Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era by Jennifer L. Goloboy (review)

Jennifer L. Goloboy seeks to reevaluate the history of the American middle class by exploring how market forces defined middle-class identity. In doing so, Goloboy challenges the vision of the middle class that has dominated historical scholarship. She notes that historians have typically painted the middle class as northern, as rooted in progressive social causes and Protestant morality, as characterized by an ethic of self-restraint, and as emerging more or less fully fledged in the 1830s. To counter this image, Goloboy offers a portrait of Charleston, South Carolina, merchants as exemplars of a middle-class identity that began to emerge as early as the late colonial era and underwent several periods of change in response to market forces. "To be middle class," she argues, "was to be possessed of the values that enabled survival in the market economy, and these values shifted under external pressure" (pp. 4–5).

Goloboy begins her story with a colonial generation of Charleston merchants whose success depended on their ability to cultivate personal relationships with business partners. They fostered these relationships by demonstrating deference to hierarchy alongside expert knowledge of business. Analyzing the correspondence of these men, Goloboy argues that they worked to embody "middle-class values such as diligence, deference, and cosmopolitanism" (p. 30). But the Revolution and its aftermath wreaked havoc on this middle-class ethic of hard work, discipline, and deference. In the midst of economic tumult, conservative business practices that had served merchants well led to financial ruin, while risky practices were richly rewarded. New opportunities in the postwar years raised the fortunes of men who had previously been at the margins of trade and created a new generation of merchants who valued rashness, ruthlessness, and a rather coarse and exuberant masculinity. Moreover, as political power became increasingly accessible to men of the middle class in the aftermath of the Revolution, these merchants sought political clout as well, thus definitively separating themselves from the colonial generation of merchants who had studiously kept their place in the social hierarchy.

As Goloboy argues, this new version of the middle class "should lead us to question our assumptions about the inherent progressivism, morality, and, above all, niceness of middle-class culture" (p. 54). In fact, as Goloboy shows, a middle class defined by "niceness" only evolved in the years after the War of 1812. Trade declined precipitously during this conflict and with it the reputation of the merchant class, which was increasingly impugned as aggressive, dishonest, and uncouth. Consequently, Goloboy argues, in the aftermath of the war, merchants self-consciously developed a new image intended to restore their social standing. As a result, "the ideal antebellum businessman was professional, restrained, and self-consciously moral," thus aligning him with the values historians have most frequently associated with the nineteenth-century middle class (p. 122).

Goloboy's study offers an important challenge to the vision of a static middle-class identity that has emerged from scholarship on the antebellum North. Instead, she argues that we should view the middle class as dynamic and rapidly evolving in response to market forces. However, Goloboy's narrative also leaves some lingering questions; perhaps most important is the question of whether this rapidly evolving middle-class identity was uniquely southern (or even Charlestonian) or reflected national trends. Goloboy ties her arguments to specific market changes in Charleston and South Carolina, leaving the reader to wonder whether the evolution of Charleston's merchants from deferential, to rash, to moral can be connected to broader market forces and to a larger regional or national middle-class culture. Nevertheless, Goloboy's work raises important questions and offers a strong case for the importance of examining middle-class identity through the lens of the market.