Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War ed. by Andrew W. Slap, Frank Towers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War ed. by Andrew W. Slap, Frank Towers Peter A. Coclanis Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War. Ed. Andrew W. Slap and Frank Towers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-22630-020-7, 302pp., paper, $30.00. Given the sizable quantity of historical scholarship on the American Civil War, it is surprising that so few scholars over the years have focused their energies on the relationship between the war and the nation’s cities. Although it is often said of mature scholarly fields that additional works tend to fill “much needed gaps,” this is hardly the case with Confederate Cities, an important new collection of essays edited by Andrew W. Slap and Frank Towers. Indeed, after finishing the volume, one is at once excited by what one has learned and left yearning for more. As the book’s title suggests, the authors of the essays Slap and Towers include here are interested, broadly speaking, in cities—primarily, though not exclusively those in the Confederacy—during the war. All of the contributors seek “to use the lens of the city to re-examine main themes of the Civil War” and, in so doing, to analyze the ways southern cities affected the war and/or how the war affected southern cities (1). The angles of scholarly refraction differ considerably among the authors, but, taken together, the quality of the scholarship in Confederate Cities testifies amply to the wisdom of the editors’ organizational conceit. Confederate Cities consists of eleven essays (including one by each of the editors), as well as a substantial introduction and a brief conclusion by the editors (both of which are well executed), and an elegiac foreword by David Goldfield, the most distinguished urban historian of the U.S. South. The essays in the volume are set in one of five discrete sections or parts: “The Big Picture,” “Secession,” “Gender,” “Emancipation,” and “A New Urban South.” [End Page 70] The individual essays, not surprisingly, vary somewhat in scale, scope, and quality, but each contributes significantly to our understanding of the urban dimensions of the Civil War. Individual readers will surely have their own favorites in what is at the end of the day a very strong collection. One cannot begin to do justice to each of the essays in a short review, so it must suffice to mention the range and purview of Confederate Cities and highlight a few of the essays that resonated most with me. After Slap and Towers’s table-setting introduction, two well-known scholars of the Civil War era—Matthew Gallman and David Moltke-Hansen—place the cities of the Confederacy, or, more precisely, the cities of the South, in broad context, focusing on long-term patterns relating to urban growth and urbanization (the latter of which denotes a relative increase in the urban proportion of a given area’s population), and on both the effects of the Civil War on southern cities and of southern cites on the Civil War. Although Gallman and Moltke-Hansen emphasize different themes and don’t always agree, both of these essays are superb. The above section is followed by two essays—one by Towers and the other by T. Lloyd Benson—demonstrating, in the first case, the complex and compound ways urban boosterism played out in the secession crisis, and, in the second, how gender/household metaphors contributed to nationalism and nation-building not only in the South but also in Canada and Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Part 3 of Confederate Cities, devoted to gender, comprises two excellent essays. In the first, Michael Pierson deftly employs a clever rhetorical strategy—reconstructing the debauched way Union lieutenant Stephen Spaulding spent his time in New Orleans on July 4, 1862—to shed light on the culture of masculinity in Civil War America. In the second, Keith Bohannon intervenes powerfully in the emerging literature on women’s bread riots in the South in 1863 via close examinations of several such “riots” in cities and towns in Georgia. The three essays included in part 4 all deal with the changes associated with / promoted by...