New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910

by Don H. Doyle

Cities were the core of a changing economy and culture that penetrated the rural hinterland and remade the South in the decades following the Civil War. In New Men, New Cities, New South , Don Doyle argues that if the plantation was the world the slaveholders made, the urban centers of the New South formed the world made by merchants, manufacturers, and financiers. The book's title evokes the exuberant rhetoric of New South boosterism, which continually extolled the "new men" who dominated the city-building process, but Doyle also explores the key role of women in defining the urban upper class.

Doyle uses four cities as case studies to represent the diversity of the region and to illuminate the responses businessmen made to the challenges and opportunities of the postbellum South. Two interior railroad centers, Atlanta and Nashville, displayed the most vibrant commercial and industrial energy of the region, and both cities fostered a dynamic class of entrepreneurs. These business leaders' collective efforts to develop their cities and to establish formal associations that served their common interests forged them into a coherent and durable urban upper class by the late nineteenth century. The rising business class also helped establish a new pattern of race relations shaped by a commitment to economic progress through the development of the South's human resources, including the black labor force. But the "new men" of the cities then used legal segregation to control competition between the races.

Charleston and Mobile, old seaports that had served the antebellum plantation economy with great success, stagnated when their status as trade centers declined after the war. Although individual entrepreneurs thrived in both cities, their efforts at community enterprise were unsuccessful, and in many instances they remained outside the social elite. As a result, conservative ways became more firmly entrenched, including a system of race relations based on the antebellum combination of paternalism and neglect rather than segregation. Talent, energy, and investment capital tended to drain away to more vital cities.

In many respects, as Doyle shows, the business class of the New South failed in its quest for economic development and social reform. Nevertheless, its legacy of railroads, factories, urban growth, and changes in the character of race relations shaped the world most southerners live in today.

Genres: History

391 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1990

About the author

Don Harrison Doyle

Reviews

[J M-B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doyle's approach is to move from the high level statistical data of urban development in the South, to the movements of population, the individual businesses, the men who made them and the familial and social connections forged in the process of becoming an upper class that supplanted the plantation owners. This movement approaches what Clifford Geertz termed 'thick description' and offers an impressive and memorable narrative of the four cities that are the focus of this history. If there is a criticism, perhaps it is that the organization of the urban labouring class is little examined other than in relation to conflicts over mixing black and white employees. I can't but think there is more to it than that.

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don Doyle, in New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910, uses four southern cities as cases to study the New South. The result is a relatively straightforward, if sometimes dry, urban history, one that focuses on city building, business formation, social classes, and race relations.

The choice of cities is interesting, but Doyle is sometimes forced to lean too hard on, or conversely downplay, the evidence that supports his forth-offered symmetry (Atlanta-Nashville, Charleston-Mobile). Mobile gets the shortest shrift which leads the reader to wonder why Doyle chose it over the rival commercial port, and more systemically important city, New Orleans. Atlanta, of the four he does consider, is the most axiomatic of the New South, this being partly a factor of its nascent antebellum development. Nashville and Charleston, both of which command the spotlight in this book, are most interesting when viewed, in the latter half of the book, through the dual lenses of race and class.

This book will be read with most profit by those seeking context for larger social phenomena playing out across the region during the latter half of the 19th century; most especially the origins of segregation and the rural populist movement. Doyle’s discussion of education and public health is very interesting; with regard to the latter he urges future historians to more fully explore the nexus between Jim Crow segregation and the advent of a popular understanding of the germ theory of disease. Perhaps the least interesting part of the book, if only because there is little to distinguish the many capsule profiles on offer, is the biographical parsing of leading businessmen in each of the cities.

The book does not read as definitive, though that ought not to be taken as an indictment. Rather, it feels like the kind of text that will seed (and likely has already in the 30 years since it was first published) future historians with good ideas, some of them supplementary, some of the revisionary. That said, both historians and the general reader will appreciate the worthy selection of photographs Doyle has seen fit to print. (C) Jeffrey L. Otto, November 11, 2019