The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861.

The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861. By Jonathan Daniel Wells (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xv plus 321 pp. $59.95).

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

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

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

The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 is an ambitious, serious work. The complexity of its analyses presented in often graceful prose makes for a persuasive argument that an influential middle class did exist in the antebellum South. Unfortunately, in places Wells strains his evidence to support conclusions regarding the ideology and impact of this class. He bases his contention that the southern middle class condemned the ethic of honor, notably dueling, on the questionable supposition that they were overwhelmingly evangelical Christians. Thus attacks upon the honor code made from the pulpit are presented as reflecting middle-class attitudes. Much of the evidence he offers regarding membership in actual anti-dueling societies comes from Charleston, South Carolina, hardly a typical community in the Old South. Wells is even less convincing when he argues that the middle class was in the vanguard of developing a coherent plan to create a modern industrial slave society. His proof that as a class they viewed the institution of slavery as a means to undercut the demands of white labor primarily rests upon two cases, the Norfolk Dry Dock Affair (1830-31) and the Tredegar Ironworker's Strike (1847). These examples hardly represent an ideological movement and both occurred before the 1850s, supposedly the critical decade of the American middle class split according to Wells's timeline. Other evidence that is held out as indicating support for industrial slavery often comes from manufacturers with questionable middle-class credentials, industrialist William Gregg for example, or from regional publications that seem to be more interested in the free labor/slave labor divide within the country than the future of African slaves as industrial workers. Wells's analysis on this point becomes less convincing the further he moves beyond the conclusions reached by Robert Fogel and Eric Foner. Such reservations aside, Jonathan Daniel Wells has opened a promising new field of inquiry. The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 is an important work that should force historians to reassess their understanding of the nineteenth-century South.

Frank J. Byrne

State University of New York, Oswego