Networks of military educators: middle-class stability and professionalization in the late antebellum South.

ON THE FOURTH OF JULY 1845 NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD ROBERT HENRY Simpson received his diploma from the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). Though Simpson was surely happy to have been released from the academic toil and military discipline, graduation did not sever his connection with the school. In fact, Simpson had already requested help locating a suitable teaching position from Francis H. Smith, the VMI superintendent. With his diploma and with this petition to Smith, Simpson, like many of his peers, accessed what has been an overlooked function of the late antebellum South's military schools: their role as a launching pad for the professional careers of nonagricultural, non-elite southerners. (1) Although the South's private and state military schools replicated the discipline and scientific curriculum of the United States Military Academy at West Point, these institutes lacked the national academy's preferential entry to the armed forces. As a result, 96 percent of those schools' matriculates had to find their ways in civilian careers. (2)

In the years following his graduation, Simpson found himself in the situation of many young southern men. The son of a teacher, Simpson's middling status left him without connections to either a plantation or an apprenticeship. His pursuit of social position returned him time and again to his alma mater. Almost yearly missives, commencing with the letter in 1845, asked the VMI superintendent for recommendations or placement in openings of which the professor knew. "You will doubtless receive applications for teachers from various quarters of the State and perhaps of the Union. You have done me the kindness to offer me several such situations which circumstances have prevented me from accepting," Simpson declared in 1849, "and now I trust I shall not be troublesome for soliciting another such offer from you." Throughout the years Simpson received references and returned the favors by encouraging his students to enroll at VMI. He dreamed of higher status occupations, first college professorships and then the more lucrative career of engineering; and as he was ready to move up, he repeatedly contacted his former professor for help. In exchange for assistance in securing an engineering job, for example, Simpson proffered his current teaching post, with a decent annual salary of five hundred dollars, to a VMI graduate of the superintendent's choosing. (3) Such exchanges, in which alumni requested jobs, offered soon-to-be-vacant positions, and sent students to their alma maters, illustrate the career networks in which alumni and military educators forged social stability and worked toward professionalization in the tenuous antebellum world of the southern middling class.

Military educator networks show that members of the developing southern middle class promoted professionalization to create social stability and that they did so not with patronage but with a quasi-bureaucratic system. Defying twenty-first-century perceptions that they embodied conservative values, military schools in the late antebellum years reflected the modernizing South; their curriculum, middle-class matriculates, and promotion of professions and professionalization were part of the region's participation in national trends. After describing the southern middle class, its use of the distinct characteristics of military education, and the operations of networks linking educators and alumni, this article focuses on how the networks created social stability for young southerners. Military alumni networks accomplished this stability through professionalization (i.e., the validation of specialized knowledge and professional status) of teaching. Their success shows in military education's expansion in the number of practitioners and locations, and it highlights the formation of the middle class in a new way, building on a vision of the increasing acceptance of professions. This analysis helps answer two significant questions in southern and American historiography: How did a middle class develop in the South absent the capitalist growth that spurred the process in the North? And how did early-nineteenth-century professionalization proceed? Finally, this study locates the military school networks in the social structure of the Old South among the myriad community connections that fostered them even as the new school ties created proto-bureaucratic avenues of advancement.

The southern military academy provides an excellent window to the makeup and priorities of the region's emerging middle class. The complex work of defining this class--were they small planters? were they yeomen?--has begun but is far from complete. Perhaps previous historians' best definition applies the term to nonagricultural professionals, as Jonathan Daniel Wells proposes in The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861. He estimates this group at 10 percent of the South's urban population by 1860. The number of VMI alumni who had attended by 1850 equaled 12 percent of the total of all students who were attending college that year at other institutions in the state. This large number of alumni of a single school suggests that the middle class may, in fact, have constituted greater than 10 percent of the overall population, especially if rural professionals are considered part of the class. (4) Clearly, however, a middle-class professional group, distinct from both yeomen and planters, developed as part of the modernizing slave society in the late antebellum years. Studying military alumni thus allows historians to further explore white social structure between the extremes of rich and poor. This article, building on the excellent scholarship on planters and plain folk, recent work on professionals and artisans, and vast historiography of the northern middle class, sees the southern middle class as connected to the elite but possessing separate status. As a result, it struggled to maintain a rank above the lower classes and developed social and cultural characteristics distinct from both groups. (5) Future scholarship must continue to explore different segments of the middle class, including urban professionals, rural professionals, and downwardly mobile planters' younger sons; such works will better reckon the number and location of the class throughout the Old South. (6) Though each subdivision of the middle class surely had its own interest in military education, this article focuses on its attraction to nonagricultural professionals, the largest portion of the group.

The middling class differed from other groups by economic situation and in some, but not all, values. This core group can be seen, then, in the members' promotion of schooling, their professional and nonagricultural careers, and the networks they established. Indeed, the southern middle class's connection to education should be unsurprising. As Wells states, "[t]he importance of publicly funded education became a key element of southern middle-class ideology." (7) Efforts to gain public financing of military institutions--campaigns that were successful in twelve southern states before 1861--and the middle-class enrollment in those schools followed from the class's increasing articulation of that ideology throughout the period. Similar to the conclusions of Wells and Rod Andrew Jr., this research finds that cadets shared some northern middle-class values, such as self-discipline and industry, but also concurred with many southern beliefs, including ideas about community, hierarchy, honor, and proslavery arguments. The influence of northern middle-class ideals on southerners, emphasized by historians Wells and Peter S. Carmichael, certainly bears more exploration, but the southern middle class's southernness--for instance, a distinctive reliance on military education and its networks-needs to be incorporated into historians' understanding of America's nineteenth-century social structure and middle-class formation. (8) This article contends that middling southerners expressed educational prerogatives and began the process of professionalization via expert knowledge in a manner specific to the Old South. These southerners were a part of the turn to professionalization that surged in the region after 1840, and previous studies have passed over the decision of a portion of the antebellum southern middle class to gain formal education via military schools, using these particularly regional institutions to create social stability in an Old South dominated by the master class. (9)

Military institutes made professional training accessible for non-elite men, specifically those who were not planters. Cadet Simpson's father taught, leaving the family outside the upper class and providing little wealth, and most of Simpson's peers had similar or fewer resources. Scholar Nancy Beadle describes antebellum northern academies as "solidly middle class" institutions that made occupational mobility and networking possible. Uncovering southerners' connections to schooling will likewise shed light on the middle class and its support for education in the region. (10) An analysis of cadets' families demonstrates that fathers with professional employment enrolled their sons in military schools at greater rates than fathers with agricultural occupations. Just over 70 percent of military school alumni's fathers worked outside agriculture, and 90.8 percent of those men held professional careers; similar to their fathers, approximately 70 percent of alumni avoided agricultural positions. (11) In contrast, the family backgrounds of less than 18 percent of fathers can be traced to planters' families. The extent of the more elite constituency varied across institutions. For example, the South Carolina Military Academy superintendent listed nine planters (10.3 percent of alumni) as the only agriculturally employed graduates among the eighty-seven men who had graduated by 1854. The attention of agriculturalists, including on occasion the offspring of elite planters, to military schools was due to the limited schooling options available, the possibility of state funding, and family proclivities; cadets from elite families were usually younger sons or distant relatives, in a branch of the family tree tending toward employment in the professions. (12) The vast majority of the families of cadets at private and state military schools, however, practiced nonagricultural occupations, and their sons used that schooling to maintain the same standing. The biographies and correspondence of 1,057 cadets, approximately 10 percent of the total number of matriculates of military institutions in the South from 1839 to 1859, provide the source base for this analysis. The existent personal and institutional records, available at twenty-two archives and in various published items, allow analysis of military education and its primarily middleclass constituency. (13)

Military institutes, one type of specialized academy that developed during the elaboration and experimentation of schools nationwide in the antebellum period, flourished particularly in the South, where at least eighty-three schools with military programs opened: twelve state-funded institutes joined seventy-one private military schools, which varied in level from secondary through collegiate schooling. (14) Mirroring the broader pattern of antebellum educational growth, twice as many military academies started in the 1850s as began in the 1840s. These institutes allowed progressively more students, especially those in the middle class, into the level of post-primary--but not collegiate--institutions, a category of education that has been recently labeled "higher schooling." Curricular reform in academies and higher schools allowed them to attract non-elite students more successfully than did colleges: likewise, small colleges accepted nonclassical curricula and non-elite matriculates more often than larger state universities did. (15) Military schools compared themselves to both academies and colleges. Indeed, the number of military institutes nearly equaled the colleges enumerated in the 1850 census in the same states. For example, the 1850 census enumerated twelve private colleges with 1,343 students in Virginia, and VMI, which the census did not count, served 12 percent of that number. Simpson joined more than eleven thousand cadets throughout the Old South. (16)

When Cadet Simpson first hooked the special gold buttons on his VMI uniform, he entered a world with distinctive characteristics. Southern military schools possessed disciplinary systems, featured scientific (as opposed to classical) curricula, and in some cases received public funding, all of which enabled the development and perpetuation of middle-class career networks. Certainly the most visible trait of military schools was the system of discipline. Detailed regulations specified the cadets' uniform, conduct, and routine. A twenty-four-hour schedule included military drill, roll calls, marches, guard duty, curfews, and demerit points for infractions. State military institutes, specifically, used the military system because cadets guarded state armories; private schools, likewise, protected weapons they received from their states. Their popularity reflected in part sectional tension and militarism, as John Hope Franklin asserted. More than militarism was involved, however. Military schools also grew from the development of a southern middle class, national reforms expanding public and vocational education, state funding aiding the schools and their faculty, and growing southern support of professional values. (17)

The schools' educational plan was more reform minded than their disciplinary system. Though schools in all categories shared pedagogical adherence to the recitation method, the curriculum in military academies differed from those in universities and college preparatory academies because it de-emphasized the classics. The military institutes echoed calls nationwide for "practical" education, and their offerings dovetailed with curricular change in the common schools (even though these institutions had only minimal success in the South). Military schools' basic entrance requirements omitted Latin and Greek, the standard college fare. Some of the schools, including VMI, taught Latin but did not require it for entrance. Neglecting Latin and Greek, military institutes' curricula specifically reduced the antebellum colleges' and universities' emphasis on classical education. Academies, colleges, and universities in the North increasingly attracted students below the elite, but southern secondary education largely held to the classics, which required students to have elite resources and goals. Southern college students, particularly those at the state universities, thus remained elite while military schools taught middling-rank students. (18) Cadets like Simpson took courses focused on modern languages--English and French, the language of engineering--rather than classical ones. Military schools also promoted scientific studies, including up to four years of mathematics, at least two years of French, and a year each of English, chemistry, physics, drawing or drafting, and engineering. (19) Thus, admission and curricular requirements allowed men to enroll in higher schooling despite lacking sufficient resources for tutors in ancient languages.

