Access Type
Online access to this book is only available to eligible users.
Files
Download Full Text (1.3 MB)
Description
This book focuses on what historians have come to call the “middling sort”, the economic group falling between yeoman farmers and the planter class that dominated the antebellum South. At a time when Southerners rarely traveled far from their homes, these merchants annually ventured forth on buying junkets to northern cities. The southern merchant community promoted the kind of aggressive business practices that proponents of the “New South” would later claim as their own. This book reveals the peculiar strains of modern liberal-capitalist and conservative thought that permeated the culture of southern merchants. By exploring the values men and women in merchant families espoused, the book 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.
Publication Date
2006
Publisher
The University Press of Kentucky
Place of Publication
Lexington, KY
ISBN
978-0-8131-2404-9 (cloth)
eISBN
978-0-8131-7145-6 (pdf version)
eISBN
978-0-8131-3816-9 (epub version)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813124049.001.0001
Keywords
Middling sort, Antebellum South, Junkets, Merchant community, New South, Merchant families
Disciplines
Cultural History | Social History | United States History
Recommended Citation
Byrne, Frank J., "Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865" (2006). Cultural History. 26.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_cultural_history/26
Consortium members may access while on their campus.
