandler dates the early phases of corporate consolidation, industrial centraliza-tion, and mass production in the northern U.S. economy to the 1840s. The coffee-flour

19 Philadelphia mills ground 750,000 barrels of flour in 1858. “Flour Received at Philadelphia,” Hunt’s Merchant Magazine and Commercial Review, 41 (Aug. 1859), 220. A “large” French mill of the 1850s turned four pairs of stones. Kaplan, Provisioning Paris, 248n94. English milling was still mostly local in the 1850s and saw little pro-duction at scale. Part-time milling was still a major factor in certain places. Richard Perren, “Structural Change and Market Growth in the Food Industry: Flour Milling in Britain, Europe, and America, 1850–1914,” Economic His-tory Review, 43 (Aug. 1990), 420–37. Brown, “Impact of American Flour Imports on Brazilian Wheat Production,” 329. The nature of Baltimore’s mercantile economy encouraged the growth of flour milling establishments in the city and in the hinterland, perhaps since urban and small-town mills maintained the same size and general level of technology. Jo N. Hays, “Overlapping Hinterlands: York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, 1800–1850,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 116 (July 1992), 303. Comp, “Grain and Flour in Eastern Virginia,” 131–33.

20 Inspector of Flour [pseud.], Letter to Dr. J. H. Claiborne, 10. Virginia General Assembly, House of Delegates, Committee on Agriculture, Minority Report of the Committee on Agriculture, etc. Relative to the Inspection of Flour, 1857–58 (Richmond, 1858), 4. Emphasis added. On the claim that country millers were surrendering due to the superiority of the big Richmond mills, see [Crenshaw], Flour Inspection Laws, 36. Berry, “Rise of Flour Milling in Richmond,” 390.

21 Robert Barksdale to William Jones Barksdale, April 28, 1852, section 43, accession Mss 1 M3816 d4048-4122, Mason Family Papers, Manuscripts Collection (Virginia Historical Society). See also H. Meade to William E Meade, in care of T. Rutherford & Sons, March 27, 1846, accession Mss 10126-c, Meade Family Papers (Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville).



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exchange of the Richmond–Rio de Janeiro circuit tells a strikingly similar story, unfold-ing at the same moment but differing by featuring slavery at both ends of the commodity chain. In the case of flour milling in Richmond, specific factors encouraged consolidation before anywhere else in the country in that particular industry. Moreover, brand loyalty (at the consumer end) and quality control (at the producer end) seem to have been more important factors than the usual Chandlerian drivers of consolidation (transaction costs and technology). The Richmond pattern of a small number of very large firms was not mirrored in the nation’s other leading flour cities such as Philadelphia, which also had less intimate commercial ties with Brazil in the antebellum period and were instead exporting to the West Indies and Europe. These distribution patterns were shaped by the era’s patch-work system of government inspections, which varied widely from state to state. Tougher inspectors in Virginia branded country flour “middlings,” while flour of a similar quality was branded “superfine” in New York. The uneven character of inspectors’ grades made an entry into mass flour markets in England and the Northeast impossible, so advocates of industrial milling in Richmond used their best flour to concentrate on cornering the expanding Brazilian consumer base, while country millers, who had formerly exported successfully to the Caribbean region and to northeastern cities such as Boston, found themselves pushed out of those traditional destinations by new midwestern producers.22

A Very Brief History of the North American Grain Trade

Virginia millers’ intense focus on tropical markets—and Brazilian dependence on upper South suppliers—should be understood within a long context. In the eighteenth century the middle colonies of North America had balanced trade deficits with England in part by exporting grain to the West Indies. Following U.S. independence, Caribbean and Latin American slave societies continued to consume much of the young nation’s export-ed grain. European demand for North American grain could be important, but it was also episodic—rising in response to the disruptions of war or the unforeseen disaster of a failed harvest. Tobacco, too, turned out to be an inconstant friend. European markets for snuff collapsed during the Napoleonic era, encouraging Piedmont farmers to cultivate wheat instead. Caribbean slaveholders, however, largely dependent on the outside world for foodstuffs, were faithful purchasers of upper South wheat flour. The food demands engendered by the spread of the sugar plantation complex were so great, as Ralph Davis put it several decades ago, that “the North American economy came to revolve around the produce of the tropical colonies . . . whilst the sugar islands in their turn depended for the lives of their slaves on continuing American supplies.”23

The reliable connection with colonial slave plantations transformed the North Ameri-can grain trade. The village gristmill had been part of the rural landscape in diverse parts of the globe for hundreds of years. Processing various grains in exchange for a toll paid in meal, homemade items, liquor, or cash, the gruff, neighborly miller would become a stock

22 Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), esp. 8, 11–12, 79–121.

23 Brooke Hunter, “Wheat, War, and the American Economy during the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 62 (April 2005), 505–26; James Lydon, “Fish and Flour for Gold: Southern Europe and the Colonial American Balance of Payments,” Business History Review, 39 (Summer 1965), 171–83; Dan Morgan, Merchants of Grain (New York, 1980). Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (London, 1973), 263. Thanks to Allan Kulikoff for insight on the pre-1815 tobacco trade.



