AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY
Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia
Daniel Kilbride
Placing class rather than race or gender at the center of this comparative study
of North and South, Daniel Kilbride exposes the close connections that united
privileged southerners and Philadelphians in the years leading to the Civil War. He
finds that the bonds between these similarly educated and socialized groups were so
durable that they resisted sectional warfare.
In An American Aristocracy, Kilbride traces the travels of southern planters
throughout the North during the decades prior to 1860, noting that they were
drawn particularly to Philadelphia because of its proximity to the South and a
perception of the city as being untainted by the larger radicalism of the North. In
addition Philadelphia possessed tangible attractions for southerners: well-regarded
schools, prestigious intellectual societies, historical landmarks, and fashionable
shopping districts. In the city’s parlors, ballrooms, and classrooms, privileged
Americans from the North and South forged themselves into a republican aristocracy
that ignored the Mason-Dixon line.
The story Kilbride uncovers is one of the upper echelon’s declining influence.
He recounts how southern families and their friends and relations in the North
fought against the forces of middle-class respectability and sectional animosity that
threatened the stability of their world. Their ability to promote sectional peace
weakened steadily during the first half of the nineteenth century as the middle class
successfully wrested cultural authority from their social “betters”. Kilbride suggests
that this humiliating loss of power bound northern and southern gentry ever closer.
Yet an inability to shape public policy left them helpless to stem the tide of sectional
strife that eventually infiltrated their carefully insulated existence.
AN AMERICAN
ARISTOCRACY
Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia
Tt
DANIEL KILBRIDE
Daniel Kilbride received his Ph.D.
from the University of Florida. He
teaches U.S. history at John Carroll
University near Cleveland, Ohio.
November 2006, 272 pages, 17 illus.
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