The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (review)

It is difficult to imagine that after decades of analysis and voluminous publications on the subject there are still major gaps in our understanding of the antebellum South. Yet this is the premise of Jonathan Daniel Wells's provocative new study The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861. Addressing such classic works as C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South as well as more recent studies of the Old South that have virtually ignored the presence of a middle class, Wells makes a compelling argument that a distinct southern middle class developed long before the post-war era, as Woodward concluded, and that it influenced the region in profound ways. Grounded in such underutilized sources as credit reports, postmaster records, and numerous regional publications, Wells divides his study into three parts that examine the cultural ties between the North and the South, the formation of the southern middle class, and, finally, the role this class played during the secession crisis. While there is intriguing analysis throughout this sophisticated investigation, at times Wells overstates both the ideological coherence of this class and its influence, particularly in bringing about the Civil War.

The first two-thirds of The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1860 outlines the economic and ideological genesis of this regional, mainly urban, middle class. By examining the lives of southern professionals like teachers, physicians, and lawyers, as well as those in many commercial professions, Wells maintains that the influence of the northern middle class, in addition to these southerners' experiences in creating their own practices and institutions, produced a distinct class between the planter and yeoman classes. The North served as the "cradle" of the southern middle class by providing both a steady stream of Yankee immigrants to the South as well as offering examples of dynamic cities, efficient public schools, strong manufacturing, and more modern gender relations. Influenced by the work of E.P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm, among others, Wells asserts, "When middling southerners voiced opposition to planter intransigence in supporting manufacturing enterprises, when they spoke in favor of education reform, when they argued that dueling was a barbaric relic that embarrassed the region, they were expressing a class ideology that was clearly in pursuit of class interests." In several excellent chapters that explore travel patterns, voluntary associations, and education reform, Wells reveals that many professional and commercial groups across the Old South did have interests in common and shared certain cultural assumptions. Acting upon these values, for example by building library societies, lyceums, schools, and other institutions, helped produce a "class consciousness" among these disparate groups. Once established, Wells details how the influence of this new middle class in modernizing the South, i.e. making it more like the North, ironically helped the two regions become "more alike" by the eve of the Civil War.

The final third of the study describes both the northern and southern middle classes, naturally with more emphasis upon the latter, and the onset of the Civil War. Wells depicts a southern middle class coming into its own during the 1850s. They were more willing to fight for their interests even when they diverged from their planter and yeoman neighbors. It was during this decade that the members of this class shaped their society with their Whig principles while at the same time attempting to create an industrial economy that would incorporate, indeed rest upon, the institution of slavery. According to Wells, their success in creating a more modern economy that limited the ability of white laborers to organize by utilizing the leverage of slave labor threatened the equanimity of a self-satisfied northern middle class. By the late 1850s middle-class northerners "reacted to these hardening southern middle-class positions on slavery with inflexibility of their own," for they "could foresee danger in a modernizing slave South." Thus while both classes proved to be reluctant supporters of secession and...