The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (review)

Abstract

The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861. By Jonathan Daniel Wells. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xv, 321. Illustrations. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $22.50.)Probably because historians have not been sure that it even existed, the antebellum southern middle class is a comparatively unexamined subject. Eugene Genovese took pains to explore the position of nonslaveholding whites within his vision of southern society. James Oakes placed middling slaveowners at the center of his interpretation of the antebellum South. But until Jonathan Wells, we have not had a book-length study of the southern middle class as a class-a group with a sense of its own values, function, membership, and relations vis-a-vis other groups in society. Given that novelty, it is refreshing to find that most of his arguments about the significance of middling southerners are well documented and sensible, even restrained. Wells makes no claim to have written the definitive study of this underresearched group. While The Origins of the Southern Middle Class makes a number of important claims, some of which historians will find controversial, it is likely that it will also prove significant for stimulating further research.Wells argues that historians have underestimated the significance of the middle class in influencing the South's culture, social life, and economy. However, he does not dispute the conventional wisdom, which maintains that planters dominated most aspects of southern public life. In the six decades prior to the Civil War, the middle class developed as a counterpoint to planting interests. In some respects they saw eye to eye: middling southerners did not oppose slavery on any grounds, and the institution was central to their vision of a modern, progressive, and economically dynamic South. But in other ways the views of planters and middling folk diverged. Large slaveowners seemed anti-intellectual, parochial, self-indulgent, and lacking in vision. Working-class whites fared no better; middling people saw little common ground and much conflict between themselves and their social inferiors.Though Michael O'Brien, in Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 (2004), offers a more comprehensive assessment of cultural connections between the North and South, Wells demonstrates the large debt that the southern middle class owed to its northern progenitor. Southerners devoured northern books and magazines, especially those that promulgated middle-class ideas about work, piety, and gender roles. And while regional periodicals mostly have received attention for their role in developing southern self-consciousness, Wells stresses how they encouraged cultural comity. Inter sectional travel and migration also promoted relations between the southern and northern middle classes. Slavery did not prevent northerners from exploiting economic opportunities in the South; they migrated to the slave regions by the thousands in pursuit of the main chance. Southerners reciprocated. Students and leisure travelers flocked to the North in the decades before secession. Travelers noted sectional differences as a matter of course, but seldom interpreted these quirks as anything more than variations on a national theme. The southern middle class shared with its northern variant an interest in developing and celebrating an American, rather than a narrowly sectional, identity.Based in part on their familiarity with northern culture, middling southerners fashioned their own middle-class identity. …