| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861. By Jonathan Daniel Wells. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xviii, 321 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2882-3. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-8078-5553-7.)
This book is a "preliminary framework" for understanding "middle class formation in the slave states" (p. xiii). According to Jonathan Daniel Wells, antebellum white men and women of "moderate income" with commercial or professional interests constituted a southern middle class (p. 6). Wells is more concerned about culture than economic structures and income, and, like many scholars of class formation, he insists on the "linguistic and ideological construction" of class (p. 10). Thus, he examines how middling southerners adopted northern values and organizations— such as lyceums—and when they began to identify as a class.	1
Historiographically, Wells challenges Eugene Genovese's notion that middling southerners were "bound" to planters and C. Vann Woodward's claim that the New South coalition of northern and southern business interests represented a "'new' force in southern society" (pp. 9, 6). Instead, by the 1850s the South already had an influential middle class with extensive northern economic and cultural ties.	. . .

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