Mortality Statistics of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850: Embracing-1. The Cause of Death. 2. The Age and Sex, 3. The Color and ... of Illness, 7. The Occupation, of the Person
Legal History of the Entire System of Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Ry. And Possessions: Including and Discussing the Charters, Amendments, ... Mortgages, Abstract of Title to Every
James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow was an American editor, publisher, and statistician. He was the founder of the influential magazine De Bow's Review.
Background
James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow was born on July 10, 1820, in Charleston, South Carolina. His father was Garret De Bow, a native of New Jersey, once a prosperous merchant, but ruined shortly before his death. His mother was Mary Bridget Norton De Bow.
De Bow was left an orphan when still a lad and used his tiny patrimony to enter a mercantile house in Charleston. Here he saved his money with Spartan self-denial for seven years in order to attend the Cokesbury Institute, Abbeville District.
Education
De Bow entered the College of Charleston and resorted to many shifts to maintain himself. In his last year, he was in particularly desperate straits, his friends scarcely knowing how he lived. He graduated in 1843 at the head of his class.
Still existing on a crust, De Bow devoted an arduous year to the reading of the law, after which he was admitted to the bar. He soon saw that he would not succeed in this profession; he was a poor speaker, and his emaciated appearance was against him. The Southern Quarterly Review, published in Charleston, offered an escape. He began contributing philosophical and political essays to its columns and soon became its editor. His most notable article, "Oregon and the Oregon Question," appeared in July 1845; in this, he discountenanced the claims of France to the northwest country, but saw much in those of Britain, toward which country he counseled, against the popular clamor, moderation and a spirit of compromise. This article attracted notice abroad, being debated in the French Chamber of Deputies.
At the Memphis Convention, held the same year, De Bow was one of the secretaries. The convention considered principally projects of internal improvement in the South, and the extent to which the federal government should be expected to aid in their construction. This discussion of economic questions decided young De Bow to found a monthly magazine devoted to social and business matters, so, after Calhoun, Poinsett, and others had encouraged the venture, he left Charleston with "a diminutive capital and very slender baggage" for New Orleans as a more bustling commercial center. The South had supported literary journals poorly, and economic ones not at all, but De Bow believed he could succeed because the interests of the southern frontier were practical. Accordingly, he issued, in January 1846, the first number of the Commercial Review of the South and Southwest.
He had difficulty in getting contributors, there were almost no subscribers, and in a few months his capital was exhausted and the Review suspended (August 1847). Then matters began to mend. He came to the notice of Maunsel White, who, from a poor Irish immigrant, had risen in sugar planting and merchandise to wealth. He admired the young editor and loaned him money to resume publication, promising more should it be needed.
For a time De Bow and his assistant endured a struggle in which only youth could have survived. After working till far into the night, they slept on a mattress on the floor of a room given them by J. C. Morgan, the bookseller. De Bow said afterward that they rarely spent more than ten cents each for a day's food. Within two years, however, they had the largest circulation of any magazine published in the South; De Bow had paid his debts, moved his office to better quarters, and was able to eat steak and chops for the first time in his life. He soon had money enough to make a trip through New England, which resulted in added information for the Review.
When the University of Louisiana was organized at New Orleans, he advocated inclusion of a comprehensive course of economic and commercial instruction in its curriculum, outlined the subjects to be treated (recommending the works of Henry C. Carey with those of the English classical school) and persuaded his friend Maunsel White to subsidize the professorship of political economy.
De Bow was promptly appointed (1848) to the chair (probably the first of its kind in this country), but it was an empty honor, for he had no students and few listeners at his public lectures. Soon afterward he was made head of the new Louisiana Bureau of Statistics, and within a year compiled and presented to the legislature a report made up from returns to a brave questionnaire. The bureau went out of existence when the legislature failed to make a further appropriation. De Bow, bound to have the South systematic, was one of the founders of the Louisiana Historical Society, which dragged out a sickly life until merged with the Academy of Sciences.
The greater opportunity opened to him when he was appointed by President Pierce superintendent of the United States Census. He issued the seventh census, of 1850, and in 1854 the Senate printed his "Statistical View of the United States," a compendium of the larger work. De Bow in an introductory essay made important suggestions for the improvement of the census, particularly through the appointment of a permanent superintendent who should maintain a staff between decennial periods.
While bringing out the report of the census he continued to publish his Review, and when he quitted his government post in 1855 took to public lecturing. He presided at the commercial convention at Knoxville in 1857 and wrote on American subjects for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
He will be longest remembered for De Bow's Review, which occupied in the South and Southwest a place similar to that of Hunt's Merchants' Magazine in the country at large. The journal was always influential and had a part in bringing on the Civil War. His own articles appeared regularly and were marked by serious, if somewhat lengthy, deliberation. Beginning with the resolve not to engage in debate on the matters threatening to divide North and South he became, little by little, an outspoken and violent partisan. This was a natural consequence of his abiding admiration for Calhoun.
More interested than Calhoun in economic prosperity, however, he retained a measure of the nationalism which his preceptor abandoned.
He contributed importantly to the policies of the series of commercial conventions held in the South prior to the Civil War, particularly with respect to a transcontinental railroad through the South, direct trade between the South and Europe, and a canal through Central America. His economic advocacies, where practical and untinged with political pique, had a little constructive issue. In the main, he was a very vocal drifter with the tide which set toward secession.
During the Civil War, the Confederate government made him its chief agent for the purchase and sale of cotton. In the false flush of prosperity that came to the Southern commercial cities immediately after the war, he revived the Review, and at the same time was president of the Tennessee Pacific Railroad Company, a paper project which seemed to embody his old ambition of a transcontinental line through the South.
Achievements
James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow was one of the leading statisticians of his time, the most successful magazinist of the antebellum South, and an enlightened advocate of Southern progress in agriculture and industry. For twenty years "De Bow's Review" published important information on agriculture, commerce, manufactures, railroads; the editor argued for better schools, libraries, and other cultural institutions.
In 1866, he became the first president of the proposed Tennessee and Pacific Railroad, a business venture that he would not live to see fulfilled.
His most notable article was "Oregon and the Oregon Question."
De Bow was influenced by the writings of the Careys, felt that protective tariffs were often desirable, and did not wish to contract the field of federal operation in internal improvements. He worked for industry in the South but expected to see agriculture remain predominant in that section.
Although he was a nominal Democrat, he tried to keep the Review above politics.
Views
De Bow was a proslavery propagandist for Southern sectionalism. He believed that "the Negro was created essentially to be a slave, and finds his highest development and destiny in that condition."
Quotations:
"We have the broadest notions of our country; we cherish Maine and Louisiana as sisters; we have no jealousies of the North."
Personality
Though in his writings he took himself very seriously, he was genial in personal contacts.
Physical Characteristics:
De Bow had a great shock of hair standing in every direction, and a heavy moustache and beard. His nose was prominent, he had a long lower lip and an obstinate chin.
Connections
James De Bow was married first in 1844 to Carolina Poe of Georgetown, Virginia who died leaving no children. He married Martha Elizabeth Johns of Nashville in 1860 and was the father of James Dunwoody Brownson Jr., Benjamin Franklin, and Evalina De Bow.
