The Urban South in Historical Perspective

TheUrban South in Historical Perspective Gary Lawson Browne. Baltimore in the Nation, f"'8(J-J86/. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980. 349 + xiii pp. Blaine A. Brownell and David R, Goldfield, eds. The Citl' in Southern Histo1:\'. Port Washington, '.'LY.London: Kennikat Press, 1977. 228 pp. Whitman H. Ridgeway. Community Leade1:~hip in Marr/and. 1790-/840. Chapel Hill: The University L,fNorth Carolina Press, 1979.414 + xxi pp. Paul E Lachance The South has often served as a foil to set off the progress of other regions ofthe United States.Urbanization isacase inpoint. Sociologists and historians conventionally remark a fifty- or sixty-year lag in the pace of southern urban growthrelative to the nation as a whole. 1 According to the editors of The Ci(v in Southern Hist01y, this perceived lag has been responsible for preoccupation with the traditional, rural South to the neglect of cities like Baltimore, Charleston, Richmond, Memphis, New Orleans and Atlanta. The five chronologically -ordered essays in their collection offer the best overview to date of southern urban history. At firstsight, the two books by Gary Browne and Whitman Ridgewaypromise to examine southern urbanization from the vantage point of a single city. Baltimore was the largest city in a slave state during the antebellum period. Onthe other hand, as Ridgeway implies in calling Baltimore a "dynamic urban and cultural oasis in a predominantly agricultural state" (p. xviii), it is not at all certain that it should be considered ··southern." 2 Baltimore's marginality raises the important question of whether or not a degree of urban development requires modification of the prevailing characterization of the Old South as traditional and agrarian. Carville Earle and Ronald Hoffman, authors of the first essay in The Ci~vin Sow hem HL'itory,show how detailed instructions from company directors and Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 1982, 53-60 54 Paul F. Lachance proprietors to recreate the compact towns of provincial England in the southern colonies went for naught. Instead, throughout the seventeenth century, the settlement pattern was dispersed and decentralized. Direct access of ships to plantations established along the estuaries of the Chesapeake, coupled with the modest size of tobacco crops, eliminated the need for town-based merchants . Settlers and their servants combined farming with trades like tanning and carpentry, reproducing in the Virginia and Carolina countryside the same occupational structure concentrated in New England towns. Sustained urban development began only between 1700and 1750."Crop characteristics," Earle and Hoffman maintain, "determined the creation and size of urban places" (p. 51). Tobacco permitted a peak population of 300 in entrepots like London Town, Virginia. After Charleston became an export center for rice, it grew to 6,800inhabitants in 1743before leveling off. Further expansion occurred only after the establishment of commercial links with wheat producers settling in the Piedmont. The grain trade also underlay Bal· timore's impressive growth. A village of 150people at most in 1750,its 13,000 inhabitants forty years later made it the nation's fifth largest city. Relative to the quasi-absence of towns in the seventeenth century, it isjus· tifiable to speak of urbanization in the next century, particularly after 1750. The process continued in the nineteenth century. In the essay on the ante· bellum period, David Goldfield contends that southern cities were by 1860 "part of the modern urban nation" (p. 83). His argument is twofold. First, an energetic urban leadership promoting internal improvements, commercial contacts with foreign ports and industrial development existed in the South as wellas in the North. Secondly, the hegemony of the planter class and slavery. often cited as incompatible with cities, in fact contributed to urbanization. Slavery, Goldfield informs us, was the "most malleable of urban labor sys· terns" (p. 65)and slave-hiring but one example of a "fruitful urban-rural coali· tion" (p. 66). Goldfield documents the existence of a booster spirit in southern cities: but unlike Earle and Hoffman who describe the clash of the dreams of Eliz· abethan promoters with the economic and geographical realities of the New World, he takes the dreams of early nineteenth-century boosters as reality. Although Goldfield admits that neither...