Book description
Becoming Bourgeois is the first study to focus on what historians have
come to call the “middling sort,” the group falling between the mass of
yeoman farmers and the planter class that dominated the political
economy of the antebellum South. Historian Frank J. Byrne investigates
the experiences of urban merchants, village storekeepers, small-scale
manufacturers, and their families, as well as the contributions made by
this merchant class to the South's economy, culture, and politics in the
decades before, and the years of, the Civil War. These merchant families
embraced the South but were not of the South. At a time when Southerners
rarely traveled far from their homes, merchants annually ventured forth
on buying junkets to northern cities. Whereas the majority of
Southerners enjoyed only limited formal instruction, merchant families
often achieved a level of education rivaled only by the upper
class-planters. The southern merchant community also promoted the kind
of aggressive business practices that New South proponents would claim
as their own in the Reconstruction era and beyond. Along with discussion
of these modern approaches to liberal capitalism, Byrne also reveals the
peculiar strains of conservative thought that permeated the culture of
southern merchants. While maintaining close commercial ties to the
North, southern merchants embraced the religious and racial mores of the
South. Though they did not rely directly upon slavery for their success,
antebellum merchants functioned well within the slave-labor system. When
the Civil War erupted, southern merchants simultaneously joined
Confederate ranks and prepared to capitalize on the war's business
opportunities, regardless of the outcome of the conflict. Throughout
Becoming Bourgeois, Byrne highlights the tension between these competing
elements of southern merchant culture. By exploring the values and
pursuits of this emerging class, Byrne not only offers new insight into
southern history but also deepens our understanding of the mutable ties
between regional identity and the marketplace in nineteenth-century
America. Frank J. Byrne is associate professor of history at the State
University of New York at Oswego.
