| This study considers the timing and nature of the development of southern identity before the Civil War. It then examines the collective identities inherited or developed by four public figures from Charleston, South Carolina. Robert Wells became the colonial South's largest publisher. William Gilmore Simms had long been regarded as the South's preeminent author and literary editor by the outbreak of the Civil War. William Henry Trescot became Acting U.S. Secretary of State, so highest ranking South Carolinian in Washington, in 1860. Born just over a century after Wells, Louis Remy Mignot became perhaps the foremost southern-born artist of his generation. In sequence, the four show the stages in the gradual subordination in Charleston of ethnic and metropolitan to regional identities and loyalties.;This progression took much longer than the century considered here. In the course of that time, the city's press linked Charleston with other communities undergoing similar transitions. By the 1820s the transition was far enough along that an expanding press could help in the construction of a virtual southern community extending from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi. Charleston became a hub in this emerging, virtual region.;Simultaneously, the growing number of the city's authors editors and cultural institutions made Charleston an unrivalled center in the imaginative and discursive development of the region. Charleston's role as the "capital of Southern Civilization," however, was short-lived. After little more than a generation, it ended with the selection of Richmond, Virginia, a faster growing city, as the Confederacy's capital.;The regional framework and networks that first united Mississippi with Carolina have continued in place for more than 160 years---approximately half of Charleston's history. Over this period, however, the meanings to Charlestonians of regional identity have changed. So have the nature and uses of as well as reasons for regional associations. The analysis here of the uses and meanings of southern identity during its early, developmental phase adds to previous geo-political, political, socio-cultural, economic, and ideological analyses. In doing so, it helps recover aspects of the identity and its uses not considered substantially in the earlier scholarship. |
