James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow

James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow , 1820-67, American editor and statistician, b. Charleston, S.C. He became (1844) editor of the Southern Quarterly Review. In 1846 he went to New Orleans, where he began publishing the monthly De Bow's Review. He was an ardent secessionist, and his magazine helped shape Southern opinion. Advocating a chair of political economy at the new Univ. of Louisiana, he was appointed to fill it. He was superintendent of the U.S. census of 1850, and his Statistical View of the United States (1854) was an abstract and interpretation of the census reports. He also wrote Encyclopaedia of Trade and Commerce of the United States (1853), Industrial Resources and Statistics of the Southwest (1853), The Southern States (1856), and many articles for the eighth edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. During the Civil War he was chief agent of the Confederate government in the purchase of cotton.

Bibliography: See biography by O. C. Skipper (1958).

De Bow, James Dunwoody Brownson (1820–67), born at Charleston, first won prominence as editor of the Southern Quarterly Review, which he left to found his own monthly, De Bow's Review (1846–80), issued with differing titles from New Orleans, Columbia, Nashville, and Washington. Mainly written by the editor, the magazine was influential in molding Southern opinion in antebellum days, through its violently partisan championing of Calhoun, the protective tariff, and slavery. After the Civil War, it was sympathetic to the Reconstruction. De Bow's Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States (3 vols., 1853) reprints important articles from the Review.