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1 Introduction In the summer of 1862 Jorantha Semmes wrote a letter expressing her war weariness to her husband Benedict Semmes, a Confederate officer . Responsible for the care of their five children in Federally occupied Memphis, Tennessee, Semmes told her husband, “I am tired of this separation .” His absence had left her bereft of “all gaiety of heart.” Caring for the children helped occupy Jorantha’s mind during the day, but she missed her “better half” at night when “it is so lonely.”1 Jorantha Semmes increasingly questioned the romantic militarism of the Civil War. Others, we know, shared this sentiment. Historians have noted that the trials of war eroded the patriotism of many southern women. Semmes’s anxiety over the fate of her family and the Confederate cause seems to conform to this pattern.2 What distinguishes Semmes’s writing from that of other educated southern women is its commercial tone. The couple’s letters reflect the concerns of their shared occupation, the mercantile trade. Benedict Semmes established his Memphis store shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. His absence during the conflict forced Jorantha to assume responsibility for the store’s operation, and their correspondence reveals her business skills. In June 1862 she wrote her husband that under Yankee occupation the boatloads of provisions arriving daily in the Mississippi River port sold “like lightning for specie.” The money she made selling what stock remained from the store, combined with the rent she collected from boarders, led her to inquire whether he might need five hundred dollars sent to him. As a savvy wife and mother in a mercantile family, Jorantha also suggested that the family’s earnings in Memphis should be invested in “a land purchase instead of letting it be idle.” More than a year later her continued confidence in business matters is obvious as she wrote her husband that the “terms” of her recent business transactions “are such as you would approve.” In 1864, Benedict openly acknowledged her acumen in financial matters when he asked her about collecting some debts: “I would like to have your own views, for you sometimes see things clearer than I.” 2 Becoming Bourgeois This commercial discourse is not a historical aberration; rather it is the result of a southern merchant culture that experienced profound change during the Civil War. The war at once destroyed the southern merchant’s financial world and opened new business opportunities in what would one day be termed a “New South.”3 The ideology of antebellum and Confederate merchants contained a series of unresolved contradictions. These merchants embraced the South but were not of the South. They traded, haggled, and invested their wealth in a slaveholding South where a planter elite created an agrarian society seemingly hostile to industry and urbanization. At a time when most Southerners rarely traveled outside their surrounding environs, merchants annually sallied forth on buying junkets that took them to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. While most southern whites remained unlettered, merchant families frequently achieved a level of education rivaled by only the planter elite. These and other cultural differences created a gulf between merchant families and their southern neighbors that both sides recognized. The unique culture of the southern merchant family helps explain Jorantha Semmes’s ability to operate her husband’s store during the Civil War.4 The skills merchants needed in order to succeed in the South also left them open to attack. Criticized as “cunning fellows” who differed little from Yankee shopkeepers, southern merchants frequently found themselves defending their trade. Remarking on their sharp trading practices and undeserved social prominence, critics frequently charged merchants with gross opportunism. Characterizing his antebellum business career, Atlanta merchant Sidney Root offered the southern merchant’s typical defense to such accusations when he declared, “I never loved money for its own sake.” The Janus-faced southern merchant, at once the shrewd entrepreneur and obsequious apologist, is an image commonly found in antebellum southern culture; it appears even within the personal correspondence of the merchant community itself. Despite the convention of the storekeeper as a “southern Yankee,” these merchants’ deeply held Christian sensibility, joined with their support for slavery, made them distinctly southern.5 The present work investigates the culture of this segment of southern antebellum and Confederate society. It focuses on what historians have come to call the “middling sort,” that group falling between the mass of yeoman farmers and the planter class that...

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