Conquest of Labor

The Conquest of Labor offers the first biography of Daniel Pratt (1799-1873), a New Hampshire native who became one of the South's most important industrialists. After moving to Alabama in 1833, Pratt started a cotton gin factory near Montgomery that by the eve of the Civil War had become the largest in the world. Pratt became a household name in cotton-growing states, and Prattville-the site of his operations-one of the antebellum South's most celebrated manufacturing towns. Based on a rich cache of personal and business records, Curtis J. Evans's study of Daniel Pratt and his "e;Yankee"e; town in the heart of the Deep South challenges the conventional portrayal of the South as a premodern region hostile to industrialization and shows that, contrary to current popular thought, the South was not so markedly different from the North.