The reduced classical requirements joined state tuition remission to offer Simpson and other young men an education they might not have been able to afford otherwise. Starting with VMI, which opened in 1839, state military institutes designated a number of young men (usually between the ages of sixteen and twenty) to receive free tuition, room, and board in exchange for two years of teaching in the state after graduation. The South Carolina Military Academy (SCMA), for example, funded at least one young man from each senatorial district, while the state university in South Carolina offered only one scholarship annually. Even so, fees for the scholarship students could run as high as a hundred dollars per year. As a result, scholarships enabled middle-class cadets, but rarely indigent ones, to attend. The schools did more than offer access to education, however. They also helped their graduates make their way in a changing world. (20)

Cadet Simpson's correspondence with Superintendent Smith reveals the military school alumni networks that assisted graduates, and an exchange of letters about an 1849 vacancy at Rappahannock Military Institute demonstrates how jobs came into the networks. When VMI superintendent Smith heard that a teacher was leaving Rappahannock, he wrote the school's superintendent to inquire if that were true. Rappahannock's superintendent confirmed that he needed a new teacher and asked about a VMI graduate who had already applied. Smith recommended that man in two separate letters. When that alumnus did not take the position, Smith suggested two other alumni. Separately, yet another VMI graduate applied for the job and wrote to Smith for a recommendation, which he sent. This final alumnus ended up with the job, but he wanted to leave it within three months. By January 1850 the VMI graduate about whom the Rappahannock superintendent had originally inquired started teaching at the school. Over the course of six months, the VMI superintendent had proposed four alumni for one military school position, and the two graduates who used his recommendations left after two years or less. All this fuss was for $350 a year and a furnished room. (21)

Exchanges such as that at Rappahannock demonstrate that cadets actively created networks to find professional positions, a process that helps complete the picture of class formation in the Old South. The networks' primary result was placing individuals in the most commonly selected career--teaching. Before the Civil War, more than one-fourth of military school alumni whose biographies allow analysis taught for some period. Despite the attraction of careers in the law, medicine, and engineering, more of the alumni found opportunities in education than in any other single career (including farming). That percentage increases to 39 percent if the pool includes only graduates rather than both graduates and matriculates. By 1850, VMI, the first and largest state-funded military school, had educated the equivalent of 12.3 percent of all Virginia's college and academy teachers. (22) Superintendent Francis H. Smith explicitly compared VMI to the antebellum schools for training teachers that were more common in the North. "It has become an object with most of the graduates," he described, "to seek employment in the profession of teaching." In 1848 Smith reported to the Virginia General Assembly that "of eighty-four graduates, forty-five have been, and thirty-three are now actually engaged in teaching." His figure of 54 percent is much greater than the figure of 39 percent compiled from the information currently available on alumni career choices. Since many alumni taught only for short periods before entering other careers (and thus do not appear in extant records as teachers), Smith's higher percentage is probably accurate. (23) Calculations for alumni of SCMA appear, consistent with those of VMI, to indicate teaching as a significant career choice. An 1857 SCMA graduate recorded 31.4 percent of antebellum graduates of his alma mater as having entered the teaching profession; likewise, his former superintendent calculated the figure at 28.7 percent of the graduates through 1853. (24) Indeed, state military institutions purposely resembled normal schools with military discipline.

Information and correspondence greased the wheels of these networks. Alumni reinforced their connections to their military alma maters in order to receive recommendations and positions; as they did so, they strengthened ties that forged career networks. Even five years after commencement, teacher Robert Simpson updated Smith on his life and position (including salary). (25) When sociologist Mark S. Granovetter explored communication between members of a cohort, he showed that weak ties, those of acquaintanceship rather than of close friendship, better facilitated communication across a network. (26) In this cohort of antebellum matriculates of a specific type of southern school, alumni only vaguely aware of each other could spread job information and positions via the direct and/or repeated communication of one or two men to their former teachers. One former cadet could contribute information on available teachers and open positions without candidates even being aware of the information exchange. Thus, every school surely spawned its own networks, and more than one alumni network grew out of each military school.

Akin to Horace Mann's dispensing advice throughout the developing common school movement in the North, the central agents in these career networks were the principals of the military academies. VMI's unusually robust records and the correspondence of Francis H. Smith, its superintendent from 1839 to 1889, provide scholars with the best evidence of a well-developed network. Smith took the reins at VMI after his West Point graduation and two brief professorships. While he had particular influence as a long-standing and successful superintendent, VMI professors J. T. L. Preston, who taught modern languages, and T. H. Williamson, who taught engineering, and the Board of Visitors member General W. H. Richardson also acted as connections in networks. Indeed, the comprehensive data from all extant correspondence at all southern military schools confirms as much as possible the typicality of the VMI networks. For example, at SCMA, Superintendent Charles Courtenay Tew advised at least two alumni educators and probably engaged in networking similar to Smith's. (27) These professors supervised networks that provided school board representatives and principals with teachers. "I would recommend to you as a successor to Mr. [Edward] Edmonds [VMI '58], Mr. Wm Keiter of the graduating Class," Smith informed the principal of Hampton Academy in 1859; Keiter "of course expects to get the same salary &c. as Mr. Edmonds." (28) As Smith's correspondence indicates, these professors actively searched out openings and then filled them. In turn, dozens of alumni across the South wrote to their schools because the administrators knew of jobs and placed young men in those positions.

"I am much oblige[d] to you for your kindness," recent graduate Charles Steptoe thanked Superintendent Smith, "in proposing me to Mr. Catlett as an applicant of the school at Mr. Taliaferro's." The position not only was offered to Steptoe but also was contained in a longer list of options sent to another 1859 graduate. "There are several vacancies now opening and I will mention them to you," began Smith; the list included a math and tactics position at the Norfolk Male Institute paying five hundred dollars per year, a replacement for another graduate at Norfolk Academy, and the situation Steptoe had been offered. Smith made sure that an alumnus undertook each opening, telling the second young man, "In the event of [Steptoe's] not going there, it would be a good situation for you, otherwise you might entertain either of the places at Norfolk." (29) This valedictorian accepted the post at the Norfolk Male Institute, and the networks proved similarly successful in securing positions for other alumni. "I am afraid I shall not be able to supply you with a teacher at this time," Smith explained in 1859 to a graduate requesting an assistant; "The demand has been such that all whom I could recommend, are now engaged." (30)

These young men's creation of networks and their movement into professional careers highlight the process of professionalization underway by the 1840s. The emerging middle class focused its hopes on education, and cadets of the middling ranks, in part mirroring the nationwide increased interest in professions in the same period, wanted to move from uncertain futures into secure careers and financial success. They feared the downward mobility that Stephan Thernstrom's seminal study found in Massachusetts between 1840 and 1880. Michael Katz, in his study of nineteenth-century Ontario, Canada, found that education offered only "marginal advantages" and even then only for elites. The wider applicability of such northern or postbellum studies vexes southern historians. (31) Thernstrom's findings in particular suggest a tenuous social position for military academy alumni who were trying to maintain or improve their social position in the late antebellum years. They struggled for social stability or mobility in a hierarchical southern system dedicated to the elevation of planters. These antebellum men inhabited a world where academies frequently closed and most men unconnected to agricultural holdings lived in precarious positions. (32)

The possibility, and the frequency, of downward mobility gave the networks their significance. They provided access to social stability in the late antebellum South and helped reinforce individual efforts against downward mobility. Young men left uncertain by their middling rank began to secure jobs, forge networks with successful alumni teachers, and locate professional stability. Whether information came from an alumnus or from a principal, the networks found cadets teaching positions as other alumni departed them. "I shall retire from the school at the end of this session (15th of July) and would like to procure some suitable person to take my place as Associate Principal," alumnus George Patton (an ancestor of the World War II general) explained to Smith. (33) Also seeking a teacher, the Western Military Institute's superintendent made sure of always having at least one VMI graduate working at his school and, in 1851, told of the happy circumstances of the last Virginian at Western: "You will recollect having kindly procured for us the assistance of Wm. A. Forbes a graduate of the VMI. The result to him, was a beautiful wife with $10,000 in cash, and the Presidency of a Southern College at $1200 per an." He continued, "We now need the services of a good mathematician, who can also render efficient aid in Tactics." Superintendent Smith followed up on the requests. He found a replacement for Forbes at Western and eventually placed another alumnus with Forbes at the new college. Forbes's decision to remain an educator must have reflected his economic success and an evaluation of its prestige as within the range of the law, the profession of his father and maternal grandfather. (34) Even more than Patton, Forbes not only gained good positions from his introduction into a network but also ensured two younger graduates' careers.

Indeed, the ties of successful teachers back to their alma maters built the networks. Micah Jenkins, the 1854 valedictorian of SCMA, exemplifies alumni patterns of teaching--six years of experience before the Civil War for Jenkins--and of networking to foster others' careers. Jenkins was one of the more privileged alumni. His late father had been a planter, lawyer, and legislator; one of six children, Micah Jenkins's older brothers acted as his guardians. The January following commencement, Jenkins and Citadel classmate Asbury Coward opened a preparatory school for their alma mater. Their school, called King's Mountain Military Academy, enrolled more than a hundred cadets each year and annually sent a few students into the state military academy of South Carolina. As the school successfully developed, Jenkins also considered opening a pharmacy and studying law, but he continued teaching at King's Mountain until he entered the Confederate army. Jenkins and Coward employed an 1857 Citadel graduate as a teacher at King's Mountain Military Academy. (In fact, the teacher's brother was an 1851 SCMA alumnus and also a military educator.) (35) In the meantime, Jenkins (and his partner Coward for that matter) acted as both recipients of their network and as perpetuators of and employers in it.

The alumni connections worked to provide social stability. "I should prefer permanency to lucrativeness," a graduate clarified to Smith as he asked for a new posting. As a teacher, this young man entered the same profession as his maternal grandfather. Indeed, when recent graduate William Clarke could not get an engineering position, he immediately turned to Smith: "I desire a place [teaching], and would put you to the trouble to secure me one if in your power." Clarke chose the security of a teaching career when, one month after graduation, the more profitable one of engineering did not develop. He continued teaching at Norfolk Academy, organized with its own cadet corps, into the years after the Civil War. (36)

The networks even provided a certain amount of stability for men who proved (continually) unsuccessful. Indeed, over months or years, the same young men repeatedly wrote back to Smith about situations, as Simpson had. While Simpson's recurring requests came out of ambition--looking for a more profitable position or career--some men found themselves without jobs and seem to have hung on to employment via the networks. VMI alumnus Charles Derby was the extreme case of networking. He was an unsuccessful teacher who constantly needed new positions and whose shoemaking father could not aid him. Over the seven years that he spent in the classroom, Derby had at least five different positions and vied for another five. He moved between jobs, staying at no position for longer than two years. Despite his volatility, Derby remained continually employed using a career network to find new positions when his personality (or possibly a drinking problem) caused him to move. "If there will not be a vacancy in the Institute, I would willingly accept one of the many good situations which the application to you for teachers place at your disposal," an early letter among many requested. (37) Even with a problematic man such as Derby, the security of a teaching career proved itself in that such a person remained employed by using his military academy ties. The alumni's best path to status was to obtain professional teaching careers and then to improve the society's estimation of that career.

