Confederate Cities

Confederate Cities The Urban South during the Civil War Era

edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, foreword by David Goldfield

University of Chicago Press, 2015
Cloth: 978-0-226-30017-7 | Paper: 978-0-226-30020-7 | Electronic: 978-0-226-30034-4
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

When we talk about the Civil War, we often describe it in terms of battles that took place in small towns or in the countryside: Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run, and, most tellingly, the Battle of the Wilderness. One reason this picture has persisted is that few urban historians have studied the war, even though cities hosted, enabled, and shaped Southern society as much as they did in the North.

Confederate Cities, edited by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, shifts the focus from the agrarian economy that undergirded the South to the cities that served as its political and administrative hubs. The contributors use the lens of the city to examine now-familiar Civil War–era themes, including the scope of the war, secession, gender, emancipation, and war’s destruction. This more integrative approach dramatically revises our understanding of slavery’s relationship to capitalist economics and cultural modernity. By enabling a more holistic reading of the South, the book speaks to contemporary Civil War scholars and students alike—not least in providing fresh perspectives on a well-studied war.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Andrew L. Slap is professor of history at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era and editor of Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War’s Aftermath. Frank Towers is associate professor of history at the University of Calgary. He is the author of The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War and coeditor of The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress.

REVIEWS

“As the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War draws to an end, Slap and Towers have given us a wonderful collection of incisive and provocative essays by some of the best historians in the field. Southern cities were vital crucibles of mobilization, information, and contestation during the Old South’s last stand, and they later became dynamic catalysts for change in the New South.”

— Don H. Doyle, author of The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War

“The image of an agrarian Confederacy engaged in a massive war against a more urban, industrial United States remains popular and influential. The essays in this impressive collection highlight the centrality of Confederate cities during the conflict. As a group, the authors illuminate questions relating to governmental reach, the structure of slavery, military affairs, refugees, industrialization, gender, and other important topics—while also demonstrating how wartime changes carried over into the postwar years.”

— Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Union War

“For too long historians have gazed at the South from the veranda of the plantation, rarely looking beyond the fields of cotton and tobacco to see the urban South. The essays in Confederate Cities strip away the veneer of a pastoral South to find a dynamic and diversified region imbedded within a world of transatlantic capitalism. The Civil War disrupted global connections and strained relations between town and country, but with the destruction of slavery and transportation expanded, urban spaces became enclaves of freedom for African Americans. Editors Slap and Towers have assembled a cast of superb historians who show a multitude of perspectives on the urban South as it endured the revolutionary consequences of Confederate defeat.”

— Peter S. Carmichael, director, Civil War Institute, Gettysburg College

“This collection of eleven essays is wide ranging in its treatment of the urban South during and immediately after the Civil War. Essays explore urban communication, the role of cities in the war, the impact of emancipation on urban life, the development of African American schools, and the promotion of Southern cities such as Norfolk and Hampton Roads. Although not given to the quantitative analyses of the new urban history of the 1970s and 1980s, the essays do reflect another ongoing tension within urban history—that between those who write about events that happened in cities (a case study approach) and those who describe historical patterns that are helpful to understanding the city as city. . . . Recommended.”

— Choice

“Confederate Cities shows that cities afford a sharp lens for examining the South in the Civil War era, revealing a picture of vigorous urban development, wartime upheaval, and dramatic transition. Among the many volumes of scholarly essays on particular aspects of American history published during the last couple of decades, this is one of the best. Comprising a dozen forcefully argued essays—including the editors’ superb introduction—the book also features a fiery foreword by David Goldfield (the dean of urban South historians), along with a welcome conclusion and a real index.”

