In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War
  • William L. Barney
The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War. By Frank Towers. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Pp. 285. Cloth $45.00.)

By focusing on and explaining "the interaction between urbanization and the sectional politics of the slave South in the 1850s" (1), Frank Towers makes an original contribution to the historiography on the coming of the Civil War in his highlighting of the neglected story of the "South's urban route to the Civil War" (4). He does so by closely examining the role of a growing white working class in reshaping the politics of the South's three largest cities, Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis.

By the 1850s, the size of the white working class in these three cities had reached a critical mass that was matched nowhere else in the urban South. White wage earners comprised a majority of the electorate in these cities, and native-born white workers made up the largest single bloc of voters. Faced by the 1850s with a decline in their living standards as wages were forced downward by new factory methods of mass production and a large influx of immigrant workers, these native white workers turned to politics to improve their deteriorating economic position and to shore up their threatened status as independent heads of households. The Know-Nothing, or American, party in Baltimore and New Orleans and the Republican party in St. Louis became the vehicles by which the American-born workers took over municipal government. Through tactics that often degenerated into sheer thuggery and ballot-box stuffing, the workers forced the urban business and political leaders to embrace their form of free-labor politics. They demanded and received jobs on public work programs, patronage appointments, a hands-off policy on strikes, and support for pushing free blacks and immigrants out of jobs desired by native white mechanics. As the violence and corruption increased, municipal elites turned for relief to state legislatures dominated by conservative rural slaveholders. The legislators responded by stripping away many of the powers of municipal governments and turning them over to state [End Page 318] authorities. The result in these cities was a contentious, conflict-ridden brand of partisan politics that was unique in the slave South.

Only in these three cities were white manual workers successful in launching a political agenda that threatened the prerogatives of a Southern polity that catered to the demands of rural planters for order and stability. What white workers defended as a manly assertion of their rights as free men, planters denounced as mob rule that fractured white unity and opened the way for abolitionist in-roads.

In addition to heightening fears over the destabilizing role of free labor in a slave society, the urban partisan battles of the late 1850s generated organizational structures that both unionists and disunionists drew on during the secession crisis in 1860–61. These structures aligned rural slaveholders, unskilled immigrant workers, and Southern-born businessmen, particularly those involved in the older mercantile trades and in servicing planters in the Lower South, in the Democratic party against their white working-class opponents in the Know-Nothing party. These fault lines, and the organizational means of expressing them, foreshadowed the ethnic and class divisions that emerged over the question of secession. The political space for native white workers was most constricted in New Orleans, which easily had the highest percentage of slaves among the South's three largest cities. Here, white workers were unable to forestall secession, but they provided the political backbone for a revived Unionism once the city fell to federal forces in April 1862. In Baltimore and St. Louis, the likelihood of direct federal involvement in the wake of the firing on Fort Sumter directly linked Know-Nothing workers with Unionism in the minds of their Democratic opponents and triggered a violent, but ultimately abortive, effort to drive their states out of the Union. What distinguished these two cities was the presence of a large, antislavery minority of German workers in St. Louis that could serve as an electoral base for a strong Republican, as opposed...

pdf

Share