ABSTRACT
The Southern Quarterly Review (SQR), founded in 1842 in New Orleans, was the most openly southern of the major antebellum periodicals until its closing in 1857. It was founded by Daniel Kimball Whitaker and edited by several important southern ideologues including George Frederick Holmes, James D. B. DeBow, John Milton Clapp, William Gilmore Simms and James Henley Thorn-well. The SQR at its founding claimed that its editorial perspective would maintain 'the interests of the South as a distinct branch of the American Confederacy'. However, its interpretation of foreign events, as illustrated in this case, evoked values ascribable to the whole country, not only to the South. 'The American people are the only people that have yet appeared upon the stage of the world in the condition to organize deliberately into an harmonious and enduring system'. Northern periodicals assessing Europe in the mid-nineteenth century tended to emphasize American national influence abroad.
