Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era ed. by Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers (review)

For more than a century after Appomattox, cities barely featured in popular or scholarly narratives of the Confederacy. Lost Cause explanations helped solidify the memory of a rural South worn down by the endless resources of the urban North. This perspective cast a long shadow over our understanding of the Confederacy and the degree to which urban history could also be southern history. Thankfully, since the 1990s a rich vein of scholarship has shown the deep compatibility of slavery and capitalism, rediscovered southern and Confederate urban spaces, and helped make works like Confederate Cities possible.

Editors Frank Towers and Andrew L. Slap explain that these past insights allow them to now address exactly “how southern cities as cities affected the Civil War and in turn how the conflict affected the urban South” (286). Their volume succeeds through eleven highly readable essays that cover an impressive range of topics—secession, nationalism, gender, emancipation, education, and environment—across a satisfying variety of locales: Richmond, New Orleans, Atlanta, Memphis, Natchez, Mobile, and Hampton Roads.

The first half of the collection applies an urban lens to offer new perspectives on persistent debates in Confederate history. J. Matthew Gallman and David Molte-Hansen begin by asking how southern cities shaped the outbreak and course of the conflict. Gallman grapples with the reality that the South’s urban growth paled in comparison to the North’s. While it offered some strategic advantages, Gallman concludes that the Confederacy’s limited urban network “would inhibit its chances of winning the Civil War” (43). Moltke-Hansen eschews sectional comparison to argue that the antebellum South experienced a vital internal process of what Louis Kyriakoudes has called “lower-order urbanization” (47). Many settlements with populations too small to be considered truly urban nonetheless grew significantly thanks to improvements in key services such as transport and communication. Moltke-Hansen believes this “multiplication of urban functions” proved essential in the foundation and subsequent viability of the Confederacy (66).

Frank Towers and T. Lloyd Benson posit urban mentalities as an obstacle to secession. Antebellum urban boosters claimed that cities such as Baltimore, Charleston, and Richmond each had potential to be the “New York of the South.” Secessionists pleaded that such dreams could become reality only in a separate nation, but Towers argues that the “divergence between urban and nationalist conceptions of the South’s collective purpose surely hampered efforts to mobilize the full resources of the Confederacy” (93). Benson’s comparative analysis of gendered rhetoric in nation building similarly maintains that the “cosmopolitanism, complexity, and dynamism” of cities clashed with nationalists’ calls for “cultural distinctiveness, homogeneity, and tradition” (99). The claim that urban-rural divides hurt the Confederate project is intriguing, and these essays suggest it merits further consideration.

Keith S. Bohannon addresses another source of internal tension in the Confederacy by reevaluating the urban bread riots of 1863, which Stephanie McCurry has recently characterized as demonstrating women’s political activism in response to government neglect. Bohannon depicts a more complex urban milieu, finding that the Georgia governor acted repeatedly to ease civilian suffering and that other factors such as festering prejudice toward Jewish merchants played a significant part in fueling the unrest. Michael Pierson uses the experiences of Stephen Spalding—a Union soldier in New Orleans—to argue that key aspects of urban male culture transcended the sectional divide. In the bars and brothels of the city, the Democratic Spalding felt immediately comfortable living the same rough masculinity he had embraced in several northern cities. Both essays suggest that conceptions of gender, often seen as divided primarily along sectional lines, had important urban-rural dimensions.

The later essays move past the war to explore the dramatic consequences of emancipation for the urban South. Andrew Slap shows how the increase in Memphis’s African American population—17.1 percent...