Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/31

 has not yet made full use. These sources are the local newspapers and the fairly numerous magazines—particularly the financial and commercial De Bow's Review published at New Orleans. The Southern historian, like his brothers of the North and East until recently, has laid disproportionate stress upon the colonial history of his section or else upon its political history, and thus has failed to bring out the interesting struggle between the old and the new economic orders of things that took place in the South down to the time of the Civil War. Hence it is that in the present volume we find in many chapters the gap between the surrender at Yorktown and the firing upon Sumter covered by only a few paragraphs. Some of the towns had a most interesting history during these years,—as we may judge from Dr. Petrie's chapter on Montgomery,—but it has not yet been written.

When it is, we shall get abundant evidence of a heroic if, on the whole, unsuccessful struggle for urban development. Charleston in particular made a most gallant fight to recover the importance as a port which she had lost through the rivalry of Baltimore and New Orleans. Her leading citizens, some of whom