Becoming bourgeois: merchant culture in the South, 1820-1865

Abstract

Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865. By Frank J. Byrne. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Pp. 308. Acknowledgments, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00.) Frank J. Byrne's ground-breaking study of merchants in the antebellum South rests on a question of such good sense one can only marvel why it has not been asked before. Why, he wonders, have historians tried to gauge the influence of liberal capitalism in the slave South by studying planters? In Becoming Bourgeois, Byrne suggests that it makes better sense to study merchants to find the answer, but it is hardly a simple one. Byrne's book is ambitious, suggestive, and based on careful work in scores of manuscript collections across the region. Drawing on a long and rich tradition of historiography ranging from U. B. Phillips to Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese to Jonathan Wells, Byrne's book portrays the Old South as a hybrid system based on slave relations of production and yet deeply embedded in the world market. His contribution is to show that merchant families literally embodied this hybridity; they combined a identity with a bourgeois world view. Their sympathy for both systems affected not only their commercial lives, but also their family relations. As middling people who stood between liberal capitalist and traditional agrarian values, merchants were not yet a class, but were something approaching a class with distinct interests (p. 3). Their lives were riven with contradictions. Dependence on the market in daily commercial transactions, devotion to education, and cosmopolitanism stemming from their frequent buying trips to northeastern cities set them apart from their neighbors and made them sympathetic in some degree with their northern peers. Nevertheless, Byrne concludes, their daily commercial transactions did not ultimately compromise their identification with the South. In the end, slavery made all the difference. The patriarchal relations of slavery (and evangelical Protestantism) determined that they would identify deeply with the South, even if their attachment to the region would ebb and flow over the course of the antebellum period (p. 120). The book is divided broadly into two sections. The first examines the antebellum period, while the second stretches from 1861 to 1865. Constituting almost 8 percent of the region's population before the war, merchant families were overwhelmingly southern born. About one quarter of them owned slaves. Unlike their neighbors, their lives were built on credit, debt, trade, and relations with their employees, in short, the stuff of the marketplace and its liberal capitalist values. These values were powerful enough to shape the ways members of these families related to one another. Yet the marketplace was a distinctly southern one, Byrne argues, in which planters retained the majority of social capital. Merchants were left with a tenuous status that was disproportionate to their economic weight. The divided lives of merchant families continued during the war. Byrne's extensive archival research allows him to follow people through secession and the early years of the war and describe their experiences in detail. Although merchants did not experience the war significantly differently than their neighbors, Byrne does find that few commercial families counted among the states' rights radicals. Nor did they fill the ranks of the Confederate government, which was dominated by lawyers and planters. In the end, many joined the army. Not surprisingly, they often became quartermasters or engaged in speculation and trade between battles. Those merchants who stayed in business were hammered by Confederate government policy during the war. …