Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980 (review)

180civil war history merical association for Leopold II of Belgium, who needed American recognition for the colony he intended to establish. Sanford got him that recognition and became the main force in a United States delegation to the Berlin Congo Congress of 1884—an uncharacteristic American venture into European colonial tangles. Unfortunately Sanford was an infinitely better diplomat than promoter . Fry argues convincingly that Sanford and John Bigelow, the better-known American consul general at Paris during the Civil War, were the two key figures of Union diplomacy on the Continent, yielding overall precedence only to Charles Francis Adams, thepeerless minister to Britain. As a businessman, Sanford made enough money from guano to last him most of his Ufe, but in the other ventures he showed himself too guUible, impulsive, fond of display, and unwilling to devote patient months and years to development work in the field. To be sure, he was burdened with a lovely, extravagant wife, who flatly refused to live in America, and, as aresult, hemadeover seventy-fiveAtlantic crossings in fifty years. His biographer remarks cogently that Sanford was really a career diplomat born before his time, with ingratiating manners, an observant eye, and a flair for international relations, but too few poUtical connections at home. Fry has given us a model biography of a third-rank American historical figure with many interesting facets. His research on Sanford is thorough and sound, his writing well organized and brisk, with an eye for color and irony. He would not be a true biographer if he did not occasionally claim a bit too much for his subject, but his well-placed appraisals are usually objective and penetrating. The result is a significant and readable study that will not need redoing for a long time. David M. Pletcher Indiana University Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980. By David R. Goldfield. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Pp. xiv, 232. $20.00.) In this broad-ranging book David Goldfield draws on his own research on antebellum southern cities and pulls together the work of others in history and the social sciences. He also makes good use of literary evidence from Faulkner, Wolfe, and Glasgow to evoke the special mood of urban life in the South. The book is presented as an "extended essay" aimed at the general reader as well as scholars in southern and urban history. It is free of footnotes, which will deUght some and scandaUze other readers. The latter, however, will find solace in an extensive bibUographic essay at the end. Goldfield insists that we must understand southern urbanization on its own special terms and not force the subject into standard theories of urbanization which portray rural folk culture disintegrating the face of a BOOK REVIEWS181 modern, rational society. Three persistent themes stamp the southern city with its regional distinctiveness, according to this argument: rural influence (evident in strong family ties, religious fervor, and staple agriculture), racism, and the colonial economic relationship of the region to the North. He introduces these themes with a brief essay on the coastal ports that emerged to serve the plantation economy in the colonial period. His second chapter on the antebellum era elaborates the argument Goldfield first developed in his case study of Virginia, Urban Growth in the Age of Sectionalism: Virginia, 1847-1861. He describes the antebellum southern city as an integral, but subservient, component of an economy and culture ruled by the planter regime. As developments in transportation and commerce created national market networks dominated by New York City, the planters and urban entrepreneurs joined hands to encourage railroads and factories. If, as Genovese has argued, the planters were ambivalent and ultimately opposed to the vigorous rise of cities in the South, the urgan bourgeoisie were equally torn between their interest in regional development and their ties to national markets. Those most enmeshed in those national markets balked at secession, but it was a measure of their subservience that they ultimately threw in their lot with the planters during the secession crisis and served the Confederate cause with great energy. Goldfield's interpretation of the postwar urban South breaks new ground and contributes to the...