Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South's Love-Hate Affair with New York City

Reviewed by Emily Holloway

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, New York City developed and nurtured deep economic connections to the cotton plantation economy of the US South. These economic bonds provided a strong foundation for wide-ranging cultural, social, and political networks that tied these regions together. Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr.’s latest book, Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South’s Love-Hate Affair with New York City details this complex and fraught collaboration through a series of literary artifacts, including fiction, diaries and correspondence, and newspaper columns. Watson, a professor emeritus of English at Randolph-Macon College, has previously written on generic conventions in antebellum Southern literature and the intellectual histories undergirding these traditions. Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster extends this approach by examining the ways in which Southern cultural perceptions of New York City were shaped by and shaped national political conflicts. The text, which explores these questions chronologically over a roughly forty-year (1820-1861) period, endeavors to balance a nuanced and complex political history with a literary analysis of an eclectic selection of antebellum Southern literature.

Before formally abolishing slavery in 1817, New York “remained much more than its rivals to the north and south undisputedly a slave city” (4). Long before the city became a leading port for cotton and sugar exports and the principal base of finance and insurance firms underwriting these global trades, the city hosted the largest urban slave population in North America. Even after abolition, city business leaders’ attitudes towards freed and fugitive slaves in New York ranged from ambivalent to downright hostile. Indeed, as Watson reminds the reader, many of these mercantilists built and expanded their empires on the fruits of enslaved labor, whether through offering favorable credit terms to southern planters, insuring cargo (both commodities and enslaved people) and ships, or through commission as brokers and factors. As the Cotton Kingdom expanded into the Deep South and new territories following the Louisiana Purchase, more and more cotton bales were shipped through New York City’s rapidly growing ports to reach mills in England, France, and New England: In 1788, for example, a mere 62 bales were shipped to Europe via New York, compared to 153,757 less than thirty years later (2). These economic arrangements and relationships would foster tighter social bonds between the mercantile elite of New York and the planter class of the South. Watson examines this cultural exchange through the travel writings and fictional narratives penned by Southern visitors to New York.

New York City was, for elite and educated southerners, an alluring destination. Despite the lengthy and arduous journey, tourists, planters, and writers flocked to the city, enduring a lengthy trip by sea and a four-day quarantine on Staten Island upon arrival. The luxury hotels that populated Broadway at mid-century, such as the St. Nicholas and the Metropolitan, were booked with Southern visitors such as Tennessee native John Stewart Oxley who remarked that these establishments were “hard to beat, even in Paris” (54). Tourists arrived to take advantage of New York’s finest shops and cultural offerings, even arriving with lists of requests for garments, fabrics, and books that were unavailable at home. Wealthy southerners eagerly bought tickets to see the famous singer Jenny Lind perform at Castle Garden and view European oils paintings on display in New York’s expanding art gallery market. During their visits, these elite southerners – many of whom owned cotton plantations -- were rubbing elbows with New York’s mercantile and financial leaders, sometimes as their guests. The close social ties that developed between these classes built on their intimate financial connections through cotton.

Already a destination for culture and finance, New York was also a hub of publishing activity. Watson emphasizes the importance of the city’s edge in developing and marketing literary talent as a key factor that could both attract and repel southern writers. Some, like the infamous James De Bow, founder, publisher, and editor of De Bow’s Review, urged southern writers to print their work in the South to subvert a growing dependency on New York’s publishing industry. But even New Orleans, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan southern cities, did not have the technological infrastructure or networks needed to print and distribute his magazine. De Bow would ultimately relocate his printing to New York, even selling advertising space to New York City firms. De Bow recognized the relationship of dependency that southern industry and culture had developed with New York in its leisure and travel activities, calling for a “touristic declaration of independence” (50) that reinvested money, resources, and pride in southern heritage and locales.

Although visitors were utterly entranced by the glamorous and sophisticated experiences on offer in New York City, many also observed the stark social divides of day-to-day life. Various southern writers remarked critically on the vast economic inequality on display throughout the rapidly growing city, a characteristic they frequently tied to the machinations of industrial capitalism. This critique was frequently deployed as a reaction to northern abolitionist sentiments, a false equivalence between the ravages of industrial “wage slavery” and the racist violence of plantation slavery. For writers such as William Bobo, a South Carolinian documentarian whose guidebook to New York was published in 1852, trenchant criticisms of New York’s uncontrollable social heterogeneity and poverty “were part of a spirited defense of both the institution of slavery and the southern way of life established upon it” (97). Watson notes that rising political tensions in the aftermath of the Compromise of 1850 were fundamental to this rhetorical shift and compounded a political divide into a cultural cudgel.

