The South had a middle class! Most discussions of the antebellum South focus on slavery, plantation owners, or sometimes even the small yeoman farmers, to understand the backwardness of Southern society in contrast to a dynamic middle class in the North dedicated to hard work, delayed gratification, temperance, industry, and reform. Wells argues that the South developed an articulate middle class of business professionals who shared most of the same values as their northern cousins—with one important caveat: The southern middle class remained dedicated to the institution of slavery. Show Wells begins with a discussion of how the South and the North shared an intellectual world through travel and literature. The travel section of this analysis depends largely on anecdotal evidence showing how both northerners and southerners traveled in each others' regions. When Wells turns to a discussion of literature, he uses anecdotal, with some quantitative, evidence to demonstrate the existence of a national audience for the literature of both regions, although southerners were more heavily dependent on the North than northerners were on the South. Neither chapter in this section, however, proves the existence of a southern middle class, though both show an active cultural exchange that forms the background for the next two sections. Part two is a cultural portrait of the signposts of the nineteenth-century middle class: religion, reform, voluntary associations, gender roles, and the family. Like the first section, it has a mix of anecdotal and [End Page 637] quantitative evidence. Wells argues that, similar to their northern counterparts, middle-class southerners were interested in a respectable revival that led to a call for reform. In particular, the southern middle class developed a critique of the plantation gentry's code of honor and unsuccessfully attacked dueling. The southern middle class had a better record in pushing educational reform, even if public education continued to trail northern efforts. Southerners also engaged in a wide variety of associational activity, forming clubs, attending lyceums, and participating in debating societies. Like northerners, the southern middle class also wanted to educate women to help to prepare the next generation for the world of business if they were male, or for motherhood and schooling if they were female. Although Wells makes a case that all of these middle-class elements existed in the South, he does not fully compare it to what the middle class in the North was doing. It is one thing to discover reform in the South but another to compare it to the wide-ranging and comprehensive efforts of the North. A dying patient's faint pulse falls far short of a healthy thumping heart. The final section defines the middle class in relation to both the planter and working classes. Wells argues that the southern middle class's efforts to push for industrialization and urbanization put it at odds with the planters who remained dedicated to growing cotton. It also generated conflict with a white working class because southern industrialists supported the use of slave labor in the factory. This acceptance of slavery ultimately distinguished the southern and northern middle classes as well. In the end, Wells is able to substantiate a southern middle class that presaged the pro-business industrialists of the postwar New South. However, he does not demonstrate that its members were absolutely vital to the South before 1865. They may have helped to move the South toward industrialization, but their efforts paled in comparison to those of the northern middle class. Planters and the slaveocracy ruled the South, pushing their region to secession and civil war. Paul A. Gilje University of Oklahoma Recommended textbook solutions U.S. History1st EditionJohn Lund, Paul S. Vickery, P. Scott Corbett, Todd Pfannestiel, Volker Janssen 567 solutions America's History for the AP Course8th EditionEric Hinderaker, James A. Henretta, Rebecca Edwards, Robert O. Self 470 solutions
Ways of the World: A Global History3rd EditionRobert W. Strayer 232 solutions America's History for the AP Course9th EditionEric Hinderaker, James A. Henretta, Rebecca Edwards, Robert O. Self 961 solutions What was the significance of the planter class?Gentry, also known as the "planter class," is a term associated with colonial and antebellum North Carolina and other southern states that refers to an upper middle class of wealthy gentlemen farmers who were well educated, politically astute, and generally came from successful families.
What was the role of the planter aristocracy?Answer and Explanation: The planter's aristocracy was a social group of the American colonies and early republic that was made up of landowners in the southern colonies who had grown wealthy by farming cash crops like tobacco, indigo, rice, and cotton.
What were the antebellum planters?A “planter” is a large farmer, one owning not less than 500 acres of land. A rancher would be included in this definition. The 500 acres or more, does not have to be in one plot or in contiguous plots or even in the same county or same state.
What was the goal of the wealthy planter in the South?Wealthy plantation owners like Lloyd came close to forming an American ruling class in the years before the Civil War. They helped shape foreign and domestic policy with one goal in view: to expand the power and reach of the cotton kingdom of the South.
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What was the significance of the planter class in antebellum southern society?
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