De Bow, James Dunwoody Brownson [key], 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.
See biography by O. C. Skipper (1958).
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