So, not in the middle?
I agree that too many people define themselves as middle class but the upper quintile (minus those who are 2 standard deviations) seems overly restrictive.
Middle class isn’t about income percentiles, IMO, and there very well may have been a time in US history when a larger percentage was middle class than now (although I don’t think any serious academic thinks it was ever as high as 70%) but the 1870s was so not that time.
When I say “middle class”, I mean professionals, managers, and senior civil servants, as well as the petite bourgeoisie
It’s not about quintiles, it’s about them being in the middle of a 3-tier system, wherever that is.
I completely agree that the nascent middle classes amounted to no more than maybe 20% of the population in large cities around 1870. It would have been a smaller number in small towns.
I also completely agree that virtually all of these middle class households would have at least one servant. Many would have a cook and a maid. Having a servant was the status symbol of being middle class; not having one would be literally déclassé.
The vast majority of northern households with servants used ethnics, often immigrants. Good cooks were more prized in those days with fickle wood stoves so they may have been older residents but the basic scrubbing maid was about as low a job as a white woman could take.
Middle class homes with servants would stay a thing until WWII, but declined rapidly after about 1900. The “servant problem” was a constant in articles aimed at the middle class starting around then because the huge increase in factories offered woman better paying jobs with fewer hours and the ability to live at home. For all their horrors, factory work was seen as a step up from being a servant.
That opened jobs for black women. The Great Migration northward that began around 1910 boosted the black population of northern cities by the hundreds of thousands. In 1870 Chicago, probably no more than 1% of the population was black. From 1916-1919 alone more than 50,000 blacks landed there. Those classic Hollywood movies and 50s tv shows with their plethora of black maids represented the reality that white servants were increasingly more difficult to find.
Upper class homes had zillions of servants, of course, but then as now the 1% is the 1% and not representative of American life.
I believe the issue here is a matter of terminology: The “Middle” class was defined originally by being between the laboring classes and the (supposedly) independently wealthy. as originally intended, it meant between the peasantry and nobility. A more comparable group update would be what is referred to as the “Upper Middle” class, or even the bourgoise. These groups not uncommonly have domestic servants today in some fashion.
I was reading how slavery ended in ancient Rome, and I wonder if anti-slavers had this same notion (other than the listed reasons): It was just more economical. You can walk a horse to a blacksmith in Rome for a small fee to get it horseshoed rather than having to maintain/clothe/shelter/train a slave to do the same thing.
I’m wondering why the South didn’t realize this.
Yes, we all wonder why the South spent 250 years embracing an economic system based on slavery without ever once questioning the effectiveness of it. Or why a culture that worshiped Rome and the way that their entire economic system ran on slavery never gave a thought to emulating them by ending slavery. Or who the scholars are that thought that Rome actually ended slavery, since they seem to be unknown to the academics who believe that slavery outlived the western Roman empire. Yes, a whole lot of wondering goin’ on.
I’m not sure where Rome comes into this, because Exapno is correct that Rome never actually outlawed it, although it was clearly fading into unimportance by the 4th century.
However, slavery in the South held on because it was profitable enough for those who owned them, and they had the money and time to dominate politics & so on. Nothing more.
I think those lynchings were more the result of the church burnings than the Wide Awake demonstrations.
This is incorrect for the reasons pointed out, but people did this type of thing anyways. Unless you had a big operation and needed someone to shoe horses full time, you didn’t train a slave to shoe horses, you hired someone. I mean, my family needs haircuts, but I don’t keep a barber on staff.
There was a religious divide in the UD with the South being mostly members of the Anglican church, mid states Quakers and New England congressional churches that seemed to play a part. The US went through 2 periods called Great Awakenings one before the US came about, , the second some time after the formation of the US. Apparently from the link below, there was a 3rd also near the time of the civil war, but it was minor compared to the rest. This movement came from mainly England to the mid and northern states, the southern states didn’t see this many people from the motherland and thus it had far less influence there, additionally the south being a different flavor of Christianity then the other also served to insulate them.
The first great awakening as I understand it values scientific reasoning and logical thinking, the second one was about direct learning about God and a personal relationship with God instead of needing a minister as a middleman. Both of these combined with the teachings of Christ from the Bible instead of the words of a minister a factor of changing attitudes towards slave ownership and slave owners in particular.
Some info on the great awakening 1.0 and 2.0 https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/great-awakening
This I think is a key factor. The South was colonized primarily by English gentry who intended to set up an idealized pre-industrial feudalism, with themselves as lords. They loathed democracy, and felt that power, wealth, and status should come from being landowners, not ‘in trade’. These cultural values were one of the primary factors in their inability to adapt to changing economic times, while the North had no such inhibitions.
Primogeniture had a lot to do with it. Second sons suddenly had access to land - they just needed to come to America and settle it.
Where did Northerners tend to come from, both geographically and socially?
The two original ‘hearths’ were the New England Puritans, who came mainly from the artisan/yeoman farmer classes plus a few very pious dissenter gentry, and who mainly immigrated from around East Anglia (influenced by the Netherlands, where many found some religious affinity). The other one was the Quakers, centered in Pennsylvania. These people were generally from poorer classes than the Puritans, I think they often came from the Midlands. They shone in business and industry in the New World (Ben Franklin, Quaker Oats).
The waves of immigrants who later followed, like the Irish for example, were impoverished; they made up the bulk of the indentured servants who filled the menial jobs that slaves did in the South.
The south already had industry. It was the cotton industry, it was wildly lucrative, there was no need to replace it.
What they didn’t have was factories, and those weren’t prevented by slavers, they were prevented by climate. Prior to air conditioning, it was simply impossible to run a factory in hot climates without killing all your workers.
Climate aside, there’s also the fact that factory work is marginally more skilled than agricultural, so the talent pool was smaller. And it bears mentioning that slavers actively prevented their slaves from cultivating skills, literacy, and education.
Please go back and read post #12.
You mean the indignant one-liner that points to a thinly-sourced, garbage Wikipedia article? That the one? What point do you believe it’s making?
Exactly the point that it does make: the reality that the South did have some factories and that slaves did work in them. The cite was a handy concise reference to something I already knew to be true from my own research.
Now please provide a cite for your contentions that the South had no factories before air conditioning and that slaves weren’t allowed to do skilled work.
Your ‘cite’ was a Wikipedia article that happened to state your opinion. So for all we know, you wrote it yourself. Two of the sources are broken links, one is an out-of-print book from 1970, and it referred to “industry”, not factories, which are related but not identical phenomena. i.e. coal mining and steamboating are considered “industry” but obviously don’t involve factories or enclosed spaces that get excessively heated by the climate and can’t be cooled. Also most of the “industry” wasn’t smokestack industry, which created much hotter work environments. Mostly agricultural milling.
I do not contend that there were zero factories in the south. They were overwhelmingly more numerous in the north, and this is uncontroversially true.
I do not contend that zero slaves were allowed to do skilled labor. But it’s a documented fact that it was illegal to educate slaves to any meaningful degree, and the vast majority of slaves were unskilled simply because that was the role they were pressed into. This also is uncontroversially true.
As I pointed out, your cite is garbage, so you are left with the remaining support of “I just knew it.” Like you, I also possess prior knowledge that my information is unquestionably correct, so I guess that will have to suffice for both of us.
One of the longest and most convoluted “I don’t have a cite and never will” responses of all time. Quite an achievement.