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

3. The Merchant Family in the Antebellum South

77 3 The Merchant Family in the Antebellum South The family was the center of southern merchant culture. The ties between husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister provided the ultimate foundation for merchant values. While the political economy of the antebellum South circumscribed merchant culture, family defined it. Household relations affirmed the bourgeois and conservative ideals that combined to distinguish merchants from the mass of southern society. The dynamics of all nineteenth-century white families incorporated varying degrees of affection, materialism, paternalism, and racism, but the peculiar blend of these qualities within the merchant family made it unique. The families of neighboring yeoman farmers sought independence, political standing, and growing market return from the land’s bounty. The planter family achieved great financial rewards and political prestige from the cotton economy of the slave South. The merchant family not only exhibited characteristics similar to those of both the yeoman and planter classes; its values spanned the growing sectional divide of antebellum America.1 Men and women in merchant families embraced a variety of bourgeois and conservative cultural ideals. Over the course of the antebellum period their households became more emotionally inward-looking than those of their southern neighbors. Well-read parents exposed their children to northern magazines and European literature before sending them to private academies or tutors. This emphasis upon education helped demarcate a cultural boundary between merchant families and most other white Southerners outside the planter class. Education and the dictates of the mercantile trade also transformed marital relations. Husbands and wives experienced the separate spheres of home and work long before most antebellum Southerners did. Few families lived adjacent to their store, and the presence of a merchant’s wife behind the counter, although resorted to on 78 Becoming Bourgeois occasion, provoked comment. Merchant households saw their economic self-sufficiency decline as wives and children produced fewer goods in the home. The same process began to recast the antebellum planter family. The marital ideal for the majority of men and women in both classes seems to have been what historians have called the “companionate marriage .” As described by Jane Turner Censer, within such relationships “husbands and wives should be linked by mutual attraction and should provide affectionate support for each other while rearing a family.” This is not to suggest that men in planter or merchant families surrendered control in a rush to adopt northern gender roles. Rather they were “refining their understanding of domestic relations.” Women and slaves still held inferior social positions, but the status of the former was in flux, particularly within merchant families. The type of paternalism that Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has asserted defined gender relations in planter families, characterized in part by a “peculiar combination of hierarchically sanctioned male dominance in the household and bourgeois egalitarianism among men in the public sphere,” was breaking down in merchant households by the late antebellum period. Whether one is inclined, like Fox-Genovese, to view the notion of companionate marriage in the Old South as mere “bourgeois rhetoric” or is willing to accept the persuasive arguments made by Anya Jabour, Jane Turner Censer, and other historians that the changes in planter marriages were more substantive, there can be no question that domestic relations in merchant families of the antebellum South were evolving into something more akin to those found in northern homes. By the 1840s one driving force for this change was the expansion of the market economy. Some historians contend, however , that the market economy made a more superficial impression on the planter household. Indeed, many wealthy planters feared the social effect upon southern communities of unrestrained commercial relations. Far from feeling threatened, merchant families attempted to improve their material and intellectual lives by consuming the growing abundance of goods and ideas available in mid-nineteenth-century America. The unique role of merchant families as brokers and consumers of this material culture influenced directly the personal relationships within them.2 Economic ties to such commercial cities as Philadelphia and New York allowed merchant families to wear French fashions, read the latest English novels, and decorate their homes with goods produced in northern shops. When not spending store profits on family consumption, merchants The Merchant Family in the Antebellum South 79 invested their money and accumulated capital. These activities seem to correspond with the intellectual mores and liberal capitalist...