Bettering the South's regard for teaching took place in three stages. Lawyers, physicians, dentists, and teachers pursued professionalization in the nineteenth century through the control of exclusive knowledge, the creation of organizations, and eventually legislation regulating their professions. Before the Civil War, military educators accomplished at least the first two steps of that process and made progress toward the third. The first stage in the professionalization of military teaching made specialized education a prerequisite for the career. (38) Military educators certainly developed a specialized curriculum with military and scientific content. They also began the second phase of professionalization--the creation of professional organizations. Historians usually present the professionalization of teaching by analyzing the associations and publications of publicly supported common school educators, but exploring the professionalization of private school educators as well expands our understanding of the middle class and of social class formation. (39) While they did not form their own organizations, military educators and their charges relied on their extra-institutional career networks, which acted as proto-professional organizations. The Civil War intervened before military educators completed the third stage of professionalization. Before 1860, state legislatures incorporated schools but did not regulate military (or any) educators; however, the establishment of academies strictly adhering to the models of West Point and VMI created some de facto standards.

The specialized curricula of the academies offered alumni the best advantage in the teaching of mathematics and military tactics. This use of specialized knowledge--specifically scientific and military subject matter--was a crucial stage of professionalization. "Every day of my life I see the tremendous advantages the VM Inst. Graduates have over all others in our profession," an 1848 alumnus exclaimed. This young man worked first as a teacher and later as an engineer, so the comment could refer to either preferred career. Significantly, college curricula de-emphasized training in these fields, so cadets encountered less competition for opportunities to teach or specialize in them. Most colleges and universities followed the influential prescriptions of the so-called Yale Report of 1828, which advocated continued use of the classical curriculum with supplementary courses in mathematics. Before the Civil War, the study of math increased but never predominated in universities, and military school graduates received more exposure to math and engineering than did most college students. As college and military alumni competed for jobs, additional training in specialized fields provided advantages to military graduates. Augustus Powell found this benefit to be real, as he boasted of opening the only school in his area of Mississippi to teach mathematics. VMI alumnus James Murfee, although opening a new school in Virginia, actually desired a professorship in tactics, math, or natural philosophy (the subjects specific to his military education) and the resulting steady salary at the University of Tennessee. (40) Also, increasing the number of programs in tactics and math, such as at Powell's school in Mississippi, allowed alumni enhanced opportunity in gaining those positions for which their military and scientific education specifically prepared them.

The processes of professionalization in the Old South illuminate class formation and interaction. Beth Barton Schweiger and Steven M. Stowe have examined southern ministers and doctors who were beginning the process in the 1840s. Their studies indicate both regional distinctiveness and national similarities. However, Stowe's "country orthodoxy" of southern physicians and Schweiger's eight-hundred-person source base describe no networking comparable to the military educator networks. (41) Military alumni, but neither doctors nor ministers, began networks, perhaps because teaching provided the best opportunity for such social change. Studies on professions such as military education must be incorporated into the larger scope of the ways professionalization occurred in the Old South. Military alumni increased the status of teaching in part through their participation in its professionalization. Their success with this amorphous mobility can be seen in networking's results: over twenty years, professionalization brought about growth in the number of military educators and military institutions and in the prestige of both teachers and schools.

After cadets graduated from the earliest academies, they entered and developed the field of military education. From the early to the late antebellum period, a shift occurred in the characteristics marking the founders of and teachers at private and state military academies. Just as Yale and Princeton graduates established the earliest southern universities, West Pointers such as Francis H. Smith started and staffed the first generation of military institutions. By the 1850s, however, the southern military schools, with their teaching networks, had produced a sufficient number of alumni to take over military education. The new institutions they founded meant more positions for their peers and their students. More than one-fourth of alumni teachers made the transition from military education to military educator. A case in point, 1846 Citadel alumnus W. J. Magill went on to teach at the Kentucky Military Institute and advanced to be the commandant of the Georgia Military Institute by 1860. Also, Thomas Rowe Thornton attended two military academies, Rappahannock Military Institute and Virginia's state military academy, before teaching math and becoming the principal at Rappahannock. He replaced John R. Jones, also a VMI alumnus, at Rappahannock after Jones resigned to establish a new military academy in Florida. (42)

Like Jones, military alumni started military schools throughout the South. William Morrissett, for example, graduated from Hampton Academy (with a cadet corps) and VMI, taught at Hampton, and then founded Williamsburg Military School in 1852. The networks encouraged and staffed a number of schools operated by alumni, including Abingdon Male Academy, Albemarle Military Institute, Chuckatuck Military Institute, Culpeper Military Academy, Petersburg Military Academy, and academies in Tazewell County, Onancock, and Petersburg in Virginia; Military and Scientific Institute at Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Columbus Military Academy in Mississippi; a military school in Quincy and Fleetwood Academy (with a cadet corps) in Florida; a military program at Central Masonic Institute in Selma, Alabama; a military school in Lexington, Missouri; Hillsboro Military Academy and Raleigh Military Academy in North Carolina; and King's Mountain Military Academy in South Carolina. (43)

To increase the success of their professional niche and their specialized knowledge, every military institution attempted to secure at least one West Point or Virginia Military Institute graduate--thus legitimating the martial side of the equation. The educational background of military institute professors is often difficult to ascertain, but of those whose schooling is known, the majority attended military schools themselves. According to their institutions' catalogs, for example, three of five professors at Kentucky Military Institute in 1853, four of five at Hillsboro Military Academy in 1860, and four of five at Western Military Institute in 1853 came from military programs. (44) Alumni then hired other men from the networks, as Jenkins and Coward did at King' s Mountain. For example, the founder of Kentucky Military Institute (KMI), West Point graduate R. T. P. Allen, would later start Bastrop Military Institute in Texas with his son, creating a career for the young man as a military educator. When Allen quit Kentucky in 1856, he sold KMI to a teacher at the Western Military Institute. (45) Thus, the ownership of KMI rotated between military educators, and more than half of its faculty remained private and state military academy graduates.

Military education expanded south and west into the newer states via these educators' new schools, including some of the twelve state military academies, which have been dubbed the "West Points of the South." Many southerners moved west to find new plantations and new areas of opportunity, and teachers did the same, locating stable careers and professional status farther afield. They spread the web of connections across the lower South from Florida to Texas. (46) VMI provided the model for, at minimum, Tennessee's Western Military Institute, the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, the University of Alabama cadet corps, and the Missouri Military Institute. The founders of the Western, Alabama, and Louisiana military academies, furthermore, turned to VMI networks for teachers. By 1851 an alumnus of the state school in Virginia reported that military education had taken off in Alabama and that some residents wanted to start a state military institute, indicating in part the networks' success. Unfortunately, lack of financing limited attempts to found a program, but they succeeded in 1860 when Landon C. Garland implemented a cadet corps at the University of Alabama, using Smith's advice. Moreover, VMI's network of military educators acted to staff the new military course. James Murfee, an 1853 VMI alumnus who had been teaching in Virginia since graduation but sought a better salary, relocated to Alabama, as did two 1860 VMI graduates who went directly to the military program. Similarly, George Mason Graham, president of the board of trustees of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, received six recommendations for teachers from Smith. Smith ended up negotiating among alumni--the candidates--about whom to locate in the new institution. In the end, Louisiana appointed only one VMI alumnus, but the negotiations showed the prevalence of the military educator networks. (47)

While military education took hold in newer states, older schools expanded and enrolled more cadets into the system. Modeled on VMI as providing both good supervision of the state armory and practical education, the second state military institute, South Carolina Military Academy, also provided schooling for the middling class. SCMA developed as two separate academies, the Arsenal in Columbia and the Citadel in Charleston; the first-year program relocated to the Arsenal Academy, thus boosting the number of cadets who would matriculate and propagate its networks as they ventured throughout the region. In other states, VMI built new barracks in 1850 to house more cadets; Kentucky Military Institute moved locations in part to augment its facilities; and Western Military Institute joined with the University of Nashville to increase resources and enrollment. (48) At a very basic level, the networks resulted in more men teaching at more military programs throughout the late antebellum years. In a reciprocal relationship, military institutions increased their attendance by accepting the pupils of their graduates; Simpson, Jenkins, and their peers used that advantage in the competitive world of private schooling. (49)

In addition to increasing the number of schools and teachers, the process of professionalization enhanced the reputations of the alumni, their schools, and their superintendents. A man's status--that ever-important quality in the antebellum South--reflected his social position as perceived by his community and its evaluation of his reputation. Planters, the elite of society who set the tone of much of the white community, based their lives on status and honor. Young men in military academies entered teaching to attempt to raise themselves in the status-conscious society. They wanted higher status, but their vision of success did not fully align with the traditional planter model--ownership of slaves and plantations--and was accessible to less-well-to-do cadets. The crux of social position in the Old South rested primarily in status and secondarily in wealth; middle-class alumni strove for both through their networks. Perpetuating the system of military education and its professionalization were part of the way in which the middle class began to assert the value of a nonagricultural status. (50)

Patterns of military academy attendance, specifically the socioeconomic status of fathers and of sons, reveal a southern trend opposite to the downward mobility and lack of benefit in education that Thernstrom and Katz described in the North. (51) People recognized military education as a southern institution, and as such, it shows the development of southern thought distinct from the northern middle class and the southern elite. Military alumni remained nonagricultural at rates equivalent to their fathers and entered professional occupations. Military educator networks helped southern professionals, especially members of the developing southern middle class, achieve stability by maintaining nonagricultural careers across generations and by increasing the status of professional employment.

As superintendents represented their schools, their reputations grew alongside the professional standing of military education. Throughout the late antebellum years, VMI superintendent Smith spoke to the Virginia legislature, published on military education, served a year as president of West Point's Board of Visitors, and helped develop other schools. Alumni educators used Smith's textbooks, such as An Elementary Treatise on Algebra, and demonstrations with their own students. The four editions each of Smith's textbooks on algebra and on geometry published prior to the Civil War suggest their popularity. (52) Likewise, C. C. Tew of SCMA, a merchant's son who taught at his alma mater after his 1846 graduation, became superintendent of Arsenal Academy, published articles on military education, and started Hillsboro Military Academy (HMA) in North Carolina. He probably gained status analogous to Smith's among his former students. (53) Thus, as superintendents advanced their graduates and academies, they enhanced their own status.

Authors and speakers increasingly praised military education's scientific curriculum and practical education. Even some elites began to recognize military education as southerners came to terms with modern and industrial ideas; in 1853, South Carolina College president James H. Thornwell defended the usefulness of military education, despite its status below that of colleges. (54) Military education, particularly in the 1850s, received praise and respect as valuable schooling, but antebellum contemporaries never equated its status with that of collegiate education in the way military educators occasionally wished. The increase in military teachers' status becomes evident, however, in the 1862 Morrill Land Grant Act, which provided for instruction in practical education and military tactics; the inclusion of military teachers as professors indicated the increased legitimacy and professionalization of the occupation in the prewar years. (55) Professionalization increased the number of military teachers, number of schools, status of educators, and public approval of military education.

