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  • No Place of Grace
  • Christopher Phillips (bio)
Jennifer L. Goloboy. Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era. Early American Places series Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. xii + 197 pp. Figures, bibliography, notes, and index. $54.95.
Michael D. Thompson. Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port.Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015. 284 pp. Figures, maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography. $54.95.

Historical (or heritage) tourists seeking the quintessence of southern gentility flock to Charleston, South Carolina. More than four million annual visitors put the former colonial and antebellum seaport in the top ten tourist destinations in the United States. At the cannon-ringed Battery, the mouth of the Ashley and Cooper rivers tourists take cool ocean breezes while marveling at distant Fort Sumter, the fated protector of the Lowcountry mansions and their gardened enclosures in the city's famed "South of Broad" district. Ranging from extravagant to stately, these many "Single houses" boast pastel colors, broad verandas, and carriage houses are tucked tightly against the many cobblestone streets and lanes shaded by spreading water oaks. Elegant eighteenth-century church spires stand sentry over its fragrant parks, flowered courtyards, and moist gardens. Not surprisingly, the fictional heroine of Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara, described Charleston and her sister city, Savannah, as "aged grandmothers fanning themselves placidly in the sun." (Indeed, her blockade-running husband, Rhett Butler, was a native Charlestonian who, after famously bedamning Scarlett, vows to go back to his home port city "where there is still a little grace and civility left in the world.") Living history is eagerly found everywhere, saturating tourists' historical imaginations of Charleston's colonial, Revolutionary, antebellum, and Civil War eras, thus rendering it the idyllic cradle of Old South culture. In his The Southern Past (2008), W. Fitzhugh Brundage is among a number of recent historians who have chronicled how Charleston's city and society leaders commercialized the city's southern past in order to cash in on tourism as early as the 1920s, creating what he calls a "memory theater" that offers "a magical suspension of time … [to] an enchanting, innocent, exotic, and seemingly timeless past" [End Page 203] to offer a distorted veneer of affluence and tradition in the city's history. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Academic historians eagerly deal body blows to shallow place-myths of historical tourism. On the eve of the War of Independence, Charleston was indeed the wealthiest city in the American South. But by the middle of the antebellum years it was already in precipitous decline, and the Civil War drove its waterfront to smoldering ruin and its economy to destitution (a narrative of loss that, ironically, feeds interest among a particular subset of southern white visitors). By different apertures, with overlapping chronologies, and to different degrees of success, historian Jennifer L. Goloboy and Michael D. Thompson target the constructed (and seemingly false) ideal of grace and civility in this well-trod southern port from the era of the Revolution to the Civil War. Surprisingly and not, the footprints of academic book-writers on early Charleston's history, as compared with that of the Lowcountry, are far lighter and more dated than those left by heritage tourists. Goloboy and Thompson offer alternative narratives that peer into two of the port's less conspicuous subpopulations: white merchants and urban dock workers, black and white, free and slave. By separate paths, each seeks to upend the centrality of wealthy planter aristocrats to the prevailing historical narratives of the city and state.

Goloboy interprets the city's striving merchant class in the Revolutionary era as a challenge to established understandings, definitions, and dynamics of the emergent American middle class, long a complicated descriptor in southern history. For most historians, the professional and commercial classes in the urban North separated home from work and fashioned new gender roles and moral and political sensibilities during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Nearly coincident, as Jonathan Daniel Wells has argued, a large and self-conscious urban bourgeois class cohered in the slave states slightly ahead of their Yankee counterparts...

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