Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath by William A. Link (review)

In his new book about Atlanta, William Link examines the ways in which white and black leaders interpreted the Civil War for a postwar audience. Link includes an overview of Atlanta’s wartime rise and fall as a Confederate city before focusing on white leaders’ postwar efforts to reimagine their city. Businessmen rebuilt Atlanta with the goal of fashioning a New South city where economic advancement occurred and white supremacy remained. Toward this end, they embraced a narrative of the recent war that focused on Atlanta’s victimization when Gen. William T. Sherman ordered the expulsion of the city’s Confederate civilians and subsequently ordered the city’s destruction. Adopting the slogan “Resurgens” and taking the phoenix as the city’s symbol, Atlanta’s white businessmen congratulated themselves on creating what Link calls a “redemption narrative [that] became part of postwar Atlanta’s identity” (54).

Black Atlantans had a different vision. They believed Atlanta’s wartime destruction had to occur in order to bring military victory and liberation of slaves. Rejecting the rigidity and brutality of the old slave regime, African Americans now sought economic opportunity, educational prospects, control over family life, and political rights. The Freedmen’s Bureau and the occupation army aided black advancement to a limited degree and quickly replaced Sherman’s invading army as white people’s scapegoats. Although the bureau helped feed a limited number of African Americans, the federal presence in north Georgia failed to control violence that occurred in 1868, which resulted in several murders and assaults in counties surrounding Atlanta.

Education became a positive force in postwar Atlanta. The American Missionary Association founded schools for African Americans in the city and also created Atlanta University west of the city center in 1869. Although initially more of a high school than a university and with an entirely white faculty until the 1890s, Atlanta University was nonetheless a place of importance that educated new leaders and allowed black and white students to matriculate together. In 1897 W. E. B. Du Bois joined its faculty. Because economic growth occurred at the same time as black advancement, Link concludes, “Atlanta thus became, paradoxically, a bastion of both white supremacy and black autonomy” (90).

In a chapter titled “Wheel within a Wheel: Competing Visions,” the author examines the efforts of white Atlantans, including the local historian Wallace Putnam Reed and the newspaperman Henry W. Grady, to interpret the postwar South. While Grady’s famous 1886 New York boosterism speech is often quoted by scholars, Link also focuses on a lesser-known speech that Grady gave in Boston three years later, in which Grady suggested that northern as well as southern whites shared responsibility for the history of slavery since northern traders brought slaves to America from Africa. He then suggested that northern and southern whites must now form an intersectional alliance based on an acceptance of white supremacy. However, African Americans rejected Grady’s arguments. In 1906, Atlanta exploded in racial violence that ended its carefully crafted image as a city bent on economic development and racial peace. Link writes that “Grady’s vision of a new South based on intersectional harmony and the advance of civilization was tattered and frayed, and was generally rarely used thereafter” (189).

With the exception of Margaret Mitchell, who is referenced at the end of the book, women’s voices are largely absent from this book, since Link has chosen not to focus on the Atlanta Ladies Memorial Association and its Lost Cause efforts or black female religious and educational leaders. Nonetheless, this book makes an important contribution by examining Atlanta at a pivotal and undervalued point in its history. It adds to the growing literature on historical memory of the Civil War and contributes to the scholarship on southern cities and African American history. Link’s...