Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War, The

The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War * Frank Towers * Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004 * xiv, 286 pp. * $45.00

This book challenges the commonly held stereotype that the antebellum South was an exclusively rural-agricultural society by analyzing how its three largest cities-Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis-responded to the political events of the 1850s. Frank Towers does not argue that these three cities, each with at least 150,000 residents in 1860, caused the Civil War, but instead explains how they "influenced the course of Southern secession" by serving as "obstacles to Southern white unity" as well as representing "examples that secessionists cited to show the corruption of contemporary politics" (p. 1).

The book particularly focuses on Baltimore, which among all southern cities posed the "biggest problem for slaveholders and the most visible example of trends that were under way in other metropolitan centers" (p. 8). In 1860 Baltimore's 212,000 residents formed the largest city in the South, the third largest in the nation, and the largest free black community. Further, Baltimore was the South's largest industrial producer. The study does not give short shrift to New Orleans and St. Louis but emphasizes how their differing demographic structures caused them to respond to the developments of the 1850s in varying ways relative to Baltimore. Further, the book reveals how differing demographic characteristics made smaller southern cities less threatening to secessionists. Indeed, it includes some very telling observations about Richmond, which "relied more heavily on slave hiring and free black labor in its industrial sector" than these three larger cities (p. 62).

Starting with Senator James Henry Hammond's famous 1858 "mudsill" speech and then tracing the rhetoric of various other fire-eaters, Towers explains how secessionists "claimed that Northern democracy was headed toward mob rule and that the South must separate itself from the Union before a tyrannical free-labor majority subjugated it" (p. 25). Indeed, many secessionists argued that the "party politics" of Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis was already headed in a direction paralleling the urban North and which, if left unchecked, might spread to other slave cities. Towers largely agrees with these secessionists as he carefully identifies the trend by which economic growth caused these three leading southern cities to shift from a system of "urban paternalism" to one of free labor with a "brand of class conflict" (p. 39) more typical of northern cities. He effectively uses census data to point to a "deskilling of the workforce" (p. 59) in these southern cities at the same time that immigrant workers became a significant share of their labor force. The political repercussions of these demographic and economic changes are the focus of most of the book as native whites, to prevent further erosion of their status, turned to the emerging American Party.

Towers is most innovative when using a variety of membership records to document how the political parties mobilized urban voters. For example, he examines the membership records of Baltimore gangs, which were important both because they "served as a bridge between workingmen and the parties" and because they "introduced into city politics a cultural style that clashed with the values of rural Southerners" (p. 127). He finds that most gang members headed their own households, were married, and were skilled, manual workers. These gang members, he points out, became a "necessary evil" for the American Party, which attempted to control and appease them by expanding city services, creating jobs, and siding with employees against their employers. As a result of these efforts, the American Party was criticized by both southern urban commercial leaders and country planters for conceding power to the urban working class, just as had occurred in northern cities.

This new perspective on the politics of the 1850s and secession will no longer allow us to look at these three cities without considering, as did many southern contemporaries, whether they, in fact, were still southern.

Reviewed by Robert C. Kenzer, William Binford Vest Chair of History at the University of Richmond. He is the co-editor of "Enemies of the Country": New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South (2001).

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