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figure in American folk culture—an amiable rip-off artist with his gnarled thumb press-ing down the scales as he exchanged pleasantries with area farmers. In the earliest fron-tier settlements, the neighborhood mill was one prominent feature of a nonmonetized world of subsistence—a neighborhood node of gossip, social interaction, and drinking (if a distillery was connected to the mill). Grain was typically too heavy and too cheap to merit costly overland transportation.24

By the eighteenth century, however, the expansion of trade networks, increasing con-sumption of purchased food, transport improvements, and the integration of markets led to a “transition to capitalism” in the North American milling industry. A specialized wheat mill constructed to meet the needs of long-distance trade, the new “merchant mill” no longer ground the grain of farmers for a toll. Rather, the merchant miller pur-chased grain from cultivators and sold the output of the mill on his own account. The merchant miller’s relationship to the producer of the raw materials and to the consum-ers of the final product, mediated by relationships of cash or debt, stretched across long distances.25

Baltimore millers would pioneer this shift in the mid-Atlantic region, largely on the strength of Caribbean consumption. When Caribbean colonies declined as markets for southern flour after 1830, however, Baltimore millers, joined and then surpassed by Richmond citizens, successfully captured the disposable wealth and European-inspired consumer habits of nouveaux riches coffee planters in the Paraíba Valley of southeast-ern Brazil. Richmond millers of the 1850s, victualling the premiere coffee zone of the world economy, would carry the logic of the merchant mill to its highest expression by constructing large-scale, automated, horizontally integrated factories that dwarfed their peers in other cities and were the state of the art, at least until the “roller mill revolution” of the 1870s.26

During the heyday of coffee production in the Paraíba Valley, which lay to the north-west of the growing cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, tens of thousands of recently arrived slaves from Africa and later from Bahia cleared large swathes of old-growth for-est to make way for the coffee bush as Brazilian slave owners concentrated land holdings and pushed out small farmers. The emergence of large-scale, monocrop coffee produc-tion wrought two important changes: it augmented the wealth available for the purchase of a variety of imports; second, it reduced the diversity of agricultural output in the re-gion. The production of wheat flour in southern Brazil declined rapidly as a result. The process was accelerated by the first flood of U.S. imports in the 1820s and 1830s.27

24 Country millers in Virginia had also been the object of price-gouging complaints; toll prices were regulated because of perceived abuses. See Peterson, “Flour and Grist Milling.” John Storck. Flour for Man’s Bread; a History of Milling (Minneapolis, 1952), 154–55. On wheat as a cheap commodity in early modern Europe because it was grown everywhere, see Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, II, 178.

25 Hunter, “Wheat, War, and the American Economy during the Age of Revolution,” 3, 34, 112–13. On the importance of distinguishing between custom mills and merchant mills, see Larry Hasse, “Watermills in the South: Rural Institutions Working against Modernization,” Agricultural History, 58 (July 1984), 280–95.

26 Sharrer, “Merchant-Millers,” 149. Geoffrey Gilbert, “Baltimore’s Flour Trade to the Caribbean, 1750–1815,” Journal of Economic History, 37 (March 1977), 249–51.

27 On the steep increase in coffee production during the 1820s and 1830s in the province of Rio de Janeiro, see Leslie Bethell and José Murilo de Carvalho, “1822–1850,” in Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822–1930, ed. Leslie Bethell (New York, 1989), 45–112. While manioc remained the staple of the northeast region of the country, maize and wheat were the preferred food crops from São Paulo southward. See Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana, 1996), 72; Stein, Vassouras, 174–79; Brown, “Impact of American Flour Imports on Brazilian Wheat Production”; and Lenharo, As tropas da moderação.



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Rio de Janeiro’s population, meanwhile, continued to grow, with the capital hav-ing transitioned out of its role as a political seat to become the commercial heart of a dynamic agricultural export sector. In the 1830s and 1840s Rio de Janeiro and other growing towns and cities began to require supplies from the surrounding countryside as well as from international sources. Even the city’s outskirts were urbanizing, which reduced land previously reserved for garden crop production and increased the num-ber of people dependent on the market for everyday sustenance.28

Politics further contributed to the increase of food imports after Brazilian in-dependence in 1822. The long-standing mercantile restrictions vis-à-vis Portugal, which had been severely weakened by the upheavals of the Napoleonic era, were sun-dered irrevocably by independence. New political elites, who had supped heartily the ideas of free-trade liberalism, adopted policies that “tied Brazil more closely into the Atlantic marketing system,” offering new opportunities for North American and Brit-ish traders. Happy to pocket the import duties paid by Anglo merchants, who were simultaneously levied export duties on coffee and cattle products, the Crown per-mitted “the massive influx of high-quality American flour into Brazilian port cities,” which spelled doom for the very southern Brazilian wheat economy an enlightened protectionist regime had strived to promote thirty years earlier.29

The Crown’s blithe outlook toward dependence on imported foods may have been due in part to the influence of multinational merchants who exported coffee, sugar, and hides, and who brought flour and other finished goods into the capital. British-dominated groups such as the Commercial Association of Rio de Janeiro, having the ear of Brazil’s political elites, counseled authorities to promote export-oriented growth. With the goal of preserving good lands for high-value export commodities, large British and North American merchant firms encouraged the importation, rather than production, of subsistence foods such as flour.30

