The southern middle class

IN THE LAST FEW YEARS THE HISTORIOGRAPHY ON THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY South, particularly antebellum period, has shifted significantly. In contrast to historians' views during 1970s and 1980s, newer scholarship has emphasized similarities rather than differences between culture and economies of North and South. (1) As a result, studies have stressed emergence of a protean nineteenth-century South characterized by fluidity and change rather than stasis. Scholars are discovering a region often beset by class and other internal divisions instead of a planter hegemony; a nascent middle class yearning for industrialization, urbanization, and other signs of progress as opposed to having a single-minded attachment to agriculture; and a culture intrigued by and well connected to intellectual milieu of Western world, not one intellectually isolated. (2) Yet all of these changing views on region also take into account ways in which slavery created a highly defensive society that, despite its desire for economic and cultural progress, was blind to evils of slavery. Indeed, as new scholarship has shown, white southerners, especially middle class, quite easily and seamlessly incorporated vigorous support for slavery within a broader modernizing vision of region's future. Until recently, few historians had given nineteenth-century professional and commercial southern middle class much attention. While middling yeomen of rural South have attracted interest of notable historians, from earlier scholars like Frank Lawrence Owsley to Steven Hahn and others more recently, urban-dwelling professionals and those engaged in commercial activities have achieved recognition not as a class or middling group but merely as individuals. (3) paucity of examinations of middle-class southerners is all more surprising given how much scholarly attention has been devoted to region's Much of recent analysis of nineteenth-century South has focused on race, gender, and culture, adding depth and diversity to our understanding of region and its population. Thanks to this remarkably creative body of work, over last four decades we have witnessed a revolution in popular mind and in academy regarding knowledge of slave life and culture, political economy of plantation, and role of women in southern society. Gender, in particular, has emerged as a central category of analysis, challenging, as Patrick Joyce has noted, the sovereignty of class in social theory, sociology, and history. (4) Indeed, cultural turn in historiography has left study of class in limbo, particularly in study of South. Aside from examinations of a narrow portion of southern social structure, that of planters, study of class relations, class formation, and social hierarchy has been largely eclipsed by considerations of other aspects of region's For historians, opportunity to explore previously neglected groups has been more attractive than study of political or social As Christopher Clark has written, The cultural turn entailed deflections from certain types of politics and structural themes, while an emphasis on identity politics of recognizable, formerly disregarded groups left little place for class. (5) Historian Gary J. Kornblith adds, [I]n 1980s and 1990s, even as 'race, class, and gender' became a mantra among progressive scholars, exploration of cultural identity increasingly displaced study of political economy--and with it class analysis. (6) historiographical vacuum left by previous generations of scholars drew graduate students and younger historians to study of race, identity, culture, and gender. A number of scholars, however, are now calling for reasserting centrality of class in historiography on nineteenth-century America. Journal of Early Republic, for example, has devoted two recent issues to reestablishing importance of social …