Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865
Frank J. Byrne
Abstract
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 ... More
Keywords: middling sort, antebellum South, junkets, merchant community, New South, merchant families
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2006 | Print ISBN-13: 9780813124049 |
| Published to Kentucky Scholarship Online: September 2011 | DOI:10.5810/kentucky/9780813124049.001.0001 |
