Red Clay, White Water, and Blues by Virginia E. Causey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Red Clay, White Water, and Blues by Virginia E. Causey Tyler McCreary Red Clay, White Water, and Blues. Virginia E. Causey. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. xi and 256 pp., figs., notes, bibliog., and index. $24.95 paperback (ISBN: 9780820358826). Virginia E. Causey's new book, Red Clay, White Water, and Blues, provides the first comprehensive account of the history of Columbus, Georgia. Causey's attention to the dynamics of development in Georgia's third-largest city brings attention to an ordinary city of the American South. Such ordinary and undistinguished cities have largely been neglected by urban studies scholars. Classic works of urban theory and urban history have focused on the declarative great American cities, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Jacobs 1961, Cronon 1991, Soja 1996, Gandy 2002). To the extent that urbanists have studied cities of the American South, they have focused on major centers like Atlanta (Bayor 1996, Lands 2011, Kruse 2013, Hobson 2017). However, few cities in the Southeastern US resemble metro Atlanta and there is a need for more systematic study of the mid-sized cities that predominate in the region. While regional studies of the US South are well established within the historical geography and cultural geography literature, it remains necessary to develop forms of urban theory and urban history attentive to the region. Reading Red Clay, White Water, and Blues provides a lens through which to begin to consider the distinct form of the ordinary city of the South. Tracing from the creation of the city in 1828 to the present, Red Clay, White Water, and Blues combines elements of environmental, political, economic, and cultural history of the city. Located along the Fall Line on the Chattahoochee River, Columbus is a community shaped by its relationships to geography. Causey shows how the development of transportation and energy infrastructures, particularly associated with the river, guided the development of local industry, particularly the historic prominence of textile mills along the Chattahoochee. She also highlights how Columbus is embedded within historic and ongoing tensions tied to plantation legacies that characterize much of the South, even as broader regional, national, and global transformations work on and modify these fault lines. Documenting the historic transformation of this secondary city, Causey charts the enduring mix of boosterism, parochialism, and corruption of the local elite that has shaped urban development. She also stresses the "bloody trail" of [End Page 163] racial violence that remains endemic to the city, reproducing structures of inequalities through broad urban transformations. From its very foundation, Columbus is a community forged through racial violence. As Causey documents, the original source of commercial prosperity driving development was the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Located on Georgia's western boundary, planters and land speculators first flocked to Columbus following the first survey of the community in 1828. The Creek already occupied the area, with the town of Cowetta located only a few miles downriver. Investing in dispossession, plantation and financial elites exploited land theft and the forced removal of the Creeks as the original form of accumulation that structured enduring forms of racialized uneven development. Subsequently, Columbus functioned as a key node in the plantation economy, as textile manufacturing concentrated in the city, which had access to global markets through shipping down the river to the Port of Apalachicola. "In 1860," as Causey documents, "40 percent of white families owned slaves," who "built everything in Columbus—private residences, commercial structures and factories, railroads, and dams" and worked "in industry as skilled workers who competed with free white artisans" (27). Columbus stagnated in the wake of the Civil War. While local boosters sought to embrace new infrastructure developments during Reconstruction, most of the railway proposals aiming to link the city to emerging networks of trade failed, and Macon was "the only significant city to which Columbus had a direct connection" (58). With river transportation through Apalachicola at a competitive disadvantage, economic investment in the city stagnated as "poor rail connections made outside capitalists reluctant to invest" (59). Local elites did not seek to diversify the economy, believing that lack of opportunities engendered a pliant workforce that could be controlled "via a combination of paternalistic...