American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond

Abstract

Gregg D. Kimball offers a rich study of Richmond's antebellum society and culture that explores the manners, styles, and outlooks of its inhabitants. He reveals Richmond's diverse urban culture through the stories of the men and women of the native-born merchant and manufacturing elite, German artisans and shopkeepers, British ironworkers, and enslaved black workers as well as free. Such diversity made antebellum Richmond a complex place, much like the fast-growing commercial cities of the North at midcentury. Consequently, Richmonders did not possess a single identity that might be characterized as southern. Instead, they constructed multiple identities shaped by the cultural, economic, and social relationships created in the city's hotels, churches, workshops, parade grounds, and countinghouses. In this complexity and diversity, antebellum Richmond possessed the elements of American urban culture. To understand the urban culture of antebellum Richmond, Kimball rejects the methodologies and sources of urban history as social history. He eschews the social historian's reliance on census data, city directories, and tax lists, which he blames for the failure of urban social history to reveal the true story of American cities found in the interplay of people and ideas. Instead, he adopts the tools of the biographer and the historian of ideas. Scouring the impressive array of diaries, letters, and memoirs of those who made Richmond in the 1850s, Kimball ably uncovers the complexity of individual lives and the rich textures of antebellum urban culture to reveal the social and cultural contours of the Richmond community.