Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gregg Kimball's book is a brilliant and beautifully crafted study of the complex relationship among the concept of place, the construction of cultural identity, and, ultimately, the political choices people make. The setting for Kimball's study is antebellum Richmond, Virginia, from 1840 through the outbreak of the Civil War. The cultural identities Kimball reconstructs are those of four distinct groups of Richmonders: merchants and their families, members (free blacks and slaves) of the First African Baptist Church, ironworkers employed at Tredegar Iron Works, and a cross section of the city's militia units. As the secession crisis mounted and war appeared inevitable, the political choices these Richmonders confronted—whether to support the newly born Confederacy or remain loyal to the Union—would depend on how these "different groups of residents understood their world" (p. xv) and their place in it.

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As the title suggests, Richmond defied easy classification; Kimball, however, is up to the task as he deftly sketches the city's dual persona in the first section of the book. Richmond's American identity, he argues, was reflected in a built environment that promoted the city as "heir to the political heritage of the Founding Fathers" (p. 4). This image, which first took shape in the late eighteenth century with the completion of the state capital building designed by Thomas Jefferson and the installation of the nation's first sculpture of George Washington, was woven into the fabric of public life and reached its zenith in 1858. That year, not only was a second monument to Washington erected in Capitol Square, along with statues of Jefferson and Patrick Henry, but city fathers also hosted a series of public events to mark the reburial of James Monroe's remains from their New York resting place to Hollywood Cemetery. (Kimball explains that this Richmond showcase was also part of a "larger American movement" that "idealized rural landscapes" within an urban setting; p. 38.)

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