From the perspective of economic self-interest, the policy prescriptions proffered by the trade associations made sense. Having left inland, domestic trade to the Portu-guese merchants whom they had bested in Brazil’s major international ports, British merchants stood to make no money from such trade and had no interest in promot-ing it. More importantly, the merchant firms advocating the abandonment of local food-crop production were the same firms that happened to enjoy a near-monopoly on flour imports to Brazil. The three partnerships of Maxwell, Wright & Co., Phipps Brothers & Co., and Roston Dutton & Co., for example, supplied 60 percent of Rio de Janeiro’s wheat flour in 1858. They were also the three chief exporters of Brazil-ian coffee and were important shipbuilders who manufactured seacraft specially de-signed for the illegal African slave trade. Belonging to interlocking networks of kin and family, the Richmond millers maintained ongoing personal relationships with

28 Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, 72.29 Brown, “Impact of American Flour Imports on Brazilian Wheat Production,” 322. Steven Topik, “The State’s

Contribution to the Development of Brazil’s Internal Economy, 1850–1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 65 (May 1985), 203–28; Jorge M. Pedreira, “From Growth to Collapse: Portugal, Brazil, and the Breakdown of the Old Colonial System,” ibid., 80 (Nov. 2000), 839–64.

30 Eugene W. Ridings, “The Merchant Elite and the Development of Brazil: The Case of Bahia during the Em-pire,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 15 (Aug. 1973), 335–53. For a discussion of new mercan-tile institutions in the British and Iberian Atlantic worlds, see Eugene W. Ridings, “Business Associationalism, the Legitimation of Enterprise, and the Emergence of a Business Elite in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” Business History Review, 63 (Winter 1989), 757–96.



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members of these powerful merchant houses, some of whom were U.S. consuls in Rio de Janeiro. These networks should also be included in any explanation of the success of Richmond natives in Brazil (not to mention in the corresponding decline of Virginia’s rural millers).31

As early as 1830 Rio de Janeiro authorities began to take note of the substitution of primary foods traditionally produced in the province by products imported from other regions. Black beans from Rio Grande do Sul supplanted local beans; manioc flour began to be shipped in from Porto Alegre; and most importantly, “wheat flour that used to come mostly from southern Brazil began to be supplemented almost exclusively by the United States.” While Brazilian wheat production waned, flour consumption rose to new levels and foodways changed. During the early decades of the coffee boom, Cariocans’ diets in-creasingly featured western European–style white bread, enough so that Rio de Janeiro alone could support 147 bakeries by 1861. By this time twenty-two large warehouses, specifically designed to deal with thousands of barrels of imported white flour, had been constructed in Brazil. Formerly self-sufficient in food production, Brazil was soon count-ed among the top destinations for North American flour. In the 1820s only Cuba, Haiti, and the British West Indies purchased more. By the time Richmond millers had hitched their wagon to the Rio de Janeiro market in the 1840s, Brazil had overtaken those mar-kets to become the primary flour customer of the United States.32

As they had in Cuba and the British West Indies, U.S. millers made good money in Brazil. The shift to Brazil, however, would be accompanied by important changes in the class makeup of consumers. While the flour sold in Caribbean markets for feeding slaves had been a lower-priced article milled in small- to medium-sized country mills and was successful because of its affordability, the world-renowned “city flour” of Richmond, baked by artisan bakers in professionalized Brazilian shops, was consumed foremost by the growing urban middle classes and the rural elite, whose own disposable income was rooted in the slave trade and plantation production.33

The consumption of white bread, though, had spread quite far down the social ladder in the cities and towns of southeastern Brazil. As Juliana Texeira da Souza puts it, “bread had become part of the consumption habits of the people. It no longer played a secondary role, constituting instead part of the daily diets of the free poor.” The democratization of imported white flour made the region dependent upon the economic ups and downs of the Atlantic system for its everyday needs. The new role of Richmond flour in the lives of southeastern Brazilians, moreover, would have important impacts on life and landscape in the hinterland of the Virginia capital.34

31 Most of the Portuguese merchants looked for a new home in the provisions business, focusing on interregional cabotage trade or local exchange. Lenharo, As tropas da moderação, 27. Texeira da Souza, “A autoridade municipal na Corte imperial,” 89. Laura Jarnagin, A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil (Tuscaloosa, 2008), 128. For examples of these interpersonal links, see Armstrong, “Memoir of William G. Crenshaw”; and Lewis Dabney Crenshaw Jr., “A Journal that I wrote on a voyage to and from Rio De Janeiro,” 1861, section 4, accession Mss1 C8635 a106-107, Crenshaw Family Papers.

32 Lobo, História do Rio de Janeiro, I, 164–65, 301, 352.33 Brown, “Impact of American Flour Imports on Brazilian Wheat Production,” 325. The spread of French-

style restaurants through the city of São Paulo after 1850 also indicates the growth of elite consumption. See Maria Izilda Santos de Matos, “Portugueses e experiências políticas: A luta e o pão: São Paulo, 1870–1945,” (Portuguese and political experiences: The struggle and the bread: São Paulo, 1870–1945), História, 28 (no. 1, 2009), 415–43.

