The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War.

The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War. By Frank Towers. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 285. $45.00, ISBN 0-8139-2297-6.)

In The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War, Frank Towers highlights the diversity of antebellum southern life with a rich account of politics in the South's three largest cities: Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis. White workers proved to be a thorn in the side of secessionists, he argues, by generating political and economic conflict at the same time that southern radicals recast their region as one marked by political consensus, economic stability, and a strong hierarchical social order. While demonstrating this point, Towers provides useful insights into the growth of small manufacturing, party politics, and urban violence in the antebellum South. The significance of this achievement should not be understated. This is a sensational book that contributes to our increasingly complex view of southern society on the eve of the Civil War by focusing on one of the most elusive cases of intraregional dissension: the white, urban working class.

Towers asserts that urban populations in the South "brought a unique set of combatants to the secession crisis" and that when they viewed their cities, southerners saw "what a future in the Union might hold" (p. 30). High levels of organized labor, immigration, and rioting in these cities not only sent shudders down the spines of fire-eating secessionists; these trends also caused cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis to defy the antipartisan drift in southern politics. Towers traces the origins of working-class political consciousness to the workplace and deftly reconstructs the breakdown of what he terms urban paternalism over the antebellum decades. A new industrial order on the shop floor gradually spawned a new arrangement of political power in southern cities. Most notably, Towers suggests, these cities witnessed the emergence of a new two-party system replete with powerful bosses, carefully orchestrated political violence, and an emerging working-class consciousness at the polls.

A free-labor ideology surfaced in southern cities, but the immediate presence of slavery tempered its growth. Towers suggests that both new and established political parties provided the best outlet for working-class aspirations, as southern cities generated their own version of the American Party during the 1850s to counter the well-established Democratic Party. Although Know-Nothingism originated in the North, its southern adherents eschewed the antislavery leanings of their northern counterparts, and its electoral appeal played well enough among the urban laborers of the South to become a "flexible and practical political movement" (p. 147). By 1860 and 1861 working-class politics served neither secession nor the Unionist cause exclusively, but each side successfully tapped into existing organizations. When Baltimore erupted in violence at the time of Lincoln's inauguration, for example, the pro-Union "Blood Tubs" that took to the streets were veterans of political rioting. In a similar vein, the secessionist crowds denouncing the "damned Dutch" in the streets of St. Louis in opposition to Unionist forces revealed as much about the breakdown in the Irish-German political alliance in the wake of Know-Nothingism's demise as it did any long-standing support for southern nationalism (p. 130).

In sum, Towers assembles a convincing case for the distinctive nature of partisanship in the urban South. "If the Civil War ended a tradition of combative party politics across the slave states," he argues, "then the survival of that tradition in the largest Southern cities may be the most important marker that differentiated them from the section that surrounded them" (p. 185). The bulk of evidence for this argument comes from events in Baltimore, which is one limitation of this book. However, Towers is careful to acknowledge this trend and does make a conscientious effort to extend his model to smaller and more traditionally southern cities. The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War ultimately offers a wide-ranging and well-supported analysis through its chosen case studies and stands as an essential work for those interested in the history of the South and antebellum politics in general.

SEAN PATRICK ADAMS 

University of Florida