In Savannah's Midnight Hour, historian Lisa L. Denmark considers the economic history of a city: nineteenth-century Savannah, Georgia. By tracing the ways in which a select group of men, namely, boosters (civically minded elites) and politicians, worked to ensure that Savannah would be fit for investment, Denmark shows that the city's history can be viewed through the lens of economic development. Moving chronologically from the colonial era to the 1880s, she interrogates how a coterie of elected officials and businessmen in Savannah, particularly between the 1820s and 1880s, attempted to leverage their economic relationships to make the city attractive to investors. With the goal of building Savannah into a premier port city, city leaders supported risky financial decisions to catapult the city into economic competition with other southern cities such as New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston. Ultimately, Savannah's Midnight Hour explores the relationship between risk and municipal debt, public improvement and economic expansion.
Other scholars have situated the volatility of Savannah's nineteenth-century economy within post–Civil War financial crises and the yellow fever epidemic of 1876. Denmark offers another explanation. She proposes that the instability caused by the Civil War was not to blame for the city's economic problems; instead, it was the overconfidence of boosters and administrators who gambled with Savannah's economic future. Denmark, therefore, argues that Savannah's economic plights were triggered by “decades of seemingly rational, human financial decisions,” mirroring other American cities in the nineteenth century (p. 3). Yet, despite the generations of financial turbulence, Denmark demonstrates that Savannah survived the economic tumultuousness and emerged in the 1880s as a city on the verge of an economic boom.
Starting in the colonial era with Savannah's founding in 1733, Denmark explores the ways in which colonial administrators sought to move the city from an economic satellite of Charleston to an economic powerhouse in its own right. Politicians, supported by other civic and business leaders, continued through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to prioritize internal improvement projects as a way to lure commercial traffic and investment down the eastern seaboard to Georgia's premier port city. But this economic mission advanced in fits and starts. By the antebellum era, Savannah was a city on the brink of default, under the constant threat of bankruptcy owing to financial overleveraging by city administrators. Denmark shows that Savannah had the opportunity to eclipse Charleston, its neighbor to the north, in the 1820s, but risky investments made by politicians attempting to moonlight as savvy financiers almost undermined the city's economic prospects. The promise of boosting Savannah to regional economic prominence through investment in railroads and improving the city's infrastructure lured civic-minded elites to work with politicians on internal improvement projects. While these investments yielded tangible results in some cases, as with the Central Railroad and the Atlantic and Gulf Railroad, for example, other projects stretched the city's already lean tax revenue to untenable levels.
One of the major strengths of Savannah's Midnight Hour is the way in which Denmark interrogates the relationship between Savannah city administrators’ investment in public works projects and the increased debt load that these projects required. Savannah boasted a drainage system that improved health conditions of city residents, a renovated harbor, and an alluring marketplace by the end of the 1870s, yet these city improvements ultimately overburdened the city's coffers. Denmark argues, “Unfortunately for Savannah, the decision to undertake expensive projects with limited budgets proved doubly detrimental.” The projects, undertaken to entice capitalists and investors, ultimately “put the city treasury deeper in debt” (p. 119).
But Denmark does not place all of the blame on the boosters, city officials, or even financial institutions that were extending lines of credit to the city. During the 1860s and 1870s, the unpredictability of the postbellum economy proved too much for the city to bear. The Panic of 1873 overwhelmed Savannah's politicians, forcing them to make difficult choices about how to deal with expanding deficits. While city officials sought to bring in capital to make Savannah attractive to investors, the reality was that the city's indebtedness continued to grow. Such economic fears were made worse by financial collapse in 1873. Though by the 1880s, Savannah emerged from the post-1873 fracas economically stronger than it had been in the previous decades, according to Denmark, the city's debt crisis cast a long shadow on how administrators approached municipal debt and internal improvements into the future.
Though Savannah's Midnight Hour makes a strong claim for situating the city within the broader history of American political economy in the nineteenth century, there are topics that could be developed further. Though this book is not a labor history of the workers who helped fulfill the improvement dreams of Savannah's boosters and administrators, a more robust discussion of the laborers would be been a welcome perspective on how the landscape of labor evolved. Specifically, how did the workers—in particular, enslaved laborers during the period of slavery and free African Americans in the postbellum era—help to fulfill goals of the investors, elites, aldermen, and mayors? If events such as the Civil War and even the yellow fever epidemic of 1876 influenced the construction of Savannah's infrastructure, how did these events affect the city's workers? Moreover, what happened to Savannah's economy during war? Though Denmark's argument hinges on the Civil War as a pivotal era of economic change, there's more to be interrogated about the economic impact of wartime Savannah, not merely antebellum and postbellum Savannah.
Overall, this book offers a unique analysis of Savannah through the lens of the politics of municipal finance. Business historians, in particular, will be interested in how Denmark weaves the political with the economic. Denmark explores how an American city, and the boosters and administrators within it, jockeyed for political power during a period of both economic instability and economic promise.