34 Texeira da Souza, “A autoridade municipal na Corte imperial,” 85–87.



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Richmond, Railroads, and the Fate of the Country Mill

The main character in the 1851 short story “Recollections of Sully” cursed the extension of railroads through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. “I wish this valley to remain in its ancient obscurity,” he protested, “with nothing to disturb the mountain air but the clack of the old mill yonder.” The coming of the railroad, he averred, would silence his beloved country mill, whose humble racket he associated with pastoral tranquility. Portrayed in the narrative as an emblem of the valley’s past, Sully nonetheless grasped the essence of the new relationship between industrialized transport and rural manufactur-ing in antebellum Virginia.35

In 1854 the Virginia Central Railroad finished a tunnel through the Blue Ridge Moun-tains, the real-life construction project to which the fictional character Sully referred. Built by a potent combination of enslaved labor and transportation engineering, the tun-nel was the longest in the country at the time of its completion. Along with a telegraph line, the rails reached the Augusta County seat of Staunton, linking the town directly to Richmond. The nearby Hogshead-Smiley mill felt the impact immediately. That year, the millers packed 473 barrels of white flour for thirty-eight different purchasers. The num-bers decreased in 1856 to 234 barrels for seventeen purchasers, and in 1858 to thirty- seven barrels for six purchasers. Whereas five years earlier some merchants had come to the mill and bought over fifty barrels in a single day, during the entire year of 1859 the millers sold only eleven barrels of flour out of the mill, all to different customers, except John Almadore, who bought two barrels. In 1860, finally, the account book recorded only two purchasers of flour: on January 15th John Mchesny bought six barrels, and on Feb-ruary 4th Andrew Archart had two barrels of his wheat ground at the mill. The scream of the steam whistle and the chuff of the locomotive had, as Sully feared, drowned out “the clack of the old mill.” When the steam locomotive came to the neighborhood it appears

35 L. I. L., “Recollections of Sully,” Southern Literary Messenger, 17 (no. 4, 1851), quoted in Aaron W. Marrs, Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society (Baltimore, 2009), 159.

This drawing depicts slaves transporting imported wheat flour through Rio de Janeiro. In the accompanying article on commercial activities in the city, Thomas Ewbank explained that large trucks, with winches to lift heavy goods onto the bed, “are as heavily built and ironed as brewers’ drays. . . . Each is of itself sufficient for any animal below an elephant to draw; and yet loads, varying from half a ton to a ton, are dragged on them by four Ne-groes. Two strain at the shafts and two push behind, or, what is quite as common, walk by the wheels and pull down the spokes.” Reprinted from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 7 (Nov. 1853), 728. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.



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that firms were forced out of involvement in distant flour markets—a line of business in which country millers had been active for almost a century.36

Beginning in the 1790s, elite and middling planters in western-shore counties of the Tidewater region, who had until then concentrated almost exclusively on growing to-bacco for export, diversified their activities. They incorporated wheat into their mix of crops, in part as a response to rising grain prices and falling tobacco prices in Atlantic markets and in part as a solution for the soil-exhausting nature of extensive and repeated tobacco planting. Wheat production encouraged new practices of crop rotation and soil rejuvenation—key elements of an enlightened agriculture that also featured early efforts to mechanize farm operations, an emergent culture of gentlemanly improvement, and at-tempts to rationalize slave management. The growth of wheat farming also created a need for local millers, coopers, and blacksmiths, as well as a network of dams, ponds, creek improvements, and wagon roads that spread westward across the state in the early nine-teenth century. While the minimal off-plantation processing requirements of tobacco had limited urban growth, “the exportation of wheat produced a configuration of sizable ports supplied by an array of interior urban places.” The development of this city-town-country regional system was, of course, underwritten by the primary activity of forcing slaves to produce grains for distant markets.37

There emerged in the countryside a cross-class system of mutual provisioning in which planters employed artisan millers (sometimes their own slaves) to run gristmills on their well-situated estates, acting as a quasi–public utility for surrounding farmers. The small and middling cultivators who brought their grains to the planter’s mill paid a toll for grinding their grain into flour, the surplus of which they sold to merchants bound for any number of towns and cities. The Founding Fathers George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson—all of whom had gristmills on their plantations—came of age in this diversified socioeconomic world, which has rightly been studied extensively by histo-rians of the colonial South.38

The thirty years leading up to the Civil War, however, saw the wholesale refashioning of this diversified, grain-centered landscape—a set of changes surprisingly profound, sud-den, and well-documented for the small impact it has left on the historical literature of

36 Ledger 1, accession Mss 38-22, Business Records of the Hogshead-Smiley Mill, 1808–1901 (Small Special Collections Library); Lynn Nelson, “The Pilot and the Storm: William Massie and the Agrarian Economy of the Tye River Valley, 1830–1860,” in After the Backcountry: Rural Life in the Great Valley of Virginia, 1800–1900, ed. Kenneth E. Koons and Warren R. Hofstra (Knoxville, 2000), 270. Augusta County was one of the few important wheat-producing counties to experience an increase in the number of mills between 1840 and 1860. See Census Office, Compendium of the Sixth Census, pt. II, 176; and Census Office, Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 606.