As professionalization developed during the antebellum years, teaching became a profession requiring skills and education rather than an informal job for youths, as it had been previously considered. Teaching slowly changed from a respectable but lowly occupation to one that young men made increasingly acceptable. This process has been traced among northern teachers and described well by Burton Bledstein as starting in the mid-nineteenth century. The results of early professionalization brought young middle-class men to view teaching both as a reputable occupation and as a stepping-stone to what they perceived as more lucrative and higher status professions, such as the law. (56) Reflective of new professional leanings in the Old South, teachers in military schools garnered additional social respect due to their association with the military. Educators at the twelve state schools received rank with their hire: Superintendents Smith and Tew, for example, were colonels in their respective state militias. Rank and title offered markers of prestige and respectability. (57)

For some military school alumni, a stable teaching career satisfied their desire for social position. Between 1840 and 1860, 51 percent of alumni educators remained faithful to the profession, maintaining a career that had less status than other professions but was increasingly praised and accepted throughout the antebellum years. Other alumni sought to move from teaching to a more prestigious occupation. Slightly under half of alumni teachers used it as a temporary career (see Table 1). In one way, the high percentage of men who left the education field reflects the funding structure of the state military academies. During most years, half the cadets at VMI and one-fourth of those at the Citadel fell under the obligation to teach after graduation as a condition of their scholarships. Similar to West Point graduates who left the army, some alumni served their required time and then tried for professional success in other fields. This is a specific reason why military teaching could be used as a launching pad. For example, brothers George and Waller Patton, the family's fourth and fifth sons, taught for a few years before following in their father's footsteps to the law. (58)

Alumni could also seek upward mobility by preparing for a better career as they taught. For example, Robert Simpson tried, while teaching, to learn Greek, a subject omitted in his military academy education but required for his goal of a college professorship. (59) Likewise, young men similar to Micah Jenkins prepared for the law, in a time when individual study was the primary requirement for passing the bar. Cadets made this type of career goal explicit in their letters. "I have much to say to you in my next in regard to your proposition," a Citadel cadet told his younger cousin, also at SCMA, "to take a school while you are studying medicine." (60)

Teaching apparently helped young southerners secure entry into other professions. More than two-thirds of men whose multiple occupations included teaching entered that profession first and then climbed into other careers. Military school alumni were not the only men who taught even as they sought to break in to other professions. For example, historian Beth Barton Schweiger found that approximately 50 percent of Baptist and Methodist clergy ordained from 1830 to 1849 were teachers first. (61) Those ministers, like the alumni who entered law and medicine directly (19.4 and 15.7 percent of military school alumni, respectively), handled career placement outside of a school network. The men who entered law and medicine directly were likely wealthier and better connected than those who taught first. For instance, Thomas B. Monroe and Benjamin H. Helm both came from professional families with lawyers and legislators on both sides; after their enrollment at the Kentucky Military Institute, both became lawyers. Family connections helped them to do so rapidly. Other young men were not so fortunate. "I am solely dependent upon my salary," a VMI graduate complained, "not only temporarily but as the means whereby I may be able to prosecute my studies and carry out my intention of becoming a physician." (62) Young alumni of the middling ranks were clearly not men without resources, but neither were they elites. These cadets thus lacked the wealth to sustain medical apprenticeship without an income, unlike the southern elites at University of Pennsylvania examined by historian Daniel Kilbride. (63) School-based proto-bureaucratic networking for jobs reflects middle-class needs in addition to the changing values in the South. Teaching, its status increasing throughout the period, attracted more middle-rank men who could take the money and time it supplied to launch themselves.

The movement of teachers into new careers must be seen as an aspect of both social stability and social mobility in the Old South. The 49 percent of military academy men who switched careers were similar to slave owners who adoped dual careers to maintain their status or gain advancement. Unlike the slave owners, however, the military school alumni were more likely to move between professions than to operate in them concurrently. Indeed, resonating with the findings of Jonathan Wells and Peter Carmichael, this point suggests that, throughout the late antebellum years, segments of southern society increasingly valued professional status. (64) Table 1 also highlights the low frequency of men who shifted between multiple occupations; just 10 percent had more than two different professions. Whether seeking careers, income, or stability, military school educators found assistance in their networks.

Alumni educators found stability in the career and gained some status from satisfactory annual salaries, such as George Patron's seven hundred dollars or William Forbes's twelve hundred dollars. An 1849 VMI alumnus explained his rising salary in conjunction with his moves. "I then was at the age of 19 appointed teacher in the [Norfolk] Academy where I had received so much of my previous education. I remained there two years till August 1851. The first year my pay was $400--the second it was $500," he wrote in his diary. "In the May previous to my leaving I had received the appointment of Adjunct Prof. of Math at this [William and Mary] College, and I removed here in October. The pay guaranteed is $700." (65) As this young man found, new positions could bring better money, and returning to the networks secured those new posts. One of the men whom Smith aided in finding work at the Rappahannock Military Institute in 1849 told Smith that he accepted the position specifically because it paid more than his previous school. Henry Whiting asked for positions Smith knew that paid more than four hundred dollars annually. (Two weeks later, Whiting thanked Smith for the posting he accepted.) These salaries reflected reliable jobs, not the erratic work that nonprofessional teachers could find, which often paid two hundred dollars or less per year. (66) Alumni then benefited from the respectable salaries that the networks almost assured upon graduation or from a later request.

Additionally, the networks offered some individuals more than just references for steady incomes; alumni occasionally received direct monetary benefits. Some youths thanked Smith for the loans he made them. In the days of paternal discipline, that a superintendent (or institutions, in other cases) loaned young men enough money to start themselves in careers is unsurprising. Furthermore, some youths, whether graduates or not, retained their connections to VMI by explaining their inability to pay off their school accounts. Some alumni's incapacity to repay debts (often expenses above their state scholarships) meant they benefited from an interest-free loan while they began their careers. Edward Edmonds, whose father committed suicide during Edward's first year at military school, explained that he had paid off some of the loans he took out to remain in school and "yours shall be the next debt attended to, I hope you will excuse me, but I am doing all in my power to do your recommendation and the Inst. the fullest Justice." (67) Beyond providing needed cash, the loans and the correspondence surrounding them strengthened matriculates' ties to the network of graduates.

The career networks aided middle-class stability within the larger social, regional, and educational communities that historians of the South study. (68) In the paradoxical and uneven way that social change occurs, the networks were based in and even mirrored patronage at the same time that they integrated a more modern system into traditional southern expectations. The military alumni networks were not based on patronage. Elites dispensing patronage more often operated through ties within their communities, while middle-class cadets relied on networks of their own making. Alumni friendships facilitated the exchanges, and non-elite teachers staffed the quasi-bureaucratic system. The web of connections, moreover, shows that the developing southern middle class possessed southern values--not only because the institutions were southern, but also because they were built on the community expectations of the Old South. The networks complement the historio-graphic assertion that the South maintained premodern relationships, but this analysis incorporates into the model a developing southern middle class based on education and professional status.

Ties among military educators coexisted with other layers of social and cultural networks. (69) More prosperous southerners who attended colleges had their own alumni networks, but they were not as vital to graduates' success. Elite young men were able to rely more on other advantages: kin, patronage, classical education, land, and money. Of course, relatives in all eras and regions acted as career networks. Kin relationships smoothed entry into professional careers, as families promoted sons and attempted to locate them the best positions possible. Graduates of southern universities ran their states; South Carolina College, the most elite southern university, produced a large number of governors and legislators, as did the University of Virginia. Alumni of those institutions, primarily planters' sons, certainly engaged in some type of student-professor networking, although more likely they relied on kin connections or their wealth to enter careers. In general, southern elites did not require school-based networks. (70)

Lacking access to jobs provided by kin, middle-class southern cadets relied on school networks. Their fathers sought recommendations from neighbors, presumably the more prestigious the better, for admission, but the cadets' families did not draw on patronage after graduation. Fathers writing to school administrators to place their sons in positions were probably unable to provide the boys with situations themselves. "The object of this communication is to get the favor of you, if you know of any vacancy in a school or on a rail road, about that time [my son is unemployed], that you will inform me or him of it," wrote Edward Hill, whose two sons graduated in the VMI class of 1859 and became teachers (an older son "was indebted to your kindness for [his current teaching] situation"). (71) The significant portion of cadets who were orphaned or cared for by guardians similarly lacked opportunities for elite patronage; such fatherless youths encompassed one-third of the matriculates. "His immediate parents were most respectable but in moderate pecuniary circumstances," a recommendation described VMI applicant John C. Wills; "he was left an orphan when very young, after receiving some little education was apprenticed to a tailor of this village." Following his 1843 graduation, Wills must have had little access to patronage to secure a professional career. Because family connections could not provide such students with plantations or occupations, middling-rank men, in particular, accessed bureaucratic school-based networks rather than patronage (although school networks could have existed alongside traditional patronage). (72)

Community connections had many roles in the Old South, and military schools fostered useful friendships. Amity brought alumni together, but it simultaneously formed them into career networks. The loose connections of acquaintances--correspondence over miles and years--often brought information into networks. VMI alumni Gabriel Jordan Jr. and William D. Stuart probably met in the barracks, and they corresponded after their 1850 graduation. Four years alter commencement, Jordan told Stuart that he would help track down an engineering post for Stuart if the man chose to quit teaching. Jordan suggested, however, that the switch was unlikely since teaching gave Stuart "a comfortable competency, and something besides." Indeed, because Stuart's father suffered from a nervous condition that ended his law practice, the youth's education was left partially to the state and his career to the networks. These young men gave each other friendship and informal career information, an exchange surely replicated by other alumni. (73) Typical friendships outside the military school arena probably more closely resembled the intellectuals in the Old South who supported each other as isolated, educated men but who never extended their connections into career advancement. But among alumni, links to casual friends and acquaintances--the so-called weak ties explained by sociologist Mark S. Granovetter--provided vital assistance over the long term. (74)

As they pursued friendships and what may have had the appearance of patronage, military academy alumni started networks that were actually institutional and quasi-bureaucratic. Continuing acquaintance among alumni was important so that one man could inform the other networks of openings and available professors. Especially good aids to information exchange were the men with friends at different military schools, so more data would enter any given network. While kin may have attended the same academies--i.e., the Otey brothers at VMI or cousins John Wylie and Lafayette Strait at SCMA--other youths were at different schools, such as a doctor's son at Hillsboro Military Academy writing of his friendship with a North Carolina Military Institute cadet. (75) In the modernizing society of the late antebellum South, school-based career networks aided middle-class young men who lacked patronage.

