Philadelphia and the Southern Elite: Class, Kinship, and Culture in Antebellum America
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PHILADELPHIA AND THE SOUTHERN ELITE: CLASS, KINSHIP, AND CULTURE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA BY DANIEL KILBRIDE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1997 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In seeing this dissertation to completion I have accumulated a host of debts and obligation it is now my privilege to acknowledge. In Philadelphia I must thank the staff of the American Philosophical Society library for patiently walking out box after box of Society archives and miscellaneous manuscripts. In particular I must thank Beth Carroll- Horrocks and Rita Dockery in the manuscript room. Roy Goodman in the Library’s reference room provided invaluable assistance in tracking down secondary material and biographical information. Roy is also a matchless authority on college football nicknames. From the Society’s historian, Whitfield Bell, Jr., I received encouragement, suggestions, and great leads. At the Library Company of Philadelphia, Jim Green and Phil Lapansky deserve special thanks for the suggestions and support. Most of the research for this study took place in southern archives where the region’s traditions of hospitality still live on. The staff of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History provided cheerful assistance in my first stages of manuscript research. The staffs of the Filson Club Historical Library in Louisville and the Special Collections room at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond were also accommodating. Special thanks go out to the men and women at the three repositories at which the bulk of my research was conducted: the Special Collections Library at Duke University, the Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the Virginia Historical Society. Thanks also to those in the University ii of Florida libraries, particularly in the interlibrary loan and microfilm departments. Their assistance reduced both the time and expense needed to finish this project. Several individuals dedicated their time to reading some or all of this manuscript and 1 have benefited from their comments and criticism. Jeffrey Adler and Thomas Gallant read the entire manuscript and offered generous suggestions. John Seelye of the Department of English at the University of Florida also dedicated much of his valuable time to reading the manuscript. Chris Olsen and Mark Greenberg provided computer support and formatting advice that saved me considerable time and misery. Every graduate student in history at the University of Florida for the past five years or so owes much to Betty Corwine, the department’s graduate secretary for most of my tenure at Florida. Betty cut enough red tape to keep me bound for a long time. Without her the administration would surely have tracked me down by now. I am happy to thank my former housemates Mark and Gomez, and the other members of my cohort—Dutch, Grandad, Brains— for their friendship. At St. Joseph’s University and at the University of Florida I contracted intellectual debts that can never be repaid. Randall M. Miller at St. Joseph’s got me interested in history as a field of study, and his teaching enthusiasm helped convince me to pursue graduate study. At the University of Florida, Darrett Rutman almost convinced me that history is a social science and not one of the humanities. Fie inculcated in me a rigor and sense of self-criticism without which I could not have written this study. I am happy also to acknowledge the help of the late Anita Rutman who read several of my graduate essays. She taught me the absolute importance of clarity and brevity in my writing; I iii shall always treasure her memory. It has been my privilege to work with Ronald P. Formisano, who taught me most of what I know about teaching and a great deal of what it means to be a historian. He read and critiqued several drafts of each chapter. My work is much better for his suggestions. All the good things I have learned about research and writing came from Bertram Wyatt-Brown. In every stage of my graduate career he has been a constant source of encouragement and direction. His well-known generosity, as well as his talent and passion for history, will inspire me throughout my career. That this dissertation has met his exacting standards is its own reward. The Department of History at the University of Florida provided numerous teaching and research fellowships to support my research. The department also provided a Milbauer Fellowship that allowed me to do a full year of research and travel. The College of Arts and Sciences awarded me a generous dissertation fellowship. Mellon fellowships from the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Virginia Historical Society provided funds for research in their archives. I am happy finally to acknowledge the hospitality of the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia. At the invitation of Richard Dunn I spent 1994-1995 at the Center as a