37 Carville Earle, Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems (Stanford, 1992), 88. 38 Lorena Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake

(Chapel Hill, 2010); Gavin Wright, “Slavery and American Agricultural History,” Agricultural History, 77 (Fall 2003), 527–52; Steven B. Hodin, “The Mechanisms of Monticello: Saving Labor in Jefferson’s America,” Journal of the Early Republic, 26 (Fall 2006), 377–418; Koons and Hofstra, After the Backcountry; Paul G. E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland’s Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain (Ithaca, 1980); John T. Schlot-terbeck, “Plantation and Farm: Social and Economic Change in Orange and Greene Counties, Virginia, 1716 to 1860,” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1980); James Irwin, “Exploring the Affinity of Wheat and Slavery in the Virginia Piedmont,” Explorations in Economic History, 25 (July 1988), 295–322. On wheat and slavery, or the Virginia economy, in the immediate pre–Civil War years, see Max Grivno, Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave La-bor along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790–1860 (Urbana, 2011); Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1985); John Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War (New York, 2000); and Sean Patrick Adams, Old Do-minion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 2004).



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the antebellum South. By the 1850s large wheat planters of the Virginia Piedmont had given up the ghost of a self-servicing plantation neighborhood. A revolution in overland transport after 1840 finally made practicable the long-distance carriage of lower-value, higher-bulk commodities such as wheat. The Richmond & Danville Railroad, the Virgin-ia and Tennessee Railroad, the Southside Railroad, the Virginia Central Railroad, and the James River and Kanawha Canal helped expand the “wheat shed” of Richmond beyond eastern Virginia. As a result, Richmond grew and transformed, superseding secondary cit-ies such as Scottsville and Farmville that had grown up in the golden age of country flour. Increasingly, interior areas shipped raw wheat to the state capital for grinding, packing, and export, silencing the familiar creak and splash of the country mill.

The wealthy wheat farmer and miller William Massie, for example, abandoned at-tempts to keep up with the Gallego mill in Richmond. Although Massie continued to grind in the 1850s, his mill “dropped out of the national and international trade, becom-ing a purely local service.”39

To succeed in an increasingly competitive Atlantic market in tobacco and grain, plant-ers such as Massie literally plowed all available capital into the fields. Peruvian guano, new seed varieties, “improved” livestock breeds from Europe, and machines from northern and southern iron-making firms altered the “agro-ecosystems” of Virginia farms, which came to depend on the world market for both inputs and customers. The remunerative activity of growing grains for Richmond mills encouraged rural Virginians to neglect home production and purchase everyday goods on the market, brought in from coastal cities by merchants, which led to a decline in local handicrafts. Flour milling was fore-most among these declining occupations.40

In one particular area that I call the central Piedmont—a cluster of counties on the Piedmont side of Richmond located close to canal and railroad lines—milling sectors were devastated while wheat production soared, highlighting the connection between capital-intensive, export-oriented, large-scale flour milling in the state’s capital and the changing economic landscape of its hinterland. For example, in Richmond’s Henrico County wheat production increased by more than five times between 1840 and 1860 (from 39,095 bushels to 217,293), while the number of flour mills and gristmills in the county declined by 70 percent (from 40 to 12). Hanover County, also near Richmond, saw an increase of 396 percent in wheat production, accompanied by a 52 percent de-crease in the number of mills. In fact, a county-by-county analysis of the state reveals a significant pattern: while most of the top twenty-five wheat-producing counties through-out Virginia saw either increased wheat production or decreased milling capacity, there were seven counties that experienced the curious combination of a major increase in wheat production and a major decrease in the number of mills. Six of those seven counties were clustered in the central Piedmont, in the immediate vicinity of Richmond, where almost all of their wheat was bound.41

In contrast, wheat yields and numbers of mills in northern Piedmont counties declined together, perhaps indicating a general decline of the grain economy in the parts of the

39 For a discussion of William Massie’s abandonment of milling, see Nelson, “Pilot and the Storm,” esp. 270. 40 On the changed dynamics of farm production in antebellum Virginia, see Lynn A. Nelson, Pharsalia: An En-

vironmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780–1880 (Athens, Ga., 2007).41 Census Office, Compendium of the Sixth Census, pt. II, 154–77; Census Office, Agriculture of the United States

in 1860, 154–65.



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state that were shipping to Baltimore, Alexandria, and Georgetown instead of Richmond. The Shenandoah Valley counties, meanwhile, also tied more closely to other cities than to the integrated industry of Richmond, saw a different pattern: a decline in the number of bushels of wheat accompanied by an increase in the number of mills. The high correlation between wheat increase and mill decrease characterized the central Piedmont alone (with the exception of Clarke County).42

The central Piedmont counties were the origination point for the product that ulti-mately went to Brazilian consumers after passing through the grinding stones of Rich-mond. This zone also accounted for most of the 3 million–bushel increase the state of Virginia saw between 1840 and 1860, which indicates that it was the Brazilian market that allowed Virginia to remain in the top tier nationally in terms of total wheat and to-tal flour production while costing rural areas a measure of diversity. The unique pattern of deindustrialization as well as the strong growth in wheat cultivation that took place in Virginia’s central Piedmont counties show how the single market of Brazil—Virginia’s counterpart slave society on the other side of the equator—shaped the upper South state in specific, quantifiable ways. Although it is important that Virginian and Brazilian actors may have imagined the world in similar ways, visited each other’s cities, and exchanged commodities, an examination of the Richmond–Rio de Janeiro circuit suggests that they transformed the landscapes beneath their feet through their interactions.43

Due to its consolidating influence on Richmond industry, Brazil, in effect, deindus-trialized the Virginia countryside, transforming the central Piedmont into a tributary hinterland and pushing formerly agroindustrial locales down the supply chain to raw ma-terials production. Quite suddenly, in the twenty years before the Civil War, gentleman farmer–millers in the tradition of Washington and Jefferson abandoned milling opera-tions to specialize in the production of raw materials destined for processing in the grow-ing industrial city of Richmond.

