The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century

Jonathan Daniel Wells, Jennifer R. Green, Jonathan Daniel Wells, Jennifer R. Green

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2011
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807138540
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green provide a series of provocative essays reflecting innovative, original research on professional and commercial interests in the nineteenth-century South, a place often seen as being composed of just two classes—planters and slaves. Rather, an active middle class, made up of men and women devoted to the cultural and economic modernization of Dixie, worked with each other—and occasionally their northern counterparts—to bring reforms to the region.

With a balance of established and younger authors, of antebellum and postbellum analyses, and of narrative and quantitative methodologies, these essays offer new ways to think about politics, society, gender, and culture during this exciting era of southern history. The contributors show that many like-minded southerners sought to create a "New South" with a society similar to that of the North. They supported the creation of public schools and an end to dueling, but less progressive reform was also endorsed, such as building factories using slave labor rather than white wage earners. The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century significantly influences thought on the social structure of the South, the centrality of class in history, and the events prior to and after the Civil War.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. The Business of Justice
• 2. Strangers in the South
• 3. Bonds of Marriage and Community
• 4. Middle-Class Benevolent Societies in Antebellum Norfolk, Virginia
• 5. Running Southern Manufactories
• 6. Three Faces of the Southern Middle Class
• 7. Born of the Aristocracy?
• 8. Navigating “the Muddy Stream of Party Politics”
• 9. The Human and Financial Capital of the Southern Middle Class, 1850–1900
• 10. Reconstructing the Southern Middle Class
• 11. Manufacturers and Rural Culture in the Reconstruction-Era Upcountry
• 12. Of Culture and Conviction
• Epilogue: Middle-Class Masters?
• Contributors
• Index