Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South

This book explores the importance of military education for the development of the antebellum southern middle class.

Jennifer R. Green (Author)

9780521201285, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 August 2011

328 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.48 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Jennifer R. Green illuminates an understudied aspect of the antebellum South: the military colleges that served as pathways to social networks and business connections for young southern men in the 1840s and 1850s. If this was all the book represented it would be an important enough contribution. Her study, however, offers the field much more. She uses military colleges to explore important questions that remain hotly contested among historians, including those surrounding the social structure of the Old South, the role of education and other reforms in modernizing the region, and the meaning of southern manhood. With compelling analysis and painstaking research, Green contributes significantly to the growing field of studies on the southern middle class, opens new territory in regard to the study of education in the region, and adds fresh perspectives to the analysis of gender, culture, and the military. She demonstrates convincingly that a middle class not only existed in the nineteenth-century South, but that it played a central role in the life of the region.' Jonathan Daniel Wells, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

This book argues that military education was an important institution in the development of the southern middle class as a regional group and as part of the national middle class in the late antebellum years. It explores class formation, professionalization, and social mobility in the 1840s and 1850s, using this data to define the middle class on a national level, while also identifying regionally specific characteristics of the emerging southern middle class. Green argues that the significance of antebellum military education is, first, that it illuminates the emerging southern middle class, a group difficult to locate and differentiate; second, it offered social stability or mobility; finally, it explicitly linked middle-class stability or mobility to the ongoing national professionalization of teachers. Ultimately, these schools demonstrate that educational opportunity and reform took place in the antebellum South and that schooling aided southerners in social mobility.

1. Introducing the emerging southern middle class
2. 'The advantage of a collegiate education': military education funding
3. 'Your duty as citizens and soldiers': military education discipline and duty
4. 'Honor as a man': manhood and the cultural values of the emerging southern middle class
5. 'Practical progress is the watchword': military education curriculum
6. Professions and status: middle-class alumni stability and mobility
7. Networks of miltary educators
8. Classifying the middle class.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]