Impacts of the Brazilian Market on Virginia Farming

Since the changing tastes of the Brazilian bakery industry altered the business practices of Richmond’s millers, the tastes by extension transformed the cultivation practices of the farmers who sold wheat to them. Richmond’s demand for high-quality wheat to meet the unique needs of southeastern Brazilian bakers encouraged the rise of a new sort of capital-intensive, land-extensive wheat production throughout the state. In the 1850s the Virginia State Assembly made this pan-American chain of causation explicit. One of its committees found that export flour headed for the tropics “must be made of the very best and soundest of our wheat, and that even some of the manufacturers of flour in the city of Richmond are afraid to use for those markets wheat grown in the limestone regions of Virginia.” Giving credit for “the high grade of Virginia flour . . . to the intrinsic and peculiar excellence of the wheat from which it is made,” the committee emphasized that

42 Census Office, Compendium of the Sixth Census, pt. II, 154–77; Census Office, Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 154–65.

43 For an emphasis on the antebellum cultural, political, and economic linkages between the southern states and Brazil without a focus on the grain trade, see Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slavehold-ers in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); and Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York, 2007).



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both farmers and millers were refining their practices and refashioning their commodi-ties for the Rio de Janeiro market.44

With the decline in country milling and the development of railroad-led market inte-gration, ambitious farmers found themselves competing directly with large-acreage, spe-cialized wheat plantations throughout the state for the patronage of a reduced number of mills. More than ever, size mattered. Swelling land values and the profits available on the Richmond market at a time of consistently high state-level prices led wealthier planters to spend money on wheat-oriented improvements such as the McCormick reaper and to push marginal cultivators into tenancy or day labor while reinvesting in slavery.45

The rise of big Richmond millers discouraged country mills and pushed the country-side toward concentrated monoculture. In an 1837 letter to the editor of the Richmond

44 Committee on Agriculture, Minority Report of the Committee on Agriculture, etc. Relative to the Inspection of Flour, 4.

45 Observers claimed that sizable farms provided much of the wheat ground in Richmond. See Agricola [pseud.], “For the Enquirer. The Wheat Market of Richmond,” Richmond Enquirer, Aug 4, 1837. Kenneth W. Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana, 1994), 43.

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Enquirer, “Agricola” inveighed against big millers’ monopoly control over rural wheat growers. An insidious “combination” of powerful city millers, he lamented, conspired to push prices downward as the harvest season wore on to incentivize suppliers to deliver goods promptly. Since large planters had the resources to deliver crops to market early, the new shape of the flour industry favored large farmers and encouraged large-scale planta-tion agriculture in the countryside. Meanwhile, Agricola continued, the wheat “which is sent in by that class of farmers who are obliged to carry their crops to market at a particular period, to wit, in August and September, is bought at a reduced price.” “Has it not hap-pened,” the editorialist asked, “that the crops of the large farmer have been bought at a high price, and the wheat of the small farmer been made to furnish the profit of the miller, by buying it at less than its real value?” The earlier one got one’s crop to market, and the bigger the crop, Agricola claimed, the better the price one could expect. Big wheat suppli-ers to the Richmond mills, the kind who purchased McCormick’s reaper and eagerly in-corporated other advances as they entered fully into concentrated, specialized wheat pro-duction, held an advantage over smaller farmers who had formerly only competed with other farms in the neighborhood of a local country mill. Smaller farmers, who would have tended to continue milling in nearby mills, also tended to adopt new farm machinery less often. Threshers, for example, “removed dirt, seeds, and other foreign matter from wheat, and threshed wheat brought a higher price than wheat trodden by horses on compacted floors.” Richmond millers were very selective about their wheat, and may have rejected the product brought in by smaller farmers.46

The heavy capital investments required to run a successful antebellum wheat planta-tion exacerbated already intense pressures to drain millponds to expose the nutrient-rich soil submerged beneath. Spanning hundreds or in some cases over one thousand acres, some of these millponds dwarfed most Virginia plantations. Such acreage really mattered in the locales where wheat production was skyrocketing. Consistently high prices for wheat and tobacco led planters to expand cultivation and establish new farms. In one area of the Piedmont, farm values increased by 97 percent between 1850 and 1860. While planters were already vexed by the thousand-acre millponds in their midst, the prosperity of the late 1840s and the 1850s, which saw the spread of cultivation to marginal lands, would add salt to the wound.47

To resolve the increasing tensions over this sort of land use, some planter-millers who wanted to continue their business drained millponds and dug narrow but deep canals in their place. Even though such energetic proprietors were in the minority, they partici-pated in a general elite trend of economically motivated resource management known as “improvement.” Their earth-moving projects, however, must also be seen as part of a local agricultural intensification directly inspired by the rise of Richmond mills and the devel-opment of an industrialized transport infrastructure to link inland locales more seam-lessly to Atlantic grain markets. Virginia’s enslaved people made such ambitious projects thinkable.48

46 Agricola [pseud.], “For the Enquirer.” Emphasis added. On the adoption of threshers on larger Piedmont farms, see Schlotterbeck, “Plantation and Farm,” 276.