The networks applied the understood values of the Old South to a new system that was outside the control of the established power elite of the plantation class but that did not oppose the elite. Robert Simpson explained the power of a superintendent in the alumnus-professor relationship: "He is frequently applied to for Teachers & he knows what each one is suited for and can be of material assistance. He can confine his recommendations for high or low situations to the most recent Graduate or let the latter gradually rise and not take the prominent positions whilst a mere boy." Simpson's description indicates that alumni had to remain on good terms to get the best positions, but he also described an alumnus's "reciprocal duties," specifically "refuting slanders against" the school and its professors. (76) Certainly, this echoes the language of southern honor. Relationships in the networks, however, modified the reciprocal individual duties of honor to apply to institutions. (77) Even as elucidated by Simpson, the networks worked within southern culture but did not duplicate the duties of southern community or patronage relationships. Professors surely recognized the demands of southern honor, but they acted as administrators in a developing bureaucracy. This networking, in the transitional period of the antebellum years, was part of both a developing career placement bureaucracy and the creation of a patronage-like system for the middle class within a southern society so reliant on those types of connections.

Friendship, literary societies, Greek letter societies, and alumni associations all brought alumni into social contact, but none of these groups enhanced status or mobility as the networks did. Educational organizations served middle-class southern youths as bureaucratic examples encouraging the second stage of professionalization, the creation of professional organizations. Literary or debating societies, organizations that most antebellum colleges and large military academies enjoyed, enrolled new cadet members each year. Cadets in VMI's Society of Cadets and its Virginia Dialectic Society, the Citadel's Calliopean and Polytechnic Societies, and Kentucky Military Institute's Philomathean Society encouraged friendships that supported the networks. The purpose and activities of the societies--debate and discussion--necessarily kept the organizations internal to their particular campuses, but their effects resonated beyond the school grounds. (78)

Greek letter societies developed along the same lines as the literary societies, but the South's lack of developed bureaucracy and of reform organizations led to a relatively low interest in fraternities. The state military institutes in Kentucky and Georgia started small Greek societies in the late 1850s, but otherwise military schools followed the southern pattern of possessing but not emphasizing fraternities before the war. (79) Greek letter societies and literary societies never provided career networking similar to that of military academy men.

Formal alumni associations at the larger state institutes likewise did not act explicitly for career placement but helped establish friendships that in turned aided the networks. The educator networks at the antebellum military institutes essentially functioned as precursors to modern alumni associations. (That they occurred in the prewar South highlights the need for more research into the neglected field of men's collective activity in furthering professional careers.) (80) The proto-bureaucratic networks of military educators reflected trends similar to northern organizations. Institutionally, then, other organizations promoted neither middle-class stability nor professional status but encouraged friendships, which in turn created better networks.

The networks that military school alumni actively constructed in the decades before the Civil War were distinct from other antebellum southern social structures in that they located employment and redefined status for middling-rank southerners. The networks were distinctly southern in growing out of military education, which was most pronounced in that region, and in their paradoxical continuation of community-based culture as they created impersonal paths to professional status. The networks were a movement toward bureaucratization in the Old South; they were, however contradictory it may now seem, built on (and even built to mimic) the region's premodern community and patronage expectations. The student-professor networks, in fact, depended on the maintenance of community connections, but those of school and professional identity rather than of kin and neighborhood. Career networks among military academy matriculates in the prewar South performed functions analogous to postbellum bureaucratic organizations. Middle-class development occurred alongside the antebellum articulation of social, cultural, political, and economic institutions, the increase in military schools, and professionalization; these processes resulted in more complex bureaucratic development in some locations and less in others.

The significance of the networks of military educators is, first, that they centered on the emerging southern middle class, a group difficult to locate and differentiate; second, that they indicate that southern education offered social stability and sometimes mobility; and, finally, that they explicitly linked middle-class stability or mobility to the ongoing national professionalization of teachers, more advanced and bureaucratic in the North but also visible in the Old South. The networks, and the niche they perpetuated, offered military school graduates professional careers in the antebellum South--a time and place ruled by the agricultural elite. Military educators improved the status of similarly educated men and of the teaching profession, in which the middle class invested many of its hopes for stability and growth. The prestige gave them a voice in the slave society. Former cadets such as Robert Simpson created and used active networks to locate stable nonagricultural careers, move into more profitable and respected professions, help professionalize the most commonly selected occupation of teaching, and thereby enhance the status of middle-class young men. Military higher schools spread throughout the South, legitimating the career and attracting more cadets as the years passed. Networks helped men of the emerging middle class hold themselves above the yeoman ranks, an important aspect in creating class stability. While VMI records most clearly demonstrate networks of military educators, similar webs linked other military academies' alumni, forming around C. C. Tew of SCMA and HMA, Micah Jenkins of SCMA and King's Mountain, and R. T. P. and Richard Allen of Kentucky and Bastrop Military Institutes.

Military educator networks demonstrate the developing social stability of nonagricultural professionals: they also suggest that these men's attempts at upward social mobility, driven by the networks, proceeded at the individual career level and in concert with the professionalization of teaching. Mobility, with its contested existence in the historiography of the Old South, has been passed over for the emerging middle class because historians have focused predominately on the two ends of the social spectrum. Nonagricultural professionals in the middling ranks worked to increase their access to higher schooling and to ensure its benefits; specifically, professionalization improved status. Antebellum military teachers both maintained the occupation and strove for more prestigious and lucrative careers; thus, stability was the certain result of their actions, while upward mobility was their hope. Indeed, members of the southern middle class and their views of status show that the group participated in the modernizing cultural shifts of the late antebellum years. Analyzing this period's professionalization and legitimation of professional status encourages the examination of mobility achieved in ways other than acquiring land and slaves, for professionals in the middle class as well as for the master class. While it solidified class distinctions, this system, unlike class formation in the North, remained separate from the emerging capitalist market. Military educator networks, overall, acted concurrently with numerous social organizations but represented one path to stability for a particular segment of southern society.

(1) Robert Henry Simpson to Francis H. Smith (hereinafter FHS), July 1, 1845, December 23, 1845, December 4, 1848, June 4, 1849, January 19, 1850 (Virginia Military Institute Archives, Preston Library, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Va.; hereinafter cited as VMI Archives). Except as noted hereinafter, cadet correspondence comes from the individual student files in the VMI Archives, and Francis H. Smith's letters are from the Francis H. Smith Correspondence, Superintendent's Outgoing Correspondence, Records of the Superintendent, VMI Archives. The author would like to thank Mark Smith, Lou Ferleger, Peggy Hargis, Scott Marler, Amy M. Hay, and the anonymous readers of the Journal of Southern History for their aid with this article.

(2) I have attempted to locate all available primary and secondary sources on antebellum matriculates in southern military schools, and information on 1,057 individuals makes up the data for this study. Unless otherwise indicated, all percentages in the text are based on analysis of the appropriate portion of this data. Full information is not available for every individual; therefore, not every percentage given draws on all 1,057 cases. For example, occupational data exists for 845 alumni and for 368 of their fathers. Because of their connection to the armed services and a military career, the U.S. service academies are excluded from this analysis. These cases were compiled from research in the following archives: American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. (hereinafter cited as AAS): Citadel Archives and Museum, Charleston, S.C. (hereinafter cited as Citadel Archives); Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University (hereinafter cited as Duke); Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.: Special Collections Department, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Ky.; Georgia Archives, Morrow, Ga.; Library of Virginia, Richmond: North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: North Carolina State Archives, Office of Archives and History, Raleigh; South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia; South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston; South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia (hereinafter cited as SCL); Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereinafter cited as SHC); Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville; Special Collections and Digital Programs, Special Collections Library, Margaret I. King Building, University of Kentucky, Lexington; Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; Vanderbilt University Archives, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn. (hereinafter cited as Vanderbilt); Virginia Historical Society, Richmond: VMI Archives; Department of Library Special Collections, Manuscript Collections, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green; Mervyn H. Sterne Library and Reynolds Historical Library, University of Alabama at Birmingham; and Department of Archives and Special Collections, J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi, University, Miss. The author will provide specific collection citations upon request.

(3) Simpson to FHS, December 23, 1845, June 4, 1849 (quotations), October 3, [1851], June 24, 1853, December 12, 1853, December 21, 1853, VMI Archives.

(4) Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (Chapel Hill, 2004), 8; The 1995 Register of Former Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute (Lexington, Va., 1995), 26-38. Census data is available online at University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, United States Historical Census Data Browser, 1850 census data, http:// fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus/index.html (accessed February 8, 2005). The debate over the existence of a middle class is just beginning. Part of the controversy involves terminology. Wells employs the term "middling class" for the group before 1850, but he uses "middle class" after 1850 because he asserts that class consciousness was present in that period. In this article the terms are used interchangeably. My work does not confirm the presence of class consciousness and allows for the inclusion of rural professionals, building on James Oakes's suggestion of "middle-class slaveholders" in The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982), 57-65.

(5) On the difficulties of defining the middle class, see Peter N. Stearns, "The Middle Class: Toward a Precise Definition," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 21 (July 1979). 377-96. Stearns's work reflects the depth of scholarship on the northern middle class. Burton J. Bledstein essentially accepts the nineteenth-century assertions that southerners did not develop a middle class. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976), 28-29. Stuart M. Blumin clearly omits the southern experience. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York, 1989), 14. See also Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York, 1978); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge. Eng., 1981); and Richard L. Bushman. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992).

(6) In his work on a more precise definition of the plain folk, Samuel C. Hyde Jr. writes, "In short, plain folk is not synonymous with middle class, but, instead, plain folk are those among the middle class who farmed." Hyde, "Plain Folk Reconsidered: Historiographical Ambiguity in Search of Definition," Journal of Southern History, 71 (November 2005), 813. Further definitional work will distinguish the middle class from the plain folk. For example, Michele Gillespie, Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789-1860 (Athens, Ga., 2000), explores the middling ranks by studying artisans. Also see Wells, Origins of the Southern Middle Class. Two recent dissertations also suggest new avenues of scholarship: Frank J. Byrne, "Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the Antebellum and Confederate South" (Ph.D. dissertation. Ohio State University, 2000); and John Gordon Deal, "The Forgotten Southerner: Middle-Class Associationalism in Antebellum Norfolk, Virginia" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 2003).

(7) Wells, Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 135.

(8) Ibid.: Peter S. Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War and Reunion (Chapel Hill, 2005), 30; Rod Andrew Jr., Long Gray Lines: The Southern Military School Tradition, 1839-1915 (Chapel Hill, 2001), esp. chap. 1: Byrne, "Becoming Bourgeois." Wells and Carmichael stress the northern influences on the southerners they examine; of course, both ascribe the acceptance of slavery, and eventually secession, to southern culture. This article examines networking and professionalization to assess class formation and social stability but does not explain the individual values of the emerging southern middle class. It is important to note that the southernness of the middle class dovetails with the conception of the "prebourgeois nature of southern society" [Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South (Baton Rouge, 1982), 34n23] and separates the group from a national capitalist system suggested in such works as Laurence Shore, Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 1832 1885 (Chapel Hill, 1986), and William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century, South (Baton Rouge, 2003). The southern middle class appears to have accepted some premodern and some capitalist values. The tension between them balanced differently according to area and experience; for example, while rural and urban professionals appreciated professionalism, they may have disagreed on other beliefs, just as professionals in Virginia and in Mississippi would have shared some traits and differed on others.

(9) In some respects, the emergence of this southern professional middle class foreshadowed the process of professionalization in the postwar North. See Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism, and Carmichael. Last Generation.