— Civil War Book Review

Acknowledgments

Foreword (David Goldfield)

Introduction -Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0000
[South, Civil War, Confederacy, Urban, Cities, New Urban History, Historiography]
The introduction places this volume in the broader arc of Civil War and southern historiography. It considers some of the ways that southern cities mattered in the history of secession, the Confederacy, and Reconstruction while analysing how the public and prior generations of historians have described the relationship between southern cities and the Civil War. It also explores the relationship between southern history and the New Urban History in shaping the study of the urban South during the Civil War era. The introduction argues that new interpretations about the relationship between slavery and modernity have helped to show the importance of Confederate cities and reinvigorate the study of the nineteenth-century urban South. (pages 1 - 24)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press

Part One: The Big Picture

Regionalism and Urbanism as Problems in Confederate Urban History -J. Matthew Gallman
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0001
[Urbanization, Urban places, Union military strategy, Confederate ports, Railroad towns]
This essay offers some broad empirical and interpretive observations that speak to this volume's central questions. The first section explores the pace and pattern of urban development in the decades leading up to the Civil War, with a consideration of various quantitative variables, some discussion of the geography of urban systems, and a regional comparison of urban functions. This section also includes a few comments on the limitations of the classic "modernization theory," but the essay is not otherwise informed by that theoretical framework. The second section considers how the Confederacy's urban system shaped – and did not shape – the Union military strategy and the overall military history of the Civil War. The final section suggests a set of speculations about how the urban worlds of the Union and the Confederacy might have produced interestingly different political cultures during the war years, perhaps helping to shape the course of events. (pages 27 - 45)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
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Urban Processes in the Confederacy's Development, Experience, and Consequences -David Moltke-Hansen
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0002
[Literacy, Lower Order Urbanization, Modernization, Print Culture, Railroads, Urban Functions, Urbanization rates, Urban Networks, Urban Processes]
By the late antebellum period the future Confederacy was urbanizing faster than its cities were growing. The scholarly focus on modernization and urban places, rather than on urban processes, networks, and functions, has obscured this development. In addition to the people who lived in urban settings, more and more southerners were establishing or moving into small towns, engaging in what Louis Kyriakoudes calls lower-order urbanization. They substantially increased the population participating in elements of urban life, thanks in part to the dramatically increased number and reach of railroads and the growth of the middle class. The Civil War accelerated at least temporarily the rate of urbanization of southern populations in complex ways. The new Confederate government's civil servants, industrial workers, military construction crews, refugees, and soldiers all participated. Elements of these populations wanted and encouraged new media. For the first time, people in large numbers read southern produced periodicals across state and denominational lines. The war had made people so avid and anxious for news and opinion that a number learned to read. The sharing of print communications shaped attitudes in the former Confederacy for decades after the war. (pages 46 - 74)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
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Part Two: Secession

To Be "the New York of the South": Urban Boosterism and the Case for Secession -Frank Towers
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0003
[Secession, Boosters, New York, Urban imperialism, Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism]
This chapter examines how advocates of southern secession appealed to the metropolitan imperialism of southern city dwellers. Disunionists predicted that the Confederacy would turn a particular slave-state city into the "New York of the South." The dream of a metropolitan commercial empire unleashed by separating from the U.S. fed into the urban rivalry that drove city building in the 19th century, but which also had a contradictory underside to it. To become the "New York" of the South places like Savannah, New Orleans, and Baltimore, would have to endorse a protectionist political economy that cut against the free-trade rhetoric of the planters. Without tariff walls and other favourable legislation New York and London would continue to dominate southern commerce. The entanglement of urban boosterism in the politics of southern secession sheds light on the modern-minded ambitions of southern nationalists and on the flexibility of urban identities in the 19th-century U.S. (pages 77 - 98)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
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"The Great Family of Nations": Gender and Household Metaphors in the Political Rhetoric of Six Mid-19th Century Nation-Building Cities -Lloyd Benson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0004
[Family, Gender, Nationalism, Unification, Politics]
As the Confederacy, Italy, and Canada moved toward unification in the 1860s the language of gender, family, and household decisively framed nation-building debates. Because urbanization promised to invigorate the "national family" but also threatened to disrupt the traditional ideals of home and household embraced by nationalist projects, political attitudes about family, city, and nation were closely linked. But while 1850s events and competing social visions among rival ethnocultural and economic factions in Montreal, Toronto, Turin, and Genoa led their nationalists to avoid many gender and household metaphors, the internal threat to urban households posed by slave resistance and abolition led opinion leaders in Richmond and Charleston to intensify their deployment of such language during the secession winter as a means of overcoming the politics of interest group factionalism and partisan loyalty. (pages 99 - 122)
This chapter is available at:
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Part Three: Gender

