"De Bow's Review is the greatest remnant of the Old South, the greatest exponent of the spirit that informed its people, the greatest exemplar of the hopes that filled its prophets and its seers." These are the extravagant words used by a writer for the New Orleans Times Democrat to describe the magazine founded in 1846 by James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow and edited by him until his death in 1867. But these words reflect, accurately enough, the regard Southerners felt for the magazine and its owner, who had spoken out for the region of his birth in its most difficult moments.

De Bow achieved his fame through that magazine, which he described as "the most flourishing periodical in the South" from 1849 to 1862. He was willing, he wrote in 1864, "to take his place in the history of the times upon the record of those fifteen years of toil and labor...