Frederick Law Olmsted, the northerner who wrote comprehensively
about his travels in the South, had no southern counterpart. But
there were thousands of southerners -- planters, merchants,
bankers, students, housewives, writers, and politicians -- who
traveled extensively in the North and who recorded their
impressions in letters to their families, in articles for the local
press, and in the few books they wrote.
In A Southern Odyssey the distinguished historian John Hope
Franklin canvasses the entire field of southern travel and analyzes
the travelers and their accounts of what they saw in the North.
Many went out of sheer curiosity. Others went on business, to get
an education, to make purchases for the store and home, to attend
religious or political conventions, or to instruct northerners
about the superior qualities of the southern way of life and warn
them of the dangers of unbridled abolitionist attacks.
The more they went, the more they doubted the wisdom of spending
money among their enemies. But they continued to go, even against
their own advice to fellow southerners, and some tarried until the
attack on Fort Sumter.
Concentrating as it does on the human side of North-South
relations during the antebellum years, A Southern Odyssey
represents a fresh and imaginative approach to a long overlooked
chapter in southern history. It is also a handsome book, with
twenty illustrations that comprise "An Album of Southern
Travel."
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