Stephen Spalding's Fourth of July in New Orleans -Michael Pierson
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0005
[masculinity, alcohol, prostitution, New Orleans, manhood]
Lt. Stephen Spalding of the 8th Vermont spent Independence Day, 1862, joyously careening through New Orleans. His day included lots of alcohol, at least one brothel, and a brawl that could have become an international incident. While much of the South was unfamiliar and hostile, Spalding found New Orleans "a great place for fun." His adventure suggests that southern cities offered Union soldiers a familiar cultural playground in which to enact masculine roles that they had established before the war. Cities offered Union soldiers the opportunity to purchase entertainment in a friendly atmosphere that replicated northern "sporting culture." New Orleans's pro-Confederate reputation masks its important role as familiar cultural space that helped Union soldiers to unwind. (pages 125 - 146)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
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"More like Amazons than starving people": Women's urban riots in Georgia in 1863 -Keith S. Bohannon
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0006
[Georgia, Joseph E. Brown, Women's riots, Public welfare, poverty]
This essay examines riots staged by women against local merchants in Georgia's major cities in the spring of 1863. While some historians argue that public officials failed to address widespread poverty prior to these riots, this essay demonstrates that state and local governments had attempted to provide relief before the disturbances took place, although the assistance had not been enough to meet the needs of many struggling households. When women did take to the streets in angry mobs, they did so for several reasons. Some hoped to force their moral economy on merchants perceived as charging prices that were too high. Other women, particularly those in the state capital of Milledgeville, became political actors by seeking to influence public opinion (including state legislators) to provide more relief. Efforts to provide relief by the state and local government after the riots, even when inadequate, demonstrated to civilians that public officials were aware of their needs and attempting to address them. (pages 147 - 168)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
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Part Four: Emancipation

Leading the Charge: African American Veterans, Memphis and the Urbanization of the Post-War South -Andrew L. Slap
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0007
[Memphis, African Americans, Veterans, Social Networks, Urbanization, Civil War, New South]
This essay examines how African American military service helped reshape the post war urban South. After the Civil War African American veterans lived in Memphis and other southern cities at a much higher rate than whites or other African Americans, disproportionately changing the demography of these cities. This essay argues that social networks among African American veterans were both a cause and a consequence of these high rates of urbanization. The urbanization of African Americans was important because cities offered more political, educational and community building opportunities for African Americans in the decades after the Civil War. The migration of African Americans' to cities also helped create new connections between the urban and rural South and help lay the foundation for the Great Migration of African Americans to cities sin the early Twentieth century. (pages 171 - 189)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
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Black Political Mobilization and the Spatial Transformation of Natchez -Justin Behrend
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0008
[Political mobilization, Emancipation, Urbanization, Natchez, Reconstruction, Public space, African American, Voting]
This essay examines the impact of the Civil War in one Deep South city, paying particular attention to the ways that slave emancipation and black political mobilization transformed urban life. Focusing on the city of Natchez in southwest Mississippi, the essay notes that too much attention has been paid to industrial metropolises in nineteenth century urban history and not enough attention to the ways that municipal politics shapes urbanization. The impact of emancipation and political empowerment can be seen in the way that public spaces took on new meanings and city residents related to one another. The spatial relations within the city, in short, became more welcoming to African Americans and the city became a more egalitarian place during the Reconstruction years. Examples of the way that relational space was transformed can be seen in parades, polling places, other civic spaces, and in the establishment of churches and schools for the newly freed population. (pages 190 - 214)
This chapter is available at:
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Legitimating the African-American Schoolhouse: African-Americans' Struggle for Education, Citizenship and Freedom in Mobile, Alabama, 1865-1868 -Hilary N. Green
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0009
[African-American education, Mobile, Alabama, Black Mobilians, Creoles of Color, Josiah C. Nott]
"Legitimating the African-American Schoolhouse: African-Americans' Struggle for Education, Citizenship and Freedom in Mobile, Alabama, 1865-1868" explores the transformative nature of the Civil War through the ways that black Mobilians defined the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the postwar urban South. Whether acting alone or with their network of partners, black Mobilians began the process of legitimizing African-American education that culminated in a statewide right promulgated in the 1868 Alabama constitution. By emphasizing the educational relationships formed by black Mobilians and their struggle against a hostile white Mobilian community, this essay argues that black Mobilians neither lost sight of their desire to become an educated people nor did they forget the role that Confederate defeat played in allowing their assertions of freedom and citizenship through education in postwar Mobile. Both enabled them to persevere and overcome the violence and rhetorical animosity encountered in their early struggle for education. As a result, the landscape of Mobile and Alabama permanently changed with the addition of the African-American schoolhouse. (pages 215 - 236)
This chapter is available at:
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Part Five: A New Urban South

