The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 | Jonathan Daniel Wells

344 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 15 illus., 9 tables, appends., notes, bibl., index

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-5553-9
Published: September 2004
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-7629-9
Published: November 2005
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-7323-1
Published: November 2005

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With a fresh take on social dynamics in the antebellum South, Jonathan Daniel Wells contests the popular idea that the Old South was a region of essentially two classes (planters and slaves) until after the Civil War. He argues that, in fact, the region had a burgeoning white middle class--including merchants, doctors, and teachers--that had a profound impact on southern culture, the debate over slavery, and the coming of the Civil War.

Wells shows that the growth of the periodical press after 1820 helped build a cultural bridge between the North and the South, and the emerging southern middle class seized upon northern middle-class ideas about gender roles and reform, politics, and the virtues of modernization. Even as it sought to emulate northern progress, however, the southern middle class never abandoned its attachment to slavery. By the 1850s, Wells argues, the prospect of industrial slavery in the South threatened northern capital and labor, causing sectional relations to shift from cooperative to competitive. Rather than simply pitting a backward, slave-labor, agrarian South against a progressive, free-labor, industrial North, Wells argues that the Civil War reflected a more complex interplay of economic and cultural values.

About the Author

Jonathan Daniel Wells is associate professor of history and chair of arts and sciences at Johnson and Wales University in Charlotte, North Carolina.

For more information about Jonathan Daniel Wells, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"An important book on an important subject. . . . Undoubtedly an important scholarly contribution."--Civil War History Journal

"Excellent and should be read by those interested in the coming of the War."--Louisiana History

"[An] ambitious, well-written, and persistently argued book."--Florida Historical Quarterly

"Notably absent [in studies of the history of the middle-class] has been any attention to the American South. . . . With [this] intelligent analysis of middle-class formation in the antebellum South, that absence is no more. . . . A fresh addition to our understanding of the origins of the Civil War."--Journal of Southern History

"This important book should be required reading for students of the Old South."--American Historical Review

"Wells recovers something that has been buried since at least 1895: the antebellum Southern middle class. . . . Impressive. . . . Enriches and challenges our comprehension of this place and time."--Arkansas Historical Quarterly

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History / United States: Southern

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