research fellow. The stimulating intellectual atmosphere is Richard’s doing, as anyone familiar with the Center well knows. I also owe thanks to Billy Smith and the assorted fellows, faculty and speakers in Philadelphia who made that year of research and writing a pleasure. My most profound thanks go to my family. George and Kathy Markwalter, my in-laws, provided infectious good cheer plus a roof and a warm bed during my research in North Carolina. My wife Heather has endured most of this project. I hereby apologize IV for the misery this study has occasionally brought to our relationship. It is her love and friendship that helped me see it to completion. Our daughter Lauren in no way contributed to this study and at times actively impeded it. Nevertheless, the responsibilities of fatherhood have served to admonish me to finish and abandon studenthood. No one will be happier that this long project is over than my parents and grandparents. No more will I have to hear the plaintive cry “are you still in school?” To gramps, grams, mom, and dad; I thank you and I love you. V TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT vii CHAPTERS 1 INTRODUCTION 1 2 TRAVELERS’ TALES 39 3 SOCIAL LIFE IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC; THE “CAROLINA ROW” AND ITS CIRCLE 86 4 SOCIAL LIFE AND CULTURE, 1830-1850: SIDNEY GEORGE FISHER’ S CIRCLE 138 5 FEMALE ACADEMIES AND THE TRANSMISSION OF CLASS IDENTITY 190 6 THE “REPUBLIC OF MEDICINE” 246 7 SCIENCE AND SOCIABILITY: THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, 1784-1841 299 8 ARISTOCRACY AND POLITICAL CULTURE IN CIVIL WAR-ERA PHILADELPHIA 352 9 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 400 REFERENCES 415 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 447 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy PHILADELPHIA AND THE SOUTHERN ELITE: CLASS, KINSHIP, AND CULTURE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA By Daniel Kilbride May 1997 Chairman: Bertram Wyatt-Brown Major Department: History In the sixty years before the Civil War, planter-class southerners had an especially close relationship with their privileged counterparts in the city of Philadelphia. Together they maintained an upper-class identity based upon shared manners and habits, devotion to conservatism, and a distaste for democracy and middle-class values of thrift, industry, piety, and sobriety. Southerners blended in effortlessly with Philadelphia high society. In the early Republic, the nexus of North/South connections in Philadelphia were the homes on Spruce Street known collectively as the Carolina Row. No single household dominated social life in the Jacksonian period, but southerners continued to seek and find hospitality in Philadelphia’s fashionable homes. Throughout the period, Philadelphians discerned distinctive southern eharacteristics in their guests, but the consciousness of sectional differences very rarely engendered hostility. Instead, northerners and southerners viewed regional traits as curiosities-as variations on a common genteel theme, as it were. Young women learned the fundamentals of gentility in Philadelphia boarding schools while their brothers trained to be professional gentlemen in the city’s two major medical schools. Though their experiences in and out of the classroom varied greatly due to the different standards that governed male and female conduct, both sexes inculcated standards of behavior that would serve them equally well in London, New York, or Savannah. Through its librarian, John Vaughan, the American Philosophical tied southern men of mind to Philadelphia. The Society’s devotion to an antiquated definition of scientific endeavor that identified intellectual engagement with gentlemanly leisure endeared it to American conservatives. It also rendered it nearly irrelevant to modem researeh that was becoming more merit-driven and specialized in the 1840s and 1850s. These relationships were strained but not broken by the tensions of the sectional crisis and Civil War. Many Philadelphia gentlefolk maintained their ties to the South. They led a secessionist movement that remained publicly pro-southern during the war. As opinion solidified behind the war effort and emancipation, the elite divided, with Confederate sympathizers losing what respect they still commanded from the lower orders. Toward the end of the conflict a new upper class, integrating some old families with others with more reeent fortunes, emerged around a new institutional base—the Union League, devoted to the northern cause, class inclusion, and middle-class values. IX CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION When Sprace Street between Ninth and Tenth Streets in Philadelphia, adjacent to Pennsylvania Hospital, was known as "Carolina Row" in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, it was lined by spacious, elegant townhouses of Federal-style red brick. Those buildings were replaced by modem condominiums in the 1970s, though many of the homes in the neighborhood surrounding Independence Hall have been preserved since the eighteenth century.