BOOK REVIEWS359 Cotton City: Urban Development in Antebellum Mobile. By Harriet E. Amos. (University: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Pp. xviii, 311. $29.50.) The Rise of the Urban South. By Lawrence H. Larsen. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1985. Pp. xii, 220. $22.00.) In the 1820s new resident Solomon Mordecai predicted that Mobile would become an "Eldorado" (p. 1). The reasons for his misplaced optimism and for Mobile's failure to become a major city are presented in Harriet E. Amos's Cotton City: Urban Development in Antebellum Mobile . In describing a Gulf port bested only by New Orleans and a cotton exporter with particularly strong ties to and dependence on the North, Amos also provides an example of American urban development (and struggle) and North-South relations in the first half of the nineteenth century. She does so by discussing the dominating political, economic, and social role of Mobile's commercial elite; their attempt to meet the needs of a growing population (and to attract more business); their effort to promote railroads, direct trade and industry during the late antebellum period; and the impact of sectional tensions on Mobile's reliance on the outsiders who had made her prosper until the late 1840s. Amos accounts for Mobile's rapid growth and success between the War of 1812and the Panic of 1837 by demonstrating the impact of cotton (which made up 99 percent of Mobile's exports) on "all facets of local development" (p. 41), including how money left the city in the hands of northern firms that provided credit, insurance, and shipping and that bought cotton from the southern city with the worst trade imbalance. What happened to Mobile—from the establishment of banks to the construction of theaters to the handling of epidemics—grew out of a concern for maintaining an economy and society that lured business. In this focus, Mobile "displayed vision" but also evidenced traditional nineteenth -century "short-sighted" and "narrow-minded" perceptions (p. 167) as it used limited capital, a focus on commerce, a belief in the inevitability of poverty, and racist theories to determine city and social services and directions. While Amos seems to ignore nothing and never loses track of her subject, Lawrence H. Larsen's important The Rise of the Urban South is not as important as it should be becauseit neither adequately focuses nor effectively guides. Its picture is a blurred one, from chapter titles to overall theme, and there are typos and an organization whose time frames give an unclear sense of change and development—or failure to change and develop. Nevertheless, Larsen provides a fascinating picture of southern urban growth in the nineteenth century. His book's scant 164 pages of text are hardly sufficient to accomplish his ambitious goals, yet they are full of useful tables (as are Amos's 239 pages) and a 360civil war history variety of significant conclusions: about the southern conditions and mindset that made for cautious urban development, the impact on the South of the Midwest's growth, the South's ties to cotton (and thus agrarianism ), and the role of post-Civil War urban and industrial advocates. The Rise of the Urban South also provides valuable brief looks at New Orleans, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Washington, D.C, and Atlanta (as well as New York and Chicago) as Larsen spotlights specific urban conditions . (Mobile receives scattered short references.) While emphasizing southerners' general anti-urbanism, Larsen says that their region had major cities which often met the low standards of services, facilities, and planning set by American cities in general in the 1800s, although the South's meeting those standards was complicated by "the burden of a depressed economy and race" (p. 141). Still, despite the optimistic but unrealistic goals of New Orleans and the farsighted planning of Baltimore, which linked itself by rail to the Midwest, the South did not develop "great cities" (p. 5). The key word for southern urban growth was caution. Few cities overreached, or rather, took risks. Many never even reached, relying instead on their faith in cotton or on "dreams" (p. 28). Even New South spokesmen, young men such as Henry Grady, were limited in their...
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Feb 7, 2009
Elias Dinopoulos + 1
Open Access