De Bow’s Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South

5. Reading and Investing in De Bow's Ideas

5 Reading and Investing in De Bow’s Ideas After fourteen years in business, De Bow had cultivated a healthy subscription list by offering practical articles to southern readers interested in commercial growth, urban development, industrialization, agricultural reform, and railroad construction. In more recent years he had also earned the respect of southern nationalists, states’ rights advocates, and secessionists who valued his willingness to support their cause. To his readers, regardless of their motivations for subscribing to the Review, the journal represented an important southern resource. To De Bow, however, it represented that and his primary means of supporting himself and his family. He did not have the luxury of alienating southerners by becoming something that he was not. He was a businessman as well as a southern patriot. If William Lowndes Yancey insulted a crowd with his sectional rhetoric, he might lose a vote of support, whereas, if De Bow offended a reader, he might lose a paid subscription or a future subscriber. De Bow had spent fourteen years cultivating support for the Review, and he understood his targeted audience. Although he needed broad support from southern readers, he had directed muchofhiseditorialcontenttowardasmallbutgrowingcohortof middle-to upper-class southern merchants, professionals, entrepreneurs, and planters. He became their public advocate. He wanted to avoid editorial mistakes that had shuttered hundreds of previous southern journals and magazines by offering relevant articles to individuals interested in the southern economy. As much as southern readers came to rely on the Review, De Bow needed their unwavering support to remain in business. Without that support, his message of regional economic growth and personal self-improvement might have gone unnoticed by disinterested or complacent southerners. He 99 100 De Bow’s Review spoke to his readers directly through the Review, and they often responded with letters and articles that embraced his ideas. Not all southern readers supported his efforts or agreed with his general themes, but enough did to make the Review the preeminent southern journal by 1860. De Bow’s Review attracted southerners with similar feelings about regional economic development. Its readers shared many traits but none as distinctive as their regional identity. De Bow wrote for southerners, and they responded by reading the Review. His desire to integrate the region’s commercial, industrial, and agricultural sectors attracted a wide variety of subscribers. Many of his readers lived in towns and cities or on large plantations . He had less appeal among yeoman farmers and poor white laborers. He often wrote and published articles that focused on regional problems or innovations that required large amounts of capital. This editorial decision excluded many poor southerners. Enough middle- to upper-class southerners , however, read the Review to make it a popular and influential magazine. De Bow’s readership reflected his vision of a diversified southern economy. Many urban subscribers worked to improve their cities and towns, and rural planters experimented with ideas they read about in the Review. A significant number of readers accepted the primacy of cotton but hoped to redirect agricultural profits to fund transportation projects, civic improvements , and new factory construction. Many readers displayed a willingness to embrace changes that benefited individuals and communities. De Bow hoped to appeal to subscribers motivated by profit and civic responsibility. Before he could engender a sense of change, however, he needed to attract and maintain readers. Who read the Review mattered, and he understood the necessity of appealing to readers who could effect change in their communities . The lax reading habits of southerners had ended many editorial careers by 1860, and De Bow understood that his chosen career path was a risky one. But he also understood how to avoid common mistakes associated with owning and editing a regional journal. Between 1792 and 1860 in the South almost 850 separate periodicals had been started and, for the most part, had ended. Southern readers notoriously failed to pay subscriptions, leaving desperate editors unprotected from creditors and northern competition . Most journals focused on specific themes or genres such as agriculture, religion,literature,orcurrentevents.Thesemonthlymagazinesalsoprovided southern writers with a public forum in which to discuss topics and issues that interested them. Periodicals became the primary intellectual stimula- Reading and Investing in De Bow’s Ideas 101 tion for many southern readers. Prominent southerners had attempted to start journals, but few sustained enough paying readers to last for more than a couple of years. William Gilmore Simms, the South’s most...