that lies before the rising generation of Southern historical scholars, neither he nor the general reader should forget the gratitude due to the editor, the various writers and the publishers of this volume for first giving the public in an attractive form adequate proof of the interest and charm attaching to the towns of the _ante-bellum_ South. In more than one important series of books relating to our national history the South is but scantily represented, but such a reproach cannot attach to this series of American Historic Towns. For weal or woe the South is now an integral part of the nation, and the attractive and inspiring, no less than the warning features of its history, should be a portion of the intellectual inheritance of every American. FOOTNOTES: [1] The later series of conventions is well described by Mr. Edward Ingle in his interesting and valuable volume, based mainly upon magazine and newspaper research, entitled _Southern Sidelights_ (pp. 220-261). Mr. Ingle pays but slight attention to the earlier series, which seems nowhere to have been fully described. [2] Schultz was a party for years to a very important case known as “John W. Yarborough and others _vs._ The Bank of the State of Georgia,” etc., for documents relating to which I am indebted to William K. Miller, Esq., of the Augusta bar. The interesting career of the man became known to me some years since through researches undertaken in the early volumes of the Edgefield (S. C.) _Advertiser_. [Illustration] HISTORIC TOWNS OF THE SOUTHERN STATES BALTIMORE THE MONUMENTAL CITY BY ST. GEORGE L. SIOUSSAT For many a year after the weary passengers of the _Ark_ and the _Dove_ had disembarked at St. Mary’s, there to make the first settlement under the proprietary government of the Lords Baltimore, the rivers of Maryland ran, like Mr. George Alfred Townsend’s Rappahannock, “All townless from the mountains to the sea.” The Chesapeake and its almost numberless tributaries made every plantation accessible to shipping, and so precluded that concentration of trade and population at points of vantage which is the essential condition of municipal growth. As Charles Calvert, third Baron Baltimore, wrote, in 1678: