American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond (review)

American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond. Gregg D. Kimball. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Pp. xxv, 345. $35.00.)

To write local history—especially a local history of a modern city—is to engage in a delicate balancing act. The historian must give equal weight to the various social and political groups within the community's borders. If the historian is successful, the reader is treated to a rich and complex presentation that provides several interconnected lines of analysis. Such is the case with Gregg D. Kimball's excellent study of antebellum Richmond, American City, Southern Place. Antebellum Richmond has long needed a comprehensive social and cultural history. Kimball, assistant director of the Publications and Educational Services of the Library of Virginia and a former employee of the city's Valentine Museum, is eminently qualified for the task. In seven chapters Kimball explores the dynamic interchange of Richmond's diverse population of free blacks, artisans, industrialists, merchants, and the enslaved. A short epilogue explains how the values and ideals of antebellum Richmonders influenced postbellum Richmond.

According to Kimball, Richmond's diverse population gave the city a rather cosmopolitan air. Each segment of the town's diverse population exposed the city to wider cultural worlds than the geographic entity of Richmond. Richmond's merchants and professionals seemed to inhabit two worlds at once. On the one hand, they saw themselves as essentially Southern and self-consciously tried to imitate the values and customs of their rural brethren. Kith and kin networks, summer excursions to the springs, and a host of other activities cemented their attachment to the South's rural customs. On the other hand, most merchants frequently traveled to Northern cities for business. There they were exposed to new values of industrialization. As men on the make, Richmond's merchants hoped to imitate Northern expansiveness, but to do so in a way that would allow them to maintain the social relations of the Southern countryside. Although the town's merchants had the greatest exposure to the world beyond Richmond, they were the most protective of Southern institutions.

In many respects, non-elites were less parochial than the town's leaders. African Americans, whether free or slave, saw themselves as part of a much wider world than Richmond and the South. The slave trade, hiring out, kith and kin networks with rural African Americans, and certain occupations connected to trade and travel enabled African Americans to connect themselves to the complex transatlantic networks of the African diaspora. White artisans, many of them immigrants from the North and Europe, also saw themselves as members of a larger community. Self-consciously, they tried to maintain the values and traditions of free labor in a slave society even as they acclimated to life in a Southern city.

As Kimball demonstrates, Richmond society comprised a volatile mix of disparate groups. Though conflict eventually came to Richmond during the war, Kimball largely avoids reading the future into the past. Using a rich variety of sources, Kimball reconstructs the diverse networks that antebellum Richmonders created to give their lives stability and meaning. Though Richmond's diverse social groups sometimes worked at cross-purposes from one another, just as often they worked in harmony. The town's black Baptist church gave free and enslaved African Americans some opportunity for autonomy, but it also gave elite white people some opportunity to exercise paternalism. Meanwhile, popular politics, public ceremonies like the return and re-burial of President James Monroe, and institutions like the local militias gave white Richmonders of all classes an opportunity to share and cultivate their common interests. Kimball observes that one the most significant of these common interests was a love for Union.

The events of the early 1860s changed all this. By April 1861, Richmond changed from an American city to a Southern place. Though most white residents came to embrace secession...