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

2. The Antebellum Merchant in Southern Society

41 2 The Antebellum Merchant in Southern Society The business activities that ordered the internal lives of merchant families also helped fashion their public identity. Buying, selling, and investing made merchant families conspicuous in the antebellum South. Every day merchants had to perform before an audience. Whether selling goods to a reluctant customer, mollifying a nervous creditor, or simply attending church, men and women in merchant families negotiated public roles determined by their trade. Moreover, the parts these commercial actors played in their communities fundamentally influenced how planters, farmers, and slaves perceived them. Successful merchants understood the sundry ways their public behavior could affect profits and made sure they and their families acted accordingly. Many white Southerners viewed merchants with suspicion. Newspaper editors, politicians, and others who shaped public opinion fostered ambivalent and often critical opinions of shopkeepers, factors, and lowly hucksters . These groups appeared to love money too much, and their sharp business practices violated community standards. Some feared that virtuous planters and farmers, lured by the merchants’ siren song of consumerism , would find themselves drowning in debt. Even more troubling was the prospect that other Southerners might embrace the servile behavior popularly associated with the commercial profession. The commonly held misconception that most merchants operating in the South hailed from Europe and the North—that they were “Jews” and “Yankees”—intensified the alarm. The editor of the Richmond Enquirer was hardly alone when he declared that excessive commercial activity threatened to become a “curse” upon the cotton kingdom. At the same time southern spokesmen had to acknowledge their region’s dependence upon the business acumen of its commercial classes.1 42 Becoming Bourgeois Antebellum Southerners obtained large quantities of goods from local merchants. Not surprisingly, such dependence on shopkeepers for foodstu ffs, medicine, and other necessities could produce tension in the community . Yeoman farmers needed and resented merchants at the same time. The same political leaders who denounced the influence of commercialism upon southern character often came to regard a lively retail trade as essential to the health of their towns and counties. Evidence suggests that a growing ambivalence prevailed where economic reality met cultural ideals. The competing image of the honest, thrifty merchant over against that of the grasping businessman represented part of the larger conflict between conservative and liberal capitalist thought in the antebellum economy. Cautious white Southerners regarded merchants as possibly dangerous interlopers in a stable and virtuous agrarian economy. Commercially oriented Southerners viewed the development of a growing mixed economy as a positive good and considered merchants essential to the financial and even the cultural development of their region. In the final analysis both positions had merit and revealed much about the larger truth of southern identity. Merchants’ professional lives and public identities centered around their role in selling merchandise to the public. While planters kept accounts of their crops, slaves, and other farming activities, shopkeepers tried to keep track of their daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly sales and expenditures. Dependent upon commerce for their livelihood, merchants naturally filled their public and personal writings with business information . Double-entry bookkeeping and other accounting techniques helped some merchants produce a rough estimate of their annual profits. Most retail and wholesale operators were more interested in, and better able to track, sales and stock accumulation than yearly profit. Figuring annual rates of capital depreciation and appreciation proved particularly troublesome . Many retail operators failed to distinguish between business capital and total assets or between business and household expenses. Southern merchants did understand that the crop season of cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice largely dictated their sales. December and January, when farmers had the money to purchase yearly supplies and perhaps a few Christmas treats for their families, saw the highest sales, while the summer months were typically dull times. In an effort to offset slow sales periods, credit strain, and the cost of transporting goods, merchants typically priced their goods at twice what they paid for them wholesale. Clearly prices, along The Antebellum Merchant in Southern Society 43 with geography, credit, and temperament, affected a merchant’s ability to turn a profit. Sellers and buyers dwelled upon these factors at length in their writings.2 Fluctuating sales often framed how merchants viewed themselves. Funding an expanding debt and a growing family, poor sales always brought “the blues” to Atlanta shopkeeper Samuel Richards. Of...