(10) Nancy Beadie. "Internal Improvement: The Structure and Culture of Academy Expansion in New York State in the Antebellum Era, 1820-1860." in Beadie and Kim Tolley, eds., Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727-1925 (New York, 2002), 101. Beadle defines the small-town middle class as "property owners who relied on their own household labor." Ibid.

(11) Focusing on occupation reflects the primary category for analysis in studies of the middle class and mobility. See Stearns, "Middle Class," and Michael Katz, "Occupational Classification in History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 3 (Summer 1972), 63-88, who notes that prestige should be considered alongside occupation. Within the military school cohort in the South, ethnicity, race, and gender are uniform due to the general homogeneity of the white southern population and the prerequisites for school admission: associational memberships with Freemasonry are few (thirteen alumni) but suggest middle-class status. On multivariate analyses, see Maris A. Vinovskis. "Quantification and the Analysis of American Antebellum Education," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 13 (Spring 1983), 761-86. The nonagricultural tendency at southern military schools resonates with James L. Morrison Jr.'s conclusions that West Point cadets were members of the middle class and that their fathers were 19 percent less likely to be farmers and 10 percent more likely to be attorneys than the general 1850 population. James Morrison, "The Best School in the World": West Point, the Pre Civil War Years, 1833-1806 (Kent, Ohio, 1986), 62, 155-58. My book-length manuscript on military education analyzes the occupations of cadets and their fathers in greater depth.

(12) C. C. T. [Charles Courtenay Tew], "South-Carolina Military Academies," Southern Quarterly Review, new sex., 10 (July 1854). 191-204, esp. p. 203. In contrast to the high percentage of nonagricultural and professional military school families, elite planters were, by definition, agricultural, and they engaged in dual careers at a minority rate of 20.2 percent, according to Scarborough's thorough study. (I omitted land speculation as a professional career.) Scarborough, Masters of the Big House, 219. Notable examples are Charles Ruffin, his father's ninth child, who enrolled in VMI, and P. G. T. Beauregard, who, after turning down the superintendency of the Louisiana State Seminary and Military Academy, arranged for two sons to attend. Elite attendance reflected growing professional aspirations, especially for sons who would not inherit the bulk of an estate; Carmichael, in Last Generation, describes this trend but, given his sources, omits a class component.

(13) See note 2 for more on the use of the data set that supports this article. A small number of military schools started before 1839, such as Rice Creek Spring Military Academy in South Carolina, but the vast majority followed VMI's establishment.

(14) I have included only those schools about which I have direct evidence. Bruce Allardice counts ninety-six schools, but he does not list them. Allardice, "West Points of the Confederacy: Southern Military Schools and the Confederate Army," Civil War History, 43 (December 1997), 321. An additional twelve schools existed in the North: they made up 12.6 percent of the total for the two regions. This article employs military academy, institute, and school interchangeably, reflecting the fluidity of terms and regulations in nineteenth-century terminology.

(15) The dearth of work on southern antebellum education is notable; for example, southern historians published only four journal articles on the topic in 2003. "Southern History in Periodicals, 2003: A Selected Bibliography," Journal of Southern History. 70 (May 2004), 351-402. Recent scholarship hopefully indicates revived interest. Works include the broad synthesis in Robert F. Pace's Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South (Baton Rouge, 2004) and analysis of the public (common) schools in Bruce W. Eelman. "'An Educated and Intelligent People Cannot be Enslaved': The Struggle for Common Schools in Antebellum Spartanburg, South Carolina,'" History of Education Quarterly. 44 (Summer 2004), 250-70: and J. Mills Thornton III, "Fiscal Policy and the Failure of Radical Reconstruction in the Lower South," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds.. Region, Race. and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1982), 378-84. On higher schools, see Kim Tolley, "Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling, 1727-1850," in Beadie and Tolley, eds., Chartered Schools, 19 (quotation). Southern historians often underestimate the significance of schooling as an agent for mobility in the antebellum South. Examples of curricula can be found in Regulations of the Georgia Military Institute, Marietta, Georgia (n.p., January 1853), 4; Semi-Annual Register, of the Officers and Cadets, of the Hillsboro Military Academy (Raleigh, 1860); Rules and Regulations of the Western Military Institute at Tyree Springs, Sumner County, TN, and the Official Register of Officers and Cadets for the Collegiate Year 1853-54 (Nashville, 1854), 12: University of Nashville, The Official Register of Officers and Cadets for the Collegiate Year 1854-5. and Rules and Regulations, with Annual Announcement of Faculty and Officers for 1855-6 (Nashville, 1855), 15-16: Official Register of the Officers and Cadets at the South Carolina Military Academies (Charleston, S.C., 1850), 9: Official Register of the South Carolina Military Academy (Columbia, S.C., 1860), 20; Register of the Officers and Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute (Philadelphia, 1847); Register of the Officers and Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute (Philadelphia, 1852); Regulations of the Kentucky Military Institute (n.p., [1855]), copy in AAS: Catalogue of the (Officers and Students of the Rappahannock Academy and Military Institute, Caroline County. Virginia (Baltimore. 1851); and Catalogue. Course of Studies. Address to the Patrons, &c. of Williamsburg Military School (Richmond, 1853).

(16) University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, United States Historical Census Data Browser, 1850 census data: public schools are excluded from the census figures in the text. Military schools conferred diplomas of graduation and rarely bachelor's degrees. It is now somewhat problematic to get a definitive accounting of the ratio of nonmilitary to military institutions; in addition to the absence of records, nineteenth-century terminology leads to difficulty in making apt comparisons. Francis H. Smith, Introductory Address to the Corps of Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute, on the Resumption of Academic Duties (Richmond, 1856), 7, compares VMI to Virginia's colleges. Current collegiate institutions, such as VMI, were not so categorized in the antebellum period, despite Pace and Carmichael identifying VMI as such. See Pace, Halls of Honor, xiv: and Carmichael, Last Generation, 84. Military schools like VMI best fit the current analytical category "higher schooling," defined in Tolley, "Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling," 19. Compiling data from three sources, Donald G. Tewksbury concluded that thirty-two to forty-two colleges were founded from 1840 to 1849 and sixty-six to ninety-two in the period 1850 to 1861; my figures for military higher schools indicate a similar degree of growth: eighteen and thirty-five for the respective decades. Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War, with Particular Reference to the Religious Influences Bearing Upon the College Movement (1932; reprint, [Hamden, Conn.], 1965), 16. Allardice, "West Points of the Confederacy," 321, estimates that twelve thousand alumni of military academies entered the Confederate army, a figure that implies many more cadets enrolled between 1840 and 1860. In this study, "alumni" includes both graduates and matriculates, except where specified.

(17) John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (Boston, 1956), chap. 8. Franklin's focus on militarism has been challenged by Marcus Cunliffe, among others. See Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775-1865 (Boston, 1968), chap 10, esp. pp. 355-58. Andrew, Long Gray Lines, 2-3, chap. I, incorporates republicanism and the citizen-soldier ideal into Franklin's argument.

(18) The historiography of education in the Old South could better consider post-1970s revisionist conclusions that northern non-elites pursued collegiate educations. David F. Allmendinger's pioneering study of northern colleges finds that poor young men did attend. Allmendinger, Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England (New York, 1975). Scholars, however, describe southern college students as elites. See Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636 (San Francisco, 1977), chap. 3, esp. pp. 54-58, 71-75; Pace, Halls of Honor; Michael Sugrue, "South Carolina College: The Education of an Antebellum Elite" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1992): Roger L. Geiger, "Introduction: New Themes in the History of Nineteenth-Century Colleges." in Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville, 2000), 1-36: and Jennings L. Wagoner Jr., "Honor and Dishonor at Mr, Jefferson's University: The Antebellum Years," History of Education Quarterly, 26 (Summer 1986), 155-79, esp. pp. 167-68. The present article's assertion of class distinctions at different schools dovetails with Colin B. Burke's finding that, alter 1820, colleges became differentiated through "student characteristics"; see Burke, American Collegiate Populations (New York, 1982), 7. Essays in Beadie and Tolley, eds., Chartered Schools, detail how private academies allowed women to pay to attend in situations where they otherwise would have been excluded. See especially Margaret A. Nash, "'A Triumph of Reason': Female Education in Academies," ibid., 64-86; and Kathryn Walbert, "'Endeavor to Improve Yourself': The Education of White Women in the Antebellum South," ibid., 116-36. The same analysis needs to be applied to southern men in a class-based study. Of course, some academies and smaller colleges in the South also adopted the non-classical curriculum to attract non-elites; military education was one segment of these reforms. Additional scholarship on southern academies, small colleges, and their students will create more detailed comparisons.

(19) The curriculum is detailed in the catalogs cited in note 15.

(20) Jennifer R. Green, "'Practical Progress is the Watchword': Military Education and the Expansion of Opportunity in the Old South," Journal of the Historical Society, 5 (Fall 2005), 363-90, argues that military school funding and curriculum provided scientific and vocational training that expanded educational opportunity into the emerging southern middle class. Works on military schools include Andrew, Long Gray Lines, esp. chap. 1; Dean Paul Baker, "The Partridge Connection: Alden Partridge and Southern Military Education" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1986); and Lester Austin Webb, "The Origin of Military Schools in the United States Founded in the Nineteenth Century" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1958). On VMI see Henry A. Wise, Drawing Out the Man: The VMI Story (Charlottesville, 1978), and William Couper, One Hundred Years at V.M.I. (4 vols.; Richmond, 1939). On SCMA see John Peyre Thomas, The History of the South Carolina Military Academy (Charleston, S.C., 1893). Carmichael, Last Generation, 47, calculates that the cost of attending the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1860 was $423.50, approximately twice the charges a tuition-paying cadet would incur. Indeed, Roger Geiger cites UVA as the most expensive college in 1840, and Jennings Wagoner's figures concur. Geiger, "Introduction," 20; Wagoner, "Honor and Dishonor at Mr. Jefferson's University," 167n33. On South Carolina College's funding, see Daniel Walker Hollis, University of South Carolina (2 vols.; Columbia, S.C., 1951-1956), I, 129-36, 153.

(21) FHS to George Butler, May 25, 1849, June 5, 1849, June 20, 1849, July 18, 1849; Butler to FHS, June 1, 1849; Briscoe Baldwin to FHS, July 24, 1849, November 24, 1849, March 12, 1850; and Charles Derby to FHS, August 6, 1849, VMI Archives.

(22) At some point before the Civil War, 26.6 percent of all military school matriculates, 38.8 percent of all military schools' graduates, and 40.2 percent of VMI graduates taught. The 1850 census identified 73 professors and 547 academy teachers in the state, while VMI had produced 76 teachers by 1850. Engineers, 11.7 percent of all military alumni, also used the networks for recommendations. See L. W. Reid to Major Preston, July 29, 1858, August 3, 1858; Daniel Trueheart to FHS, June 3, 1851, June 22, 1859, VMI Archives; and University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, United States Historical Census Data Browser, 1850 census data.

