Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865

Conclusion: Merchant Culture in the Slave South and Beyond

203 Conclusion Merchant Culture in the Slave South and Beyond It is sad to think how things are changing. In another generation or two, this beautiful country of ours will have lost its distinctive civilization and become no better than a nation of Yankee shopkeepers. —Eliza Frances Andrews, July 27, 1865 The appearance of a purely trading class will have of itself no revolutionary significance; . . . its rise will exert a much less fundamental influence on the economic pattern of society than will the appearance of a class of capitalists whose fortunes are intimately linked with industry; . . . while a ruling class, whether of slaveowners or feudal lords, may take to trading or enter into a close alliance with traders, a merchant class . . . is unlikely to strive to become a dominant class in quite that radical and exclusive sense. —Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism BecomingBourgeois:MerchantCultureintheSouth,1820–1865hasinvestigated two related questions in the history of the antebellum and Confederate South. First, what identities and roles did merchants embrace in that society ? Second, what do the activities and popular images of the merchant class reveal about the nature of southern society as a whole? Answering the first question required piecing together disparate fragments that were left behind by the overlooked men and women of the merchant class. What emerges from the historical record are the stories of people who shared a cosmopolitan worldview that emphasized a strong commitment to liberal capitalism, Whig politics, close family ties, a Protestant work ethic, and white supremacy. These findings suggest areas for further investigation . Recent scholarship on the American middle class in the nine- 204 Becoming Bourgeois teenth century has advanced our knowledge of this surprisingly neglected group, but much work, particularly in southern archives, remains to be done. Examining merchant culture and how that culture was perceived by outsiders helps advance our understanding of the nineteenth-century South in general. The complex nature of the slave South and its political economy, the essence of my second question, has for decades elicited con- flicting interpretations from historians.1 The image of an agrarian, economically underdeveloped, even anticapitalist South has long been a staple in American thought. John Taylor of Caroline celebrated it, Hinton Rowan Helper deplored it, and H. L. Mencken jeered it. Historians have long debated the degree to which capitalism penetrated the slave South. During the past forty years, perhaps the historian with the most to say on the point has been Eugene Genovese. Beginning with his first study, The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), and further developing his theories in several other of his influential works, Genovese has maintained that the hegemonic class in the antebellum South, the slaveholders, were fundamentally noncommercial, perhaps even acommercial; they were rarely interested in money for its own sake; and they participated in a slave system that proved unprofitable for individual owners as well as for the southern economy as a whole. Furthermore, the paternalism that Genovese sees as defining the master-slave relationship assaulted the slave’s personality while allowing many of them an overlooked measure of cultural breathing space. Based in part upon the theoretical work of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Maurice Dobb, and others, Genovese’s interpretation of the slave South has won many supporters within the historical profession. Others have found his argument less convincing. A number of historians and economists—Robert W. Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman, and James Oakes being among the most vocal— have found slaveholders to have been profit-driven capitalists much like any businessman in Europe or the northern United States. Over the years numerous academics, many bringing fresh insight, have weighed in on this question. The preponderance of studies on the planter class, however, have deflected scholarly attention from those other segments of the white population that also influenced the southern economy.2 Examining the political economy of the slave South through the historical prism of the planter class makes sense. After all, they more than anyone else ruled the “Cotton Kingdom.” Nevertheless, as I have attempted to illustrate, the merchant class proved to be instrumental “retainers” in this Conclusion 205 imagined realm. Over time these commercial servants exerted ever greater influence, until the economic transformation occurring in the antebellum South—greatly hastened by the Civil War—made businessmen the masters in the New South. Their retail operations, connections to northern wholesale firms, and business...