This cultural dynamic is illustrated against the backdrop of increasingly overt political hostilities with a variety of different authors, genres, and subjects. Perhaps none is more fascinating, or uncanny, than Watson’s summary of the 1860 serial (turned novel) Anticipations of the Future by dedicated secessionist and fire-eater Edmund Ruffin of South Carolina. A dystopic, proto-science fiction epistolary narrative, Anticipations of the Future begins with the 1864 election of radical Republican William Seward. Four years later, amid rising tensions, the first battle of a (still fictional!) war was staged at Fort Sumter – a battle that, of course, did mark the beginning of the conflict in 1861, a year after Ruffin’s novel was published. As the war unfolds, Ruffin describes a maverick Union government that retreats further and further north, ceding Washington, D.C. to the new southern government and isolating a weakened northeastern region from trade. With what Watson describes as “another stroke of remarkable imaginative prescience” (123), New York City erupts into enormously destructive mobs and riots after a long and painful economic downturn in 1869 – riots with an uncanny similarity to the 1863 Draft Riots. With characteristic dramatic flourish, Ruffin calls the urban uprisings “‘the sack of New York’” (124), a widespread mob that ultimately climaxes with “Gotham’s teeming and subjugated masses” (125) burning the city to the ground. The fictional narrator lays the blame for this destruction squarely at the feet of radical Republican politicians and “Fifth Avenue plutocrats” (125) to highlight the “failure of the intellectually bankrupt ideals of laissez-faire capitalism and progressive democratic idealism that Ruffin considered the driving forces of Yankee culture” (127).

The novel was a direct appeal to southern prejudices and thus written for a sympathetic and uncritical audience of southern elites, but hardly received any notice in northern reviews. As the real Civil War unfolded in the years after his book’s publication, Ruffin’s prophetic vision ultimately proved false. Indeed, despite the turmoil of the 1863 Draft Riots, New York City profited handsomely from the war. Not long after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Watson tells us, Ruffin declares in his diary his “‘unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule – to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, and to the perfidious, malignant, and vile Yankee race’” (132) and commits suicide – an astonishing dramatic twist to an illuminating and gripping vignette.

Overall, Watson’s approach to the rapid devolution of the south’s relationship to New York City is interesting, accessible, and well-written. The prose is brisk and lively, filled with suprising and rather obscure examples of a very specific genre in the southern literary canon. Specialists, especially historians, may find more to quibble with. For one, there is very little engagement with contemporary historical scholarship. Although Watson alludes briefly (without naming it as such) to work in the so-called “New History of Capitalism,” citing Sven Beckert, Walter Johnson, and Edward Baptist, there is no critical reflection on how this text might build on or contribute to this field.[i] The primary secondary citations include Edwin Burroughs’ and Mike Wallace’s Gotham (naturally) and (the consistently and frustratingly misspelled) New York Burning by Jill Lepore (not “Le Pore”).[ii] Philip Foner’s classic Business and Slavery is frequently cited as well, but was published nearly a century ago![iii] As a scholar of English, Watson understandably focuses on the literary texts of the era, but the project would be greatly enriched by more detailed primary archival research and historiographic critique.

There are occasional glimpses of how Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster might be made relevant for a contemporary audience: Watson (somewhat confoundingly) cites Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project in his introduction, but simply to point out the long history of African and African-descended peoples and slaves in New York City that has been ignored or undocumented in mainstream narratives. This is a major missed opportunity: hyperpartisanship dominates the tenor and content of mass media today to galvanize and weaponize political sentiments. Indeed, Hannah-Jones’ revisionist project is frequently invoked as the centerpiece of this conflict, and she was recently denied tenure at the University of North Carolina for her work.[iv] Watson does not comment on any of these parallels or dilemmas. Finally, the narrow focus of the book, which spotlights the social and political exchanges of white economic and cultural actors, makes little effort to explore how these rhetorical and literary dynamics affected or were influenced by Black actors in New York and elsewhere. Although Watson raises an important and relevant research agenda, he effectively neutralizes the book’s significance today through these omissions.

Emily Holloway is a PhD candidate in Geography at Clark University. Her research focuses on the relationship between Caribbean slavery and the industrial built environment of the Brooklyn waterfront.

[i] Edward E. Baptist (2016), The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Basic Books; Sven Beckert (2014), Empire of Cotton: A Global History, Knopf; Walter Johnson (2013), River of Dark Dreams, Harvard University Press.

[ii] Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Oxford University Press; Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, Knopf.

[iii] Philip S. Foner (1941), Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict, University of North Carolina Press.

[iv] Katie Robertson, “Nikole Hannah-Jones Denied Tenure at University of North Carolina,” The New York Times, May 19, 2021.

Reviews, Politics, Race & Ethnicity, Antebellum & Civil War, Manhattan, Slavery & Antislavery, Business & Labor, Arts & Culture, MediaAndrew LangAugust 9, 2023Comment