Military Education and Social Mobility in the Late Antebellum South

May/June 2008 Historically Speaking 43 switchin' sides and standin' up for things they believe in," Haggard sang of the protesters, "but when they're runnin' down my country, hoss, they're walkin ' on the fightin' side of me." Invited to die White House by President Richard Nixon, the singer refused , saying he had not written a political song. If dissenters wanted to change the country, he proclaimed , they should help to make it better. While Merle Haggard offers a fitting representation of populist sensibilities, performers from Tammy Wynette and Lynyrd Skynyrd to Creedence Clearwater, Paul Simon,John Prine, Randy Newman, and die early Bruce Springsteen approached the life of ordinary people with only rare political references. Portraits of everyday existence in subsequent works of literature, theater, comic books, television, and movies provide additional illustrations. An appreciation of America's populist culture, whatever its source or political content, may offers an avenue to social healing and reconcilation in a society increasingly paralyzed by political division and social acrimony . DavidA. Horowit^ isprofessor of history atPortkndState University and the author of The People 's Voice: A Populist Cultural History of Modern America (Sloan, 2008). Portions of this essay were delivered as theAnnualDavid W. Noble American Studies Lecture at the University of Minnesota , April26, 2006. Military Education and Social Mobility in the Late Antebellum South* Jennifer R. Green Twenty-one-year-old William Gordon , a senior at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), was not well-liked among his peers. As the cadet captain, the highest-ranking student officer , he had fights with at least diree other young men. In 1852, the expulsion of a cadet for challenging Gordon's authority and Gordon's reaction to the situation led his peers to deny him their "kindly feelings and . . . mutual confidence and esteem ." Graduating fourth in his class, Gordon endured his classmates' ostracism because a VMI diploma helped his prospects more than the respect of his peers did. His father was described as a blacksmidi, one of the few skilled tradesmen who sent a son into military schooling . Without education, young men such as Gordon probably would have had little choice but to remain in a low social position . With education, however, cadets like Gordon could merge into and sustain die developing southern middle class. Military school offered Gordon the vocational training to enter his first career as a civil engineer and his second as a military educator during the Civil War.1 By the outbreak of war in 1861, more than 11,000 young men similar to Gordon enrolled in die twelve state military academies in the South, as well as more than seventy private ones. Together, VMI and other institutions educated a generation, or possibly two, of the growing southern middle class. The rise of southern military education oc- * Copyright © 2008 byJennifer R. Green, from the book Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South, to be published by Cambridge University Press in August 2008. Reprinted with permission . The Citadel cadets, of Charleston, South Carolina, 1 861 , from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [re production number, LC-USZ62-1 29739]. curred in the context of increasing sectional tensions preceding the Civil War, and this timing certainly contributed to the institutions' success and informed the students who passed through their gates. Yet military schools also participated in the modernization of the Old Soudi; they were more culturally and socially significant and progressive than their current image would suggest. Indeed, die study of southern military education provides an excellent window into die makeup and priorities of the southern middle class diat emerged in the late antebellum years. Military education was one location for the development of the middle class as both a regional and a national group. Middle -class Soudierners mirrored their northern counterparts in leveraging education to develop professional occupations, social stability, and what are often identified as bourgeois values; as they accomplished these things, they attempted to redefine the soudiern criteria for upward mobility to make those criteria more attainable for men of their standing. The complex work of defining the emerging southern middle class has begun but is far from complete. This...