Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee (review)

Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee. By Lisa C. Tolbert (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1999) 294 pp. $49.95 cloth $19.95 paper

In this examination of town planning and architecture in four Middle Tennessee county seats, Tolbert seeks to liberate antebellum southern history from its almost obsessive concern with rural plantations and yeomen homesteads. Goldfield and other scholars have examined how staple agriculture and the slave system stifled urban growth, but Tolbert argues that the impact of smaller towns--the focal points of civic culture for rural counties--has been largely ignored. ¹ Her effort to present the southern small town as a hybrid of rural and urban institutions on the basis of grid plans and architectural styles raises questions about the limitations of such material evidence.

The need for central places to house county government and the significance of courthouse squares for public life led early settlers to establish towns like Murfreesboro, Columbia, Shelbyville, and Franklin thirty to forty miles apart from one another. Through analysis of decorative elements, Tolbert traces a two-stage evolution from rough-hewn collections of log houses to more "refined" lumber and brick structures, and, finally, to downtown districts with high-style courthouses, Masonic halls, private academies, and homes that set towns apart from the surrounding countryside. This "ceremonial townscape" became the backdrop for town processions and political meetings upon which civic life was constructed (72). By the 1850s, "Gentrification and industrialization proceeded hand in hand to reshape space in the renovated townscape," promoting spatial differentiation around town squares and encouraging architectural "refinement and gentility" (97, 101).

In the second half of the study--its most interesting part--Tolbert turns her attention toward the social composition of the residents, primarily gender and race. Nonetheless, space and the built environment are her main themes. The strolls of a wealthy teenage girl and the consumerist tastes of a young wife and mother serve to trace the movement away from household production to genteel domesticity, a transition that found physical expression in the tented gardens surrounding townhouses and in the construction of female academies. This scenario contrasts with the behavior of young male clerks who lodged in the stores where they worked. Their rowdiness and public drunkenness led town fathers to police public spaces more tightly, stage temperance campaigns, and seek to tame such unruly practices as serenades. Slaves comprised a much larger share of the population in small towns than in cities. Tolbert argues that their lives "must be understood on [their] own terms" (194). Lacking the privacy of the larger rural plantation slave quarter and the anonymity of cities, the slave community was sharply circumscribed by the very publicness of small town life. The public nature of slave life in small southern towns is effectively underscored by trial transcripts of a slave accused of a double murder.

For all the strengths of her narrative, historians will recognize a number of shortcomings in Tolbert's methodology. First, the heavy attention to town plans and architectural styles creates a sharply attenuated perspective through which interpretations of aesthetics serve to make social historical arguments. Even with the incorporation of surviving diaries, much of her argument seems inferential and indirect. Second, the townscape focus of the study too often obscures the social and economic structures of these towns, as well as their relationship to rural hinterlands. How these towns functioned within the hierarchy of cities, towns, and villages; the composition of local trades; and the relationship between growing spatial differentiation and population size are questions that Tolbert skirts.

The greatest problem with her study is one that she shares with other work on the antebellum South--the lack of a meaningful treatment of class for whites. Save for a brief discussion of an apprentice cabinetmaker, her book retains the standard view of the plantation South divided simply between slaves and genteel whites, unlike the more complex occupational...