47 Hunter, History of Industrial Power in the United States, I, 147; Schlotterbeck, “Plantation and Farm,” 306.48 On the canal-building millers, see “A Profitable Change Of a Mill Pond for a Canal,” Farmer’s Register, 2 (Feb.

1835), 579; “Rough Notes upon Some of the Agricultural Improvements of Charlotte, and the Adjacent Counties,” ibid., 4 (Oct. 1836), 374; and “Proceedings of the New London Agricultural Society,” ibid., 2 (Jan. 1835), 487. On



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More frequently, country millers abandoned operations. Many proprietors of grain mills throughout the countryside doubled as planters or tavern keepers. They did not specialize in grain processing and abandoned the increasingly capital-intensive and skill-demanding activity to focus on cultivating wheat for export. Humbler farmers ran smaller gristmills; they were more wedded to a diverse, local, agroindustrial social economy—and stood to lose from the crisis of the country milling industry—and were therefore less ame-nable to closing up shop. Not serving the needs of the regional export machine, these less influential men became, like the perpetrators of “cold-blooded murder” discussed by the planter who opened this article, a lightning rod for elite criticism.49

The reforming planters who bemoaned the existence of the local millpond no longer had to step as lightly as they once had because railroads and canals allowed them to by-pass nearby millers. Frances Barbour, for example, a politician, Orange County wheat farmer, and early buyer of the McCormick reaper, often shipped large amounts of wheat by rail to the Haxall & Crenshaw mill and to others in Richmond. He also purchased his flour for home consumption from the Haxall & Crenshaw mill, requesting that his agent in the state capital send it on the westbound train. Wealthy farmers such as Barbour saw the more expensive Richmond-milled flour as “the good stuff,” leaving the dubious “ca-nal flour” to their less affluent neighbors. New consumption patterns represented another way wheat planters were lifted out of diverse local economies. The increasing alienation of planters from local custom millers was perhaps most boisterously articulated in debates over the public health threat presented by excess standing water in malarial latitudes.50

Still needing to grind their wheat somewhere, though, vociferous planters such as Ed-mund Ruffin in effect led a “not in my backyard” movement of the antebellum South. Men such as Ruffin railed not against manufacturing per se but against the sort of pre-industrial, small-scale, neighborhood manufacturing that annoyed agriculturalists and annihilated public health. With watercourses too puny to grind even the humblest of harvests, Ruffin declared, remaining mills were an embarrassing display of “rustic frivo-lousness.” Sending four thousand bushels of wheat coastward annually, Ruffin thus made himself a de facto advocate of urban industrial concentration, although he might have bristled at the suggestion. Even if the mass of wheat planters were neither as bold nor as vituperative as the correspondents to the Farmer’s Register, they voted with their commod-ities just as Ruffin did, sending the wheat by rail to Richmond instead of grinding their grains locally and sending the flour to the coast. In doing so, they encouraged the growth of large-scale, concentrated industry in the fall-line metropolis.51

Competing over scarce endowments of land and water, milling and farming have nev-er been a harmonious combination. Modern American jurisprudence was shaped by the contentious relationship between farmers and millers—ambivalent allies who sometimes

standing water creating very fertile soil, see Stewart, “What Nature Suffers to Groe,” 110. For more on the “enlight-ened” agricultural practices of the early to mid-nineteenth century, see Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth.

49 On the abandonment of milling by farmers with means, see Nelson, “Pilot and the Storm.” For the criticism of small mills, see Kirby, Poquosin, 130–40; and Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy, 53–80. Anonymous, “Ma-laria and Millponds.”

50 On the experimental farming practices of Frances Barbour’s illustrious father James Barbour, set within the context of elite agricultural reform in 1820s and 1830s Virginia, see Charles Lowery, “James Barbour, a Progressive Farmer of Antebellum Virginia,” in America, the Middle Period: Essays in Honor of Bernard Mayo, ed. John B. Boles (Charlottesville, 1973), 168–87. Haxall Bros. & Co. to Frances Barbour, Sept . 5, 1845, section 4, accession Mss1 B2346 a1028, Barbour Family Papers (Virginia Historical Society).

51 Kirby, Poquosin, 138–39. For the claim of 4,000 bushels, see Edmund Ruffin to Julian Calx Ruffin, Aug. 24, 1853, section 1, accession Mss1 B8387 b45-53, Ruffin Family Papers (Virginia Historical Society).



