Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South's Love-Hate Affair with New York City by Ritchie Devon Watson Jr (review)

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• Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South’s Love-Hate Affair with New York City by Ritchie Devon Watson Jr
• Anne Marie Martin

Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South’s Love-Hate Affair with New York City. By Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. Southern Literary Studies. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. x, 243. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7933-8.)

In Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South’s Love-Hate Affair with New York City, Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. examines the deterioration of the relationship between the South and New York City during the antebellum period. New York was a popular tourist destination, and wealthy white southerners filled the city’s hotels and enjoyed all the city had to offer, from opera and theater productions to the numerous shopping opportunities. However, as the period progressed, white southerners grew increasingly defensive of slavery and felt that it was only fair to demand that New Yorkers, who had grown wealthy as major players in the southern cotton trade, should support the institution’s continued practice. The appeasement New Yorkers offered, though, was never enough. Using the writings of white southerners, New Yorkers, and others, Watson reveals the cracks that emerged in this relationship between 1820 and 1860, demonstrating that proslavery and antislavery Americans were aware of and acted in response to the economic and political ties that bound New York City’s wealth to southern slavery.

Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster’s structure is thematic, with chapters primarily organized by literature type. Chapter 1, “That Most Southern Connected of Northern Cities,” sets the stage, considering not just the general relationship between the South and New York, but also the history of New York City and its long relationship with slavery. In “The Greatest Emporium of the Western Hemisphere: The South Travels to Gotham,” Watson considers travelers’ accounts of their time in the city. He argues that, while the growing tensions between white southerners and the city were clear in other literary forms by the 1850s, southern travelers’ accounts of their time in the city were generally positive across the period.

The deteriorating nature of the relationship also appeared in white southern fiction, as Watson explains in his third chapter, “Early Fictional Appraisals of New York City.” While southerner William Alexander Caruthers’s The Kentuckian in New-York; or, The Adventures of Three Southerns (1834) included themes like national identity and some questioning of slavery, by the 1840s southerners’ works had become more critical of the city. As seen in Watson’s chapter 4, “Blotted from the List of Cities: Southern Writers Assail Gotham,” by the 1850s white southern authors were increasingly using New York City as a stand-in for critiques of the free market and their defense of slavery. Far from the attitudes of earlier novels, these later works included Edmund Ruffin’s Anticipations of the Future, to Serve as Lessons for the Present Time (1860), which predicted the city’s destruction, brought about by a successful, southern-led civil war.

In his final chapters, Watson’s focus shifts. Chapter 5, “William Gilmore Simms, William Cullen Bryant, and the Breaking of the Hinge of Union,” follows the longtime friendship of South Carolina author, planter, and champion of slavery Simms and Bryant, a New York newspaper editor with long-standing antislavery sentiments. Watson argues that this relationship, and [End Page 428] its ultimate demise, can be seen as a useful allegory for the broader situation surrounding the city and the South. The book’s final chapter, “Execrable New York,” follows New York City in the wake of southern secession. While southern journalists both called for the city’s support of the Confederacy and predicted New York’s downfall without southern cotton, the wave of U.S. patriotism that swept the city after the firing on Fort Sumter made it apparent not only that New York would not come to the Confederacy’s aid, but also that its economic downfall, which so many southerners predicted was inevitable, was not guaranteed.

Through his extensive use of written sources, Watson illustrates the deeply personal relationship wealthy white southerners had with New York City, and he allows them to narrate...