The origins of the southern middle class: Literature, politics, and economy, 1820-1880.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the ideological, cultural, political, and economic roots of the southern middle class. Precursors to the New South men and women of the post-war era, they championed the causes of industrialization, urbanization, and intellectual progress. Though they remained small in number throughout the antebellum period, middle-class southerners had a profound impact on the South, the debate over slavery, and the coming of the Civil War. Because of the cultural bridge between the North and South, which expanded dramatically with the growth of the periodical press after 1820, the South was already changing culturally and ideologically before the onset of industrialization. The emerging southern middle class seized upon northern middle-class ideas about intellectual and economic progress and made those ideas their own. But in pushing its agenda through the Whig party in the South, the middle class faced what it perceived to be short-sighted yeoman and planter opposition to economic and cultural change. Antagonism from classes above and below only enhanced middle-class consciousness. By the late 1850s, the southern middle class had won many victories in its battle to remake the South in the North's image as nearly every southern state witnessed impressive gains in industrial production, urbanization, and internal improvements. Even as it sought to emulate northern progress, however, the southern middle class never abandoned its attachment to slavery. On the contrary, most middle-class southerners viewed slavery as a distinct advantage; in using slaves to quiet demands on the part of white workers, capital held considerable leverage over labor. Industrial slavery, however, threatened northern capital and labor, and the debate over the western territories helped to convince northerners who remained unpersuaded by religious or moral attacks on slavery that the modernizing slave South of the 1850s represented a real danger to free labor. New South advocates of progress like Henry W. Grady harkened back to antebellum middle-class arguments for economic and cultural change even as they rejected slavery. Recycling ideas and values first expressed by the antebellum middle class, post-bellum leaders promised a new South built upon the ashes of the old.