(23) Smith, Introductory Address to the Corps; Smith, The Regulations of Military Institutions, Applied to the Conduct of Common Schools (New York, 1849), 5 (first and second quotations); Semi-Annual Report of the Virginia Military, Institute, January 14, 1848 (third quotation), copy in AAS.

(24) Henry D. Moore, unpublished memoir, typescript, [1900], p. 3, Henry D. Moore Autobiography #A1980.17, Citadel Archives. Moore does not specify whether his figure indicates antebellum or postbellum careers and appears to omit early years of teaching; however, published sources similarly put the prewar number at 29 percent; see Thomas, History of the South Carolina Military Academy, 258-70; and Official Register of the South Carolina Military Academy (1860), 21-24.

(25) Simpson to FHS. January 9, 1851, VMI Archives. For a similar letter, see Daniel Trueheart to FHS, July 10, 1859, ibid.

(26) Mark S. Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology, 78 (May 1973), 1360-80. For a methodological discussion of network studies, see Peter V. Marsden, "Network Data and Measurement." Annual Review of Sociology, 16 (1990), 435 63: and Peggy G. Hargis, "For the Love of Place: Paternalism and Patronage in the Georgia Lowcounty, 1865-1898," Journal of Southern History, 70 (November 2004), 825-64.

(27) William H. Stith to Gen. W. H. Richardson, December 1, 1847: James Ashton to Maj. J. T. L. Preston, July 20, 1858; FHS to Philip St. George Cocke, June 2, 1859, VMI Archives; Micah Jenkins to brother, March 22, [1855], Micah Jenkins Papers, 1855-1879, Duke. Allardice, "West Points of the Confederacy," 315, mentions Smith's "teacher-placement service."

(28) FHS to J. B. Cary, June 1, 1859, VMI Archives. Three weeks later the exchange continued when Smith explained that Keiter and another VMI applicant had accepted better positions, and Smith suggested a third alumnus for that position. FHS to J. B. Cary, June 26, 1859, ibid.

(29) Charles Y. Steptoe to FHS, August 18. 1859 (first and second quotations); FHS to William Clarke, August 17, 1859 (third and fourth quotations), ibid. To speculate on the larger connections within the network, it is probably no coincidence that a cadet named Catlett and two named Taliaferro attended VMI in the 1840s and 1850s. Charles Derby to Father, February 26, 1847, ibid.

(30) FHS to John R. Jones, December 14, 1859, ibid.

(31) Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 152-54; Vinovskis, "Quantification and the Analysis of American Antebellum Education," 769 (quotation), 776; Roger L. Geiger with Julie Ann Bubolz, "College as It Was in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," in Geiger, ed., American College in the Nineteenth Century, 80-90, esp. p. 89. Howard P. Chudacoff, "Success and Security: The Meaning of Social Mobility in America," Reviews in American History, 10 (December 1982), 101-12, lays out some excellent theoretical issues. The difficulties of young southerners finding professional careers can also be seen in Steven M. Stowe, Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill, 2004), chap. 3: and Carmichael, Last Generation, 37, 57.

(32) Working-class men and artisans in the South often struggled without the developing net works that aided military educators. In comparison to those difficulties, networks provided alumni who had specialized education with good salaries, secure positions, new jobs, and growing status. On mechanics and artisans, see Gillespie, Free Labor in an Unfree World, and Dudley S. Johnson, "William Harris Garland: Mechanic of the Old South," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 53 (March 1969), 41-56. On college failure rates, estimated at approximately 15 percent nationwide but higher in the South, see Burke, American Collegiate Populations, 23, 25; and Geiger, "Introduction," 4-6.

(33) George Patton to FHS, January 16, 1855, VMI Archives. Other examples include William Finney to FHS, September 2, 1848, November 20, 1849: Briscoe Baldwin to FHS, November 27, 1849: and Gabriel C. Wharton to FHS, June 6, 1848, ibid.

(34) T. F. Johnson to FHS, February 11, 1851 (quotations): FHS to William A. Forbes, December 21, 1850, ibid.

(35) Micah Jenkins to John Jenkins, February 24, 1856, Folder 7, February 27, 1856, Folder 7, July 21, 1857, Folder 9, July 4, 1859, Folder 10, John Jenkins Papers, SCL; Micah Jenkins to J. P. Thomas, April 18, 1860; Asbury Coward and Micah Jenkins, Articles of Agreement, January 5, 1855, Legal Size Folder 1, Micah Jenkins Papers, SCL; Micah Jenkins to brother, March 22, [1855], Jenkins Papers, Duke. See also E. T. Crowson, "Jenkins, Coward, and the Yorkville Boys," Alumni News (Winter 1974-1975), copy in Micah Jenkins Folder, Citadel Archives.

(36) Daniel Trueheart to FHS, June 3. 1851 (first quotation); William Clarke to FHS, August 11, 1859 (second quotation), VMI Archives.

(37) Charles Derby to FHS, May 4, 1849 (quotation), October 27, 1849, May 21, 1851, June 11, 1851. July 21, 1851, October 24, 1851, January 13, 1852, November 25, 1853, December 27, 1854, March 7, 1855, September 17, 1855, December 2, 1855: Robert Rodes to FHS, October 8, 1859, ibid. See also the correspondence of, for example. Robert H. Simpson, Daniel Trueheart, Henry Whiting, and Robert Rodes, ibid.

(38) Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism; Paul H. Mattingly, The Classless Profession: American Schoolmen in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1975); Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana, 1977); Samuel Haber, The Quest for Authority and Honor in the American Professions, 1750-1900 (Chicago, 1991); Stowe, Doctoring the South; Beth Barton Schweiger, The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in Nineteenth-Century Virginia (New York, 2000), chap. 3.

(39) Wells, Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 140, states, "After 1840, a growing subculture of teachers emerged"; he cites professional journals (mostly for common school teachers) in the South but describes mostly female teachers. The feminization of teachers started in this era in elementary, public, and northern schools: in the South, in particular, teaching professionalized as a male career. Studies outside the Northeast remain to be done, as noted by Kim Tolley and Margaret A. Nash, "Leaving Home to Teach: The Diary of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815-1841," in Beadie and Tolley, eds., Chartered Schools, 179-80n4. Also see Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York, 1983), chap. 6.

(40) Robert Rodes to FHS, November 27, 1856 (quotation); Augustus Powell to FHS, November 4, 1846; James Murfee to FHS, August 27, 1855, VMI Archives; Reports on the Course of Instruction in Yale College (New Haven, 1828). Michael O'Brien notes the poor training in mathematics, political economy, and modern languages provided in southern universities despite Basil Manly's calling those languages "necessary to a man of business." See O'Brien, Conjectures of Order." Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 (2 vols.: Chapel Hill, 2004), I, 30-32, 329, 330 (quotation), II, 879.

(41) Schweiger, Gospel Working Up: Stowe, Doctoring the South, 2 (quotation); Steven Stowe, "H-South Review: Stowe Replies to Emberton's Review," H-South posting, March 2, 2006, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=lm&list=H-South.

(42) On the general trend see Andrew, Long Gray Lines. 20-21: on Thornton and Jones see their student files, VMI Archives; on Magill see Cadet J. W. Fraser, "First Cadet Finals Are Called to Mind" (n.p., [1940]), copy in James W. Fraser File, Citadel Archives.

(43) Testimonials and pedagogical advice from superintendents helped support new schools at a time when many schools shut their doors for lack of students. For example, see FHS to J. C. Councill, June 20, 1859; and FHS to G. M. Edgar, June 16, 1859, VMI Archives. VMI student files, alumni biographical information, and alumni letters indicate the schools the young men established; for example see John R. Jones to FHS, November 29, 1859, and Augustus Powell to FHS, December 10, 1845, ibid.

(44) Catalogue of the Officers and Cadets of the Kentucky Military Institute, Six miles from Frankfort Kentucky (Frankfort, 1853); Semi-Annual Register ... of the Hillsboro Military Academy (1860); Rules and Regulations of the Western Military Institute at Tyree Springs (1854). See also Allardice, "West Points of the Confederacy," 314. Professors at military institutes, when not military school alumni, generally held bachelor's degrees, indicating that they graduated college.

(45) On the history of KMI, see James Darwin Stephens, Reflections: A Portrait-Biography of the Kentucky Military Institute, 1845-1971 (Georgetown, Ky., 1991). Cadet Leeland Hathaway followed Edwin Morgan from Western to Kentucky. See his unpublished memoir, ca. 1890, Leeland Hathaway Recollections #2954, SHC.

(46) Gabriel Jordan to William D. Stuart, November 22, 1854, William Dabney Stuart Papers #0108, VMI Archives; John R. Jones to FHS, November 29, 1859, ibid. On moving to Mississippi, see R. D. Powell to FHS, August 16, 1845. Augustus Powell Student File, ibid.; on Alabama. see Robert Oswald Sams, unpublished memoir, Citadel Archives.

(47) Graham selected William T. Sherman, an 1840 West Point graduate, as superintendent. George M. Graham to FHS, May 30, 1859, August 4, 1859: FHS to George M. Graham, August 18, 1859; FHS to William T. Sherman, September 30, 1859; FHS to Robert Rodes, June 20, 1859; Rodes to FHS, July 4, 1859; Daniel Trueheart to FHS, July 10, 1859, VMI Archives. Also see Franklin, Militant South, chap. 8; Allardice, "West Points of the Confederacy"; Edwin L. Dooley Jr., "'A Fine College from This Time Forward': The Influence of VMI on the Militarization of the University of Alabama" (April 19, 1997; presented at the University of Alabama, copy in author's possession).

(48) John W. Brockenbrough, Address Delivered on Laying the Corner Stone of the New Barracks of the Virginia Military Institute (New York, 1850); 1995 Register of Former Cadets, viii; Royster Lyle Jr. and Matthew W. Paxton Jr., "The VMI Barracks," Virginia Cavalcade, 23 (Winter 1974), 14-29; Western Military Institute, Order Book, 1848-1855, University of Nashville, Record Group 2988, Vanderbilt. Kentucky Military Institute increased its average enrollment from 72 to 150 cadets in the early 1850s; see Kentucky Military Institute, Circular of Information on Ante-bellum and Post-bellum Professors and Officers of the Institute ... (Frankfort. 1878), in the Rare Pamphlet Collection, Filson Historical Society.

(49) Andrew, Long Gray Lines, 20-21, partially attributes the success of military education to the growing number of alumni. Examples include Robert H. Simpson to FHS, December 11, 1851; Charles Derby to FHS, August 23, 1852: James J. Phillips to FHS, December 13, [1846], December 24, 1846, August 12, 1856; Stephen T. Pendleton to FHS, May 25, 1845; John H. Pitts to FHS, July 15, 1845; and John R. Jones to FHS, January 28, 1849 [1850], VMI Archives.

(50) On status, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982). Gillespie maintains that ownership of slaves and land was the cornerstone of "a prescribed set of patterns" to achieve mobility. Gillespie, Free Labor in an Unfree World, 33. In contrast, Carmichael, Last Generation details the increasing prestige attributed to professions. The professionalization of military educator networks contributed to the growing occupational status of the southern middle class.