Invasion, Destruction, and the Remaking of Civil War Atlanta -William Link
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0010
[Atlanta, Civil War, New South, Urban, Reconstruction, Emancipation]
William T. Sherman's conquest of Atlanta in 1864 has long occupied a prominent position in the popular and scholarly understanding of the Civil War, how warfare affected civilians, how people remember war, and how they imagine rejuvenation and rebuilding. Little of this literature has explored a ground-level understanding of how soldiers and civilians, during the war itself, represented destruction and devastation, how these perceptions shaped their attitudes toward the war, and how memories of destruction fed into postwar reconstruction. A large literature exists about how the Confederate defeat was remembered and how that memory shaped the definition of the postwar New South. This paper considers remembering in a different sense—how wartime destruction shaped the city's identity. In the emerging narrative about Atlanta, defeat also meant rebirth. The Phoenix in the early years of the war's aftermath meshed notions of destructions with reconstruction, with the end of the Old South replaced by the making of the New South. (pages 239 - 260)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
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Freeing the Lavish Hand of Nature: Environment and Economy in Nineteenth-Century Hampton Roads -John Majewski
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0011
[Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton Roads, Soils, Yellow Fever, Railroads, Coal, Cotton]
The Hampton Roads region of Virginia is blessed with one of the best deep water anchorages in the world. Before the Civil War, though, Hampton Roads failed to realize the ambitious economic goals of its boosters. The acidic soils the region discouraged the growth of densely populated hinterlands that could support industry, commerce and urban growth. A yellow fever epidemic in 1855, which killed more than 3,000 residents, further undermined business confidence and deterred emigration. The Civil War helped unleash the economic potential of Hampton Roads. After the war, northern capitalists poured tens of millions of dollars into new railroads, new steamships, new dock facilities, and new cities. These technological innovations allowed Hampton Roads to escape the confines of its sparsely-settled hinterland to realize the commercial ambitions of their early boosters. (pages 261 - 285)
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Conclusion: Cities and the History of the Civil War South -Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226300344.003.0012
[South, Antebellum South, New South, Urban, Cities, Confederacy, Civil War, African Americans]
The conclusion suggests some broader interpretations about the relationship between the urban South and the Civil War that can be drawn from book's essays. First, many of the essays find major differences between the urban and rural antebellum South. Second, differences and tensions between the urban and rural South hurt the Confederate endeavour. Third, Confederate defeat lessened the differences between the urban and rural South, making the postbellum South more homogenous than its antebellum predecessor. Fourth, the greatest change in the South after the Civil War was emancipation and its profound effect on the region's cities, and the cities in turn offered more political, educational and community building opportunities for African Americans in the decades after the Civil War. (pages 286 - 290)
This chapter is available at:
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Contributors

Index