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

In this carefully researched book, Frank Byrne analyzes the culture of antebellum southern merchants and their families. Using not only business documents and newspapers but also diaries, letters, and family papers to uncover their worldview, he finds a group bound "into something approaching a class with distinct interests . . . a dynamic, self-identified community" (3). Although southern merchants "did not produce" (3) a distinct ideology, they shared habits, aspirations, and attitudes that set them apart. Playing an economic role that was distrusted in the Old South, they encountered enormous hostility during the Civil War but emerged, nevertheless, equipped to prosper in the New South.

Merchants "tended to establish themselves in more wealthy, settled regions of the South" (16) and their economic interests tended to align them with the planter class and the Whig Party. But the requirements of their business forced many to travel frequently to the North and such separations "inevitably weakened patriarchal authority" in families whose domestic relations "were evolving into something more akin to those found in northern homes" (36, 78). These families "readily embraced the developing capitalist market economy" and exhibited "behavior historically associated with the northern middle classes" (93). But they were merely in the process of becoming bourgeois. Their dedication to slavery, patriarchy, and a conservative evangelical Christianity "proved a critical barrier to the kind of intellectual transformation necessary for them to become truly bourgeois" (102). Still, merchants' social standing "remained tenuous" as "the region's farmers, planters, and artisans often viewed the merchant's commercial world" with "suspicion or outright hostility" (40).

If the merchant operated "within a cultural and economic no-man's-land" (75) in the antebellum period, he became "the ultimate outsider in the embattled Confederacy" (179). Merchants were often reluctant to secede, as they accurately foresaw the disruption that war would bring to their business and their families. They probably could not foresee the hostility and "flow of abuse" that by 1863 condemned them as "rapacious, unpatriotic, and alien" in a Confederate society suffering from shortages and rampant inflation (187). Yet merchants were an important element of continuity between the Old South and the New South and were ready at war's end to "embrace the same goals as 'bourgeois' New York businessmen." Byrne suggests that scholars have "underestimated the economic continuity that bound the antebellum, Confederate, and postbellum South into a commercial whole" (208).

An appendix summarizes Byrne's analysis of merchants in twenty-two counties selected from nine states in the 1850 census. Averaging only 1.8 percent of the free population, these merchants (virtually all of whom were male) were predominantly southern in origin, tended to be in their thirties, averaged $2,542 in real estate, and had an average family size of 4.5. Roughly one-quarter had a clerk living in their homes. Nearly one-quarter owned slaves, and the average size of their slaveholdings was 7.9 (209-14).