The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1860 (review)

The South had a middle class! Most discussions of the antebellum South focus on slavery, plantation owners, or sometimes even the small yeoman farmers, to understand the backwardness of Southern society in contrast to a dynamic middle class in the North dedicated to hard work, delayed gratification, temperance, industry, and reform. Wells argues that the South developed an articulate middle class of business professionals who shared most of the same values as their northern cousins—with one important caveat: The southern middle class remained dedicated to the institution of slavery.

Wells begins with a discussion of how the South and the North shared an intellectual world through travel and literature. The travel section of this analysis depends largely on anecdotal evidence showing how both northerners and southerners traveled in each others' regions. When Wells turns to a discussion of literature, he uses anecdotal, with some quantitative, evidence to demonstrate the existence of a national audience for the literature of both regions, although southerners were more heavily dependent on the North than northerners were on the South. Neither chapter in this section, however, proves the existence of a southern middle class, though both show an active cultural exchange that forms the background for the next two sections.

Part two is a cultural portrait of the signposts of the nineteenth-century middle class: religion, reform, voluntary associations, gender roles, and the family. Like the first section, it has a mix of anecdotal and quantitative evidence. Wells argues that, similar to their northern counterparts, middle-class southerners were interested in a respectable revival that led to a call for reform. In particular, the southern middle class developed a critique of the plantation gentry's code of honor and unsuccessfully attacked dueling. The southern middle class had a better record in pushing educational reform, even if public education continued to trail northern efforts. Southerners also engaged in a wide variety of associational activity, forming clubs, attending lyceums, and participating in debating societies. Like northerners, the southern middle class also wanted to educate women to help to prepare the next generation for the world of business if they were male, or for motherhood and schooling if they were female. Although Wells makes a case that all of these middle-class elements existed in the South, he does not fully compare it to what the middle class in the North was doing. It is one thing to discover reform in the South but another to compare it to the wide-ranging and comprehensive efforts of the North. A dying patient's faint pulse falls far short of a healthy thumping heart.

The final section defines the middle class in relation to both the planter and working classes. Wells argues that the southern middle class's efforts to push for industrialization and urbanization put it at odds with the planters who remained dedicated to growing cotton. It also generated conflict with a white working class because southern industrialists supported the use of slave labor in the factory. This acceptance of slavery ultimately distinguished the southern and northern middle classes as well.

In the end, Wells is able to substantiate a southern middle class that presaged the pro-business industrialists of the postwar New South. However, he does not demonstrate that its members were absolutely vital to the South before 1865. They may have helped to move the South toward industrialization, but their efforts paled in comparison to those of the northern middle class. Planters and the slaveocracy ruled the South, pushing their region to secession and civil war.