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Here is the sixth and final volume in James W. Hagy's series of transcriptions taken from city directories and censuses for the ante bellum city of Charleston, South Carolina (see also Items 9134, 9135, 9185, 9187, and 9338). The five previous books in the series encompassed twenty-seven separate city directories or censuses and spanned the period 1782-1855, with interruptions. Mr. Hagy's new volume is drawn from the city directories of 1859 and 1860, with supporting information taken from the special census undertaken by the Charleston City Council in 1861 for the purpose of apportioning aldermen to the city's wards. As in prior volumes, Mr. Hagy has arranged the names of the citizens from each directory in alphabetical order, along with their occupation and address. Also provided is some background information on the publisher of the directory or circumstances surrounding its publication. For example, W. Eugene Fersley, the publisher of the 1860 directory and sensitive to the incendiary climate in Charleston at that time, was careful to state that " . . . no Northern men, either as printers or otherwise, have had or have any connection with this publication." In the case of the 1860 directory Mr. Hagy was also able to tabulate the number of business establishments in Charleston from business directories at the front of the volume. The 1859 directory contains references to over 7,000 persons and its 1860 counterpart nearly 8,000. Members of Charleston's sizeable free black population are indicated by the abbreviation f.p.c. (free person of color). While the compiler did not transcribe the 1861 city census he has extracted much of its statistical summary. In addition, for use in pinpointing an individual's residence or ascertaining the racial makeup of Charleston neighborhoods, there is an alphabetical list of Charleston streets taken from the 1861 census, indicating each street's location and number of residents, whether whites, free blacks, or slaves.

On the Eve of the Civil War is the second longest volume in this valuable series and a fitting close to one scholar's efforts to identify the entire population of an ante bellum southern city and demonstrate how it changed over more than a half-century.