This Southern Metropolis

"Based on visitor descriptions of antebellum Mobile's physical and social environment, this book transports readers to a place and time that looms exceptionally large in Gulf Coast history. Mobile's foundational American epoch is a period in which it transformed from a struggling colonial outpost into one of the nation's most significant economic powerhouses. On the eve of the Civil War, the city ranked as the fourth most populous community in what would soon become the Confederacy, and within the Gulf Coast region stood second only to New Orleans in population, wealth, and influence. In addition to being home to the largest white population of any community in Alabama, the city also claimed the state's largest free Black, foreign-born, and Creole communities and served as the home for thousands of enslaved people. Except for isolated remnants of its famed architecture, however, today the sights and sounds of this dynamic nineteenth-century metropolis have vanished. Although numerous excellent histories of Mobile have been published over the years, none have focused on the dozens of evocative firsthand accounts published by some of its most well-traveled and literate antebellum-era visitors. These writings allowed literary-minded travelers, who were often consciously looking for things that struck them as singular about a place, to become a sort of tour guide for their contemporary readers. In attempting to capture the essence of the city's reality at a specific moment in time, Mobile's antebellum guests have left us with a unique record of one of the South's most historic communities"--