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

The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861. By Jonathan Daniel Wells. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xviii, 321. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-8078-5553-7; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2882-3.)

The veritable cottage industry that has emerged in the last two decades on the history of the middle class has a welcome addition. Heretofore, important nineteenth-century studies, most famously those by Mary P. Ryan on Utica, Paul E. Johnson on Rochester, and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall on Britain, have traced middle-class formation in industrializing urban societies during the first half of the century. Notably absent has been any attention to the American South, presumably because of its modest urban and industrial development. With Jonathan Daniel Wells's intelligent analysis of middleclass formation in the antebellum South, that absence is no more.

Wells's book is, however, much more than an account of middle-class formation; it is a fresh addition to our understanding of the origins of the Civil War. Wells divides his study into three parts. The first part locates the middle class among Whig professionals (doctors, teachers, editors) and merchants and between the planter class above them and the yeoman and white laboring class below. It then documents the fluid traffic of peoples, ideas, and monies between the North and South early in the century as the precondition for class formation. Middling southern intellectuals and men of commerce both "came to embrace northern ideas about capitalism, industrialization, progress, the work ethic, and internal improvements" at the same time that they "abandon[ed] aristocratic notions about honor [i.e., dueling] as well as banish[ed] agrarian fears of industries and cities" (p. 14).

Part 2 then examines the emerging middle-class cultural values and institutions that advanced their modernizing agenda: the mobilization of evangelicalism as a critique of planter profligacy, the development of lyceums for creating a culture of progress, and the advancement of public school reform and a cadre of teachers who could advance "modern" urban, industrial life.

Part 3 brings the story to midcentury, when Wells sees the middle class well established and when its relationship to its northern mates shifts from one of exchange to conflict. Wells is careful to reiterate that neither the southern middle class nor southern industrial, urban society is particularly prominent as in the North. His points are that the dramatic relative growth of southern manufacturing and cities by the 1850s created conflict with competing industrial interests and that slavery was the issue on which the two middle classes would divide. Indeed, although he never makes the reference, I think Wells's history powerfully recapitulates the Civil War as what Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard long ago called the "Second American Revolution" over capitalism and slavery. As Wells points out, whereas middling northerners aligned with abolitionists in support of free labor on the principle that capitalism and slavery were incompatible, the southern middle class concluded that industrial slavery would be the best means to modernize. Understanding of the Civil War, then, becomes further layered as a response by northern commercial and industrial interests to threats of a southern industrial society built on cheap slave labor with which northerners would not be able to compete. In such ways did a southern middle class form by midcentury, first shaped by its northern cousins and then in conflict with them. And, of course, as Wells suggests, by war's end many of these interests coalesced around a common ideology that tolerated if not outright sanctioned "free" cheap black labor in the North and South.

Wells's book is an important contribution to middle class, Civil War, and southern studies. I might quibble with his description of the middling project as modernizing, but that may be the most effective shorthand to encapsulate the values they celebrated. More to the point, I appreciate this book as a subtle, complicated analysis of the middle class that steadfastly attends to class as an oppositional category with material, political, and cultural dimensions.

DANIEL J. WALKOWITZ

New York University