"S" is for Southern Quarterly Review

"S" is for Southern Quarterly Review. The Southern Quarterly Review (SQR) originated in New Orleans in January 1842, but moved to Charleston later that year. It remained there until 1854 when it moved to Baltimore. A year later it returned to South Carolina where it was published in Columbia in 1856 and 1857. The SQR had the advantage of being not a literary magazine, but rather a magazine open to any branch of knowledge. It also had experienced editors in Daniel K. Whitaker (a transplanted New Englander) and South Carolina’s man of letters William Gilmore Simms. No magazine sketched better the idea of the southern gentleman with his “polished manners” and “moral excellences.” More than any other periodical, the Southern Quarterly Review sought to define the incompatibilities that would necessitate the South’s becoming a separate nation.