An American Aristocracy: Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia Book

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.