(51) Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Katz, "Occupational Classification in History."

(52) Smith, An Elementary Treatise on Analytical Geometry: Translated from the French of J. B. Biot ... (New York, 1840): Smith, An Elementary Treatise on Algebra: Prepared for the Use of the Cadets of the Virginia Military Institute, and Adapted to the Present State of Mathematical Instruction in the Schools. Academies, and Colleges, of the United States (Philadelphia, 1848); Smith and R. T. W. Duke, The American Statistical Arithmetic: Designed for Academies and Schools (Philadelphia, 1845); Wise, Drawing Out the Man, 66. Not surprisingly, the teachers who complimented Smith on his texts were also men who relied on the network and Smith's recommendations. Charles Derby to FHS, November 27, 1849, July 21, 1851; Augustus Powell to FHS, November 4, 1846, VMI Archives.

(53) Careers such as J. M. Richardson's teaching for Tew at HMA seven years after leaving SCMA endorse that connection. [Tew], "South-Carolina Military Academies." Tew is briefly discussed in "Family Losses in the War," Confederate Veteran, 10 (February 1902), 79-82.

(54) Edwin Heriot, The Polytechnic School, the Best System of Practical Education (Charleston, 1850); D. H. Hill, Essay on Military Education, delivered at Wilmington NC, November 14, 1860 Before the State Educational Convention (Charlotte, 1860); Smith, Regulations of Military Institutions; Smith, College Reform (Philadelphia, 1851); James H. Thornwell, Letter to His Excellency Governor Manning on Public Instruction in South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1853).

(55) Obviously, the Morrill Act did not apply to the Confederacy when enacted, but schools in the South started with the bill's support after the war. Its passage in the U.S. reflected both wartime concerns and a valuation of military educators that supports their increased presence and status in the 1850s. O'Brien, Conjectures of Order, 1, 392, notes that mathematical education did not equate to a gentleman's status. But it clearly raised those men above "the common mass," and I am arguing that that ranking reflected middle-class stability.

(56) Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism. Tutoring did not receive the same approbation. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 186-87. Some military alumni accepted tutoring but looked for more prestigious placements.

(57) Andrew, Long Gray Lines: Daniel Kilbride, "Southern Medical Students in Philadelphia, 1800-1861: Science and Sociability in the 'Republic of Medicine,'" Journal of Southern History, 65 (November 19991. 697-732, describes this drive among elites; Bushman, Refinement of America, addresses it primarily for northerners.

(58) On the Patton brothers, see various items in their student files in the VMI Archives.

(59) Robert Simpson to FHS, December 4. 1848, ibid. Documents on other men who wanted to learn Greek to enter a professorship include Edward Fristoe to FHS, April 4, 1850, May 24, 1852, ibid.; and Victor Manger, unpublished memoir, Victor Manget Memoirs #A1995.11, Citadel Archives.

(60) John D. Wylie to Lafayette Strait, January 4, 1854, Papers of the Gaston, Strait, Wylie, and Baskin Families, SCL. Cadets teaching while studying to become lawyers include Robert P. Carson, William Clarke, Giles B. Cooke, Joseph Hambrick, Charles Hurt, Alexander C. Jones, James Kincheloe, and Craig McDonald. See their respective student files in the VMI Archives.

(61) Schweiger, Gospel Working Up, 200. Schweiger also finds that 46 percent of the next generation of clergy, ordained between 1850 and 1861, were teachers before the war. Ibid. Carmichael, Last Generation, 50, describes a UVA graduate's "random pattern" of employment as a teacher and lawyer.

(62) William Finney to FHS, November 20, 1848. VMI Archives. On Monroe and Helm, see Stephens, Reflections.

(63) Kilbride, "Southern Medical Students in Philadelphia." 724-25.

(64) Oakes, Ruling Race, 58-59: Wells, Origins of the Southern Middle Class: Carmichael, Last Generation.

(65) George Patton to FHS, January 16, 1855; William Finney to FHS, November 20, 1848, VMI Archives; entry for November 30, 1851, Robert Gatewood Notebook-Diary, MS #300, ibid. (quotations).

(66) These starting teachers' salaries (usually four hundred dollars or more per year, plus room and often board) compared favorably to the average annual salary for clerks in the southern states, which was approximately six hundred dollars. Robert A. Margo, Wages and Labor Markets in the United States, 1820-1860 (Chicago, 2000), 67. Samuel B. Sweat's casual teaching position and lack of salary are mentioned in Johnson, "William Harris Garland," 4748. See also John R. Jones to FHS, January 28, 1849; and Henry Whiting to FHS, July 18, 1853, August 1, 1853, VMI Archives.

(67) Edward C. Edmonds to FHS, May 18, 1859, VMI Archives. One cadet claimed he bad never heard of Smith refusing to loan cadets money (usually ten to twenty dollars). Francis Suddoth to FHS, July 18, 1856, ibid. Similar examples are George Patton to FHS, January 26, 1852; Edward Fristoe to FHS, July 9, 1846; and James Ashton to Maj. J. T. L. Preston, July 20, 1858, ibid.

(68) Many historians accept and discuss southern community expectations. See, for example, Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor; Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers. Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting. and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton, 1996): and Wagoner, "Honor and Dishonor at Mr. Jefferson's University," 157-63.

(69) Gregg D. Kimball pointed out that voluntary associations did not prevent other layers of connection. He gave comments at a session titled "Merchants, Markets and the Middle Class: Southern Identity in Antebellum Virginia Towns," at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association, Memphis. Tenn., November 4, 2004.

(70) It should be noted that similar networks probably existed at nonmilitary schools, though without the dominance of one career their success and depth may not have been as great. See the appendix in Schweiger, Gospel Working Up; Kilbride, "Southern Medical Students in Philadelphia"; and Sugrue, "South Carolina College."

(71) Edward Hill to FHS, February 1, 1861, VMI Archives. For similar evidence, see also George C. Hutter to FHS, June 17, 1859, Edward S. Hurter Student File, ibid.

(72) Archd. Atkinson to Board of Visitors, June 1, 1840, John C. Wills Student File, ibid. Within the overall sample of military school matriculates, 20 percent of all fathers were recorded as dying before their sons graduated, and an additional 13.5 percent of cadets had guardians without their fathers' deaths being clearly stated in the records. Certainly, patronage never guaranteed careers for middle-class youth. Consider that the aid received by Hinton Rowan Helper's family helped his older brother maintain the family's "middle-class status"; the Helpers' guardian and kin resources provided them, like some military alumni, with sufficient resources to stabilize their social position and avoid downward mobility. David Brown, "Attacking Slavery from Within: The Making of The Impending Crisis of the South," Journal of Southern History, 70 (August 2004), 550.

(73) Gabriel Jordan Jr. to William D. Stuart, November 22. 1854, Stuart Papers (quotation): A. H. Stuart to FHS, May 6, 1847, VMI Archives. For a more common example of alumni exchanges see Edmund Pendleton to Philip James Winn, March 28, 1845, Pendleton Student File, ibid.

(74) Granovetter, "Strength of Weak Ties." Michael Sugrue slates that South Carolina College alumni, including James Henry Hammond, corresponded but not for occupational aid. Sugrue, "'We Desired Our Future Rulers to Be Educated Men': South Carolina College, the Defense of Slavery, and the Development of Secessionist Politics." in Geiger, ed., American College in the Nineteenth Century, 93. Hammond was also studied by Drew Gilpin Faust in A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 (Baltimore, 1977).

(75) Egbert Ross to Emma Ross, April 20, 1860, Emma E. Ross Harty Papers #3631, SHC.

(76) Simpson to FHS, December 21, 1853, VMI Archives.

(77) The increasing attention to professional status and the values being encouraged by the growth of the southern middle class is relevant to non-elite visions of manhood in the Old South. Cadets, in tact, balanced military honor's demand for submission and southern honor's call for mastery. While non-elite cadets accepted the tenets of southern honor, they also began to absorb professional values such as temperance and religiosity into their understanding of manhood. Some southern young men incorporated religious and professional impulses into southern honor so that diversity in the definition of manhood, especially among non-elite groups, bubbled to the surface and is currently garnering historiographic attention. See Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover, eds., Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South (Athens, Ga., 2004); Jennifer R. Green, "'Stout Chaps Who Can Bear the Distress': Young Men in Antebellum Military Academies," ibid., 174-95; Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997), 250-52; and Carmichael, Last Generation, 11, chap. 3. For extended discussions of elite honor, see Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor; Greenberg, Honor and Slavery; and Pace, Halls of Honor.

(78) Pace describes them as having "near absolute" influence and being the site in which students' honor ethic developed. Pace, Halls of Honor, 73. Also see Rudolph, Curriculum, 98: Frederick Rudolph, The American College amt University: A History (New York, 1962), chap. 7, esp. pp. 143-46; Wells, Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 101-2; and Carmichael, Last Generation, 72-73. James McLachlan examines Princeton College but omits regional analysis in "'The Choice of Hercules: American Student Societies in the Early 19th Century," in Lawrence Stone, ed., The University in Society (2 vols.; Princeton, 1974), II, 449-94. See also Philip James Winn to John Winn. December 14, 1839, John Winn and Philip James Winn Papers, Duke.

(79) As with many antebellum educational institutions, the number and composition of southern Greek letter societies is difficult to ascertain. Francis W. Shepardson, ed., Baird's Manual of American College Fraternities: A Deseriptive Analysis with a Detailed Account of Each Fraternity (Menasha, Wise., 1930), 3, records that only two fraternities had been founded at southern schools by 1856, though several organizations founded elsewhere existed at southern universities. In contrast Clyde Sanfred Johnson lists more societies as starting in the South, especially early in the nineteenth century, but describes their northern counterparts as more successful and lasting. Johnson, Fraternities in Our Colleges (New York, 1972), chaps. 1-3 (esp. pp. 21-22). On fraternities at Kentucky Military Institute, see Stephens, Reflections, 15.

(80) Literature about alumni associations now focuses on the organizations' fund-raising component, which of course takes them very far from their nineteenth-century origins. A comprehensive study of alumni organizations still needs to be done; most texts are specific to an institution. Fraternal societies that alumni might join, such as the Freemasons or the Odd Fellows, could also have acted as network creation points as well. Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch suggests men entered fraternal societies for similar reasons. See Pflugrad-Jackisch, "A Host of Shameless Imposters: Fraternal Orders and the Urban Confidence Man in Antebellum Virginia," presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association, Memphis, Tenn., November 4, 2004.

MS. GREEN is an assistant professor of history at Central Michigan University.

TABLE 1
MILITARY SCHOOL ALUMNI TEACHERS, 1840-1860

                                              Number of
                                              Alumni      Percentage

Teachers only                                 116         51
Teachers first, then one occupation            58         26
Teachers first, then two or more occupations   17          8
Teachers with one or more other occupation
  (order unspecified)                          27         12
Other occupation, and then teacher              9          4

NOTE: N = 227 individuals. Service in the Mexican War was not
calculated as an occupation.

SOURCE: See footnote 2.