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loathed but ultimately needed each other. However, at the antebellum moment of the wheat boom and the rise of large-scale milling in Richmond, the contradictory needs of milling and farming began to outweigh their interdependence. Already riven with ten-sion, the agroindustrial détente between grist milling and farming was finally undone by the coming of the railroads, which freed planters from their former dependence on nearby mills.52

The ensuing drainage of thousands of acres of abandoned millponds points to an in-tensification of land-use patterns that the South lacked in other locales. The spirit of re-source management that spread throughout the upper South’s plantation zones in the antebellum decades helped push the cottage industry of toll milling out of the country-side while it was simultaneously pulled out by the gravitational force of industrializing Richmond.53

Like water drawn into a turbine’s spinning blades, central Piedmont manufacturing was pulled downstream to the capital. In the wake of the retreating flood, a more ordered and simplified landscape rose into view, as rural space respecialized, or dediversified, into one or two market-oriented undertakings. Influenced by the specific character of con-sumer demand in southeastern Brazil, wealthier planters in Virginia ceased milling locally and selling their own flour through city merchants. Increasingly, they sold unprocessed wheat in bulk to city millers via the railroad. This economic transformation had its cul-tural counterpart in the emergence of the malarial millpond as a powerful motif of waste, profligacy, and rural backwardness. Anxiety over “bogs of death” betrayed planters’ fears of sinking into a morass of archaic rural tradition. In their minds, the millpond’s mucky expanses threatened to suck the boots right off the feet of southern improvement. How-ever, the mystery of the vanishing millpond of antebellum Virginia is best explained by the transformation of an integrated, slavery-centered Atlantic economy that had evolved to make most country mills uncompetitive.

Conclusion

In the 1832 plantation romance Swallow Barn, the ruins of an abandoned gristmill and the plot of land that had once been submerged under its millpond are the focus of a prop-erty dispute between two Virginia planters. Although the planters’ grandfathers, who had built the gristmill in the 1750s, found the enterprise unprofitable and the millpond “foul and slimy,” the 1832 owners experience the setting quite differently. When the narrator and his cousin—the inheritor of the estate and one of the parties to the suit—

stretch ourselves out upon the grass, in the silent shade of the beech trees, or wander around the old ruin, the spot becomes peopled to our imaginations with the ancient retainers of Swallow Barn; the fiery-headed miller; the elvish little negroes who have probably all sunk, hoary-headed, to the grave, leaving their effigies behind, as perfect as in the days when they themselves rode to mill; and last of all, our vener-able ancestors.54

52 Kirby, Poquosin, 56–57. 53 John Majewski and Viken Tchakerian, “Industry and Agriculture in the Antebellum South and Midwest,” in

Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South, ed. Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie (Columbia, Mo., 2005), 137–50.

54 John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn; Or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1851; Baton Rouge, 1986), 140, 144. Thanks to Al Brophy for making me aware of this novel.



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The ruins of the old mill and the vanished millpond conjure a profoundly racist feudal fantasy of the past: the ghosts of the “plantation family” are recast as ancient retainers, gnome-like servants, and a grumpy miller who could have been traced from the pages of Canterbury Tales. The lawsuit over who owns the “ragged, marshy, and unprofitable” plot of land is portrayed as a charming imbroglio embarked upon by lovable, prickly patricians who cared nothing for the usefulness of the soil; instead they meant to honor nostalgically the acreage where illustrious, if impecunious, ancestors trod.55

The conflicted narrator of Swallow Barn—at once repulsed by the filthy secrets lurk-ing under the southern “bog of death,” and oozing nostalgia for a stately and quaint time gone by—echoed a broader antebellum debate among Virginians about the economic and sanitary effects of the state’s long-standing millponds, and by extension, the country mills for which they provided waterpower. In taking up the theme of the vanishing mill-pond, Swallow Barn’s author, John Pendleton Kennedy, ambivalently wrestled with the fact that in the upper South wheat-producing zones of the antebellum years, the small-time country mill really was becoming a thing of the past but not because of a lack of know-how or absence of motivation to produce goods and improve the land. The reasons were quite the contrary.

The fictional estate of Swallow Barn was modeled on Kennedy’s actual family planta-tion outside Martinsburg, Virginia (an important stop on the Baltimore and Ohio Rail-road by 1842), in a county of large wheat plantations. However, Kennedy made a last-minute change to his manuscript in 1831, moving the family plantation from outside Martinsburg to the southern Tidewater region. He complained that the area around Mar-tinsburg was “becoming commercialized” and would not make an appropriate setting for his precapitalist romance. In narratively relocating Swallow Barn to a more “appropriate” locale, Kennedy acknowledged that his attempt to use the abandoned millpond as a nos-talgic tribute to pastoral malaise sounded strained. As a defender of a paternalistic south-ern social order, Kennedy was uncomfortably aware that the vanishing millpond—both trope and truth in antebellum Virginia—signaled something else entirely. In the decades prior to the Civil War, the millers, mills, and millponds of Virginia’s central Piedmont were washed out by a freshet of capitalist landscape transformation—an undercurrent of change in the slavery-centered Atlantic economy many observers have failed to see.56

55 Ibid., 199. John Pendleton Kennedy’s predecessors in the Virginia plantation novel had also used the old coun-try mill as a powerful conservative trope. See George Tucker, The Valley of Shenandoah; or, Memoirs of the Graysons (New York, 1825), 176; and Anonymous, Tales of an American Landlord, Containing Sketches of Life South of the Po-tomac (New York, 1824), 78. For a nostalgic, post-Reconstruction retrospective, see George William Bagby, “Canal Reminiscences: Recollections of travel in the old days on the James River and Kanawha Canal,” in Selections from the Miscellaneous Writings of Dr. George W. Bagby, by George William Bagby (2 vols., Richmond, 1884), I, 132.

56 Kennedy, Swallow Barn, xxi.



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