| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.3

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.3 | The History Cooperative

BOOK REVIEWS

An American Aristocracy: Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia. By Daniel Kilbride. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. x, 216 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95.)
Upper-class southerners were drawn to Philadelphia as the premier national center of conservative aristocratic society, education, and culture after the American Revolution. Bonds of friendship and kinship developed as a result and helped Philadelphia's elite families maintain their southern connections in the face of rising sectional animosities. In turn, southerners felt more comfortable in this most southern of northern cities than they did farther north. Even on the eve of the Civil War, therefore, there were many southern students in Philadelphia's medical schools and young ladies' "French" boarding academies.	1
Daniel Kilbride develops this argument through a half-dozen chapters. What emerges, inter alia, is that class mattered more than any differences over slavery. Philadelphia drew southerners who sought there the urbanity, cosmopolitanism, and seasoning that were much esteemed by their parents and peers back home. These values and pursuits helped successive generations of aristocratic families at once resist expanding middle-class ideals and, eventually, wear lightly some of the sterner elements of Victorian morality and culture. At the same time, these men and women found themselves and the clubs and organizations to which they belonged progressively less important as arbiters of taste, setters of standards, and shapers of intellectual life for the nation.	. . .

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