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

3. A Busy and Fractured Mind of the South

55 3 A Busy and Fractured Mind of the South News of De Bow’s failure circulated among affluent southerners who read or contributed to the Review. Maunsel White pledged financial support to his friend, and readers from around the South sent subscriptions in to De Bow. R. F. W. Allston of South Carolina delivered eight new paid orders, intending to give them to friends. Miles McGehee of Bolivar, Mississippi, bought ten subscriptions and hoped to resell them to neighbors. James H. Hammond, a former governor of South Carolina, sent money and a public letter that chastised southerners for their literary neglect of such a worthy cause. The Charleston Mercury learned: “The subscription list of the Review does not exceed 100 in Charleston. Mr. De Bow deserves several hundred names among us for his valuable enterprise.” Most southern journals had limited appeal outside the region aside from the Southern Literary Messenger, the Southern Quarterly Review, and De Bow’s Review, which were also the most popular among southern readers. A frustrated De Bow estimated that his Review had only about five thousand readers compared to the sixty thousand subscribers that Harper’s Weekly enjoyed. The reading habits of Americans worked doubly against southern editors because northern journals dominated the reading habits of southern readers and most northern readers had little interest in southern journals. De Bow chided southerners for not supporting their homegrown periodicals more and prodded northerners who failed “to sustain or encourage any enterprise south of Mason and Dixon’s line.” He warned that the suspension of the Review might be permanent if readers failed to support his enterprise with paid subscriptions.1 Eager to restart the Review and find new topics to explore, De Bow 56 De Bow’s Review took an extended trip to Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana in June 1849. He first traveled to Memphis to visit old subscribers and find new readers. He planned to attend a commercial convention in town but learned that an outbreak of cholera had canceled the event. Nevertheless, the visit to Memphis , the place where his editorial career began in 1845, lifted his spirits. He then made his way to Louisville, Kentucky, and spent considerable time with Hamilton Smith, a local cotton factory owner and Review subscriber who owned a lavish home near his factory in Cannelton, Indiana. Located along the northern bank of the Ohio River, Cannelton had become the financial centerpiece for a group of northern and southern investors who hoped to develop seven thousand acres of land, mine nearby coal deposits, and operate the cotton factory. Smith believed that his factory’s proximity to southern cotton fields would decrease production costs and undercut competitors in New England.2 Hamilton Smith served as an excellent model for southern Review readers. He had been born in New Hampshire and educated at Dartmouth College before studying law in Washington, DC. In December 1833, he moved to Louisville and began a legal career that served as a catalyst for his commercial and agricultural interests. When Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, failed to establish an industrial center at Cannelton, Smith organized a group of investors who included Maunsel White and eleven other men from Louisiana and Mississippi. Regional chauvinism had yet to consume southern planters, who saw potential profit in Smith’s project. By the time De Bow profiled Smith in July 1851, the cotton mill at Cannelton had 10,800 spindles and 372 looms. In De Bow’s mind the large factory embodied the spirit of the Memphis convention because southerners and westerners worked together to improve their collective economic position within the nation. Although Smith’s project sat north of the Ohio River, De Bow saw Cannelton as a western enterprise that benefited southern farmers by moving cotton factories closer to cotton fields. Charles T. James, a Review reader and industrialist from Rhode Island, believed that Cannelton had the potential to supplant the most profitable factory towns in the North and Europe. Like Daniel Pratt in Prattville, Alabama, and William Gregg in Graniteville, South Carolina, Hamilton Smith made Cannelton a cotton-manufacturing center that promised to boost the South’s economic capacity and serve as a practical example of industrial enterprise. Excited by De Bow’s visit, the Cannelton Economist reported: “Professor De Bow has fully shown himself competent to the preparation and management of A Busy and Fractured Mind of the South 57 such...