Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (review)

In this thoroughly researched and provocative book, Frank J. Byrne concludes that southern wholesalers, retailers, and their clerks formed a "unique culture" in the slave states prior to and during the Civil War (2). Byrne believes that merchants, lodged between planters and yeoman farmers among the South's white inhabitants, were simultaneously central and "marginal" figures, outsiders and insiders in a region dominated by plantation agriculture (54). They cultivated business contacts with northern wholesalers, haggled persistently with customers—just as their Yankee counterparts did—and adopted the domestic proclivities of the middle classes residing above the Mason–Dixon line. Yet they also offered customers the cornucopia of industrial goods emanating from northern and European mills, developed crucial credit relationships with their neighbors, and provided ideological and financial ballast for white supremacy and the institution of slavery. The Civil War increased tensions between merchants and their fellow Confederates, but did not change the ambiguous position of commercial men. Southerners who endured runaway inflation and food shortages condemned firms for charging exorbitant prices, even while men of business enlisted in armies to preserve white men's rights to human property. The social upheaval caused by the war paved the way for merchants to use the commercial strategies they had employed in the antebellum years to become a New South elite.

Byrne has done impressive research in census schedules, credit reports, newspapers, magazines, and merchants' personal writings to create a complex portrait of southern mercantile men and their families behind the store counter and around the domestic hearth. He is attentive to the ways in which subtle regional distinctions and more prominent differences between urban and rural places shaped merchants' lives. Although business proprietors and their families accounted for no more than eight percent of the South's free population, Byrne contends that they loomed larger than their numbers to play important roles in Dixie's political economy and society. Merchants cemented commercial bonds between the regions during purchasing visits to New York and Philadelphia, enabling northern goods, capital, and credit to flow into southern markets. Back at home, however, merchants encountered the perils of a credit economy linked to the fluctuating yields of cotton harvests. Rebuffed by recalcitrant debtors, storekeepers and wholesalers alike relied upon kinship networks to withstand rough patches in the boom-and-bust economy. They also endured ethnic and regional slurs from their neighbors—the labels "heartless Shylocks" (190) and "unscrupulous Southern Yankees" (63) registered community disapproval of purportedly greedy men and only grudging acceptance that such behavior had found a home in the South.

Byrne's analysis is a sustained assessment of the difficulties encountered by merchants in their attempts to claim power and prestige in the nineteenth-century South. Merchants were independent businessmen, and some possessed considerable pull in local and national economic circles. Nearly a quarter of the merchants in Byrne's wide-ranging census sample owned slaves. Yet commercial men remained dependent on customers' purchases and their ability to pay debts in a timely manner. Unlike planter patriarchs, moreover, merchants who traveled to faraway markets and bought into the ideals of domesticity—emphasizing companionate marriage, consumer culture, the separation of workplace and home, and the nurturing of children—ceded substantial authority to their wives over home affairs and store operations. Caught between "self-reliance" and "servility," they could only fitfully appeal to the unparalleled masculine prerogatives associated with their social betters (47).

The Civil War simultaneously threatened merchants' livelihoods and gave them new chances to challenge planters for social authority. Byrne traces southern firms' "continuing relationships with northern capital" after secession, focusing on the efforts of merchants such as Sidney Root, a transplanted northerner who managed a cotton brokerage and blockade-running conglomerate with offices in Atlanta, New York, Liverpool, and Le Havre (129). Commercial men, however, had trouble reconciling their quest for profits with Confederate nationalism. Merchants kept lines of trade open while they could, providing neighbors...