OBJECTS OF CONFIDENCE AND CHOICE: PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITIES IN ALABAMA, 1804 ...

221 Pages·2014·2.15 MB·English

OBJECTS OF CONFIDENCE AND CHOICE: PROFESSIONAL

COMMUNITIES IN ALABAMA, 1804-1861

By
THOMAS EDWARD REIDY
JOSHUA D. ROTHMAN, COMMITTEE CHAIR
GEORGE C. RABLE
LAWRENCE F. KOHL
JOHN M. GIGGIE
JENNIFER R. GREEN

A DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of History
in the Graduate School of
The University of Alabama

TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

2014

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Copyright Thomas E. Reidy 2014
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ABSTRACT

Objects of Confidence and Choice considered the centrality of professional communities
in Alabama, from 1804 to 1861. The dissertation highlighted what it meant to be a professional,
as well as what professionals meant to their communities. The study examined themes of
education, family, wealth patterns, slaveholding, and identities.
This project defined professionals as men with professional degrees or licenses to
practice: doctors, clergymen, teachers, and others. Several men who appeared here have been
widely studied: William Lowndes Yancey, Josiah Nott, J. Marion Sims, James Birney, Leroy
Pope Walker, Clement Comer Clay, and his son Clement Claiborne Clay. Others are less
familiar today, but were leaders of their towns and cities. Names were culled from various
censuses and tax records, and put into a database that included age, marital status, children, real
property, personal property, and slaveholding. In total, the database included 453 names. The
study also mined a rich vein of primary source material from the very articulate professional
community.
Objects of Confidence and Choice indicated that professionals were not a social class but
a community of institution builders. In order to refine this conclusion, a more targeted
investigation of professionals in a single antebellum Alabama town will be needed.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to take the opportunity to thank those who helped me write this dissertation.
Johanna Shields first suggested a study on antebellum professionals during an Old South course
at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Shortly after, and independently, George Rable
mentioned the same topic during a class at the University of Alabama. I took the bait. Writing
dissertations can be a lonely and painful process, and I could not have finished without the help
of my committee. In addition to Professor Rable, sincere thanks go out to my committee chair
Joshua Rothman, and committee members Jennifer Green, Lawrence Kohl, and John Giggie.
Ten years ago, I decided to turn my passion for History into an academic career. I would
like to thank longtime UAH Department Head Andrew Dunar for encouraging me to pursue my
goals, and supporting me along the way. I was blessed to have outstanding professors at both
UAH and UA, none finer than my good friend John Severn. John took time out of his busy days
to read earlier drafts of Objects of Confidence and Choice. Similarly, I am indebted to John
Kvach of UAH, whose recent book on De Bow’s Review confirms his status as a rising star in the
world of antebellum social history. Kudos, too, to the indefatigable Nancy Rohr: your wide-eyed
enthusiasm for all things antebellum inspires me.
Today’s graduate students have many advantages with online resources, but nothing beats
the thrill of rummaging through archival boxes and discovering unpublished material. Special
thanks to Ed Bridges and Steve Murray from the Alabama Department of Archives and History,
and to Susanna Leberman and her team in the Heritage Room at the Huntsville-Madison County
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Public Library. Visits to the University of Alabama’s Hoole Special Collections, Duke
University’s Perkins Library, and the University of North Carolina’s Southern Historical
Collection, were always productive.
Finally, I have a very patient family and for that I am grateful. To my wife, Anne Marie,
you are my bedrock, best-friend, hero. Thank you for sharing this and other journeys with me.
And to my mother, Clare, who died before I completed this dissertation. Thank you encouraging
me to be creative. Your nurturing voice is forever in my ear.

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CONTENTS

ABSTRACT……………………………………………...……………………………………….ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………………….….iii
LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………………………..vi
INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………...…1
CHAPTER ONE…………………………………………………………………………………20
Ordering the Hinterlands: Institution-Building Alabama Professionals,
1803—1819

CHAPTER TWO………………………………………………………………………….……..51
“A State of Ignorance is the Worst of All States”: Creating a Culture of
Education in Antebellum Alabama

CHAPTER THREE……………………………………………………….……………………..85
“An Aristocracy of the Mind”: The Continuing Education of the Professional Man

CHAPTER FOUR………………………………………………………………………...…….125
The Brotherhood: Professional Identities in Alabama, 1820—1860

CHAPTER FIVE…………………………………………………….....………………………153
Alabama’s Urban Slaveholding Professionals and the Peculiar Institution

EPILOGUE……………………………………………………………………………………..179
Alabama Professionals and the Civil War: A Return to Hinterlands

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………190

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LIST OF TABLES

1. Relative Literacy Rates………………………………………………………………………..81

2. Number of Professional Schools………………………………………………………………91

3. Lawyers in the three largest Alabama cities………………………..………………………..119

4. Percentage of Professional Households in Town…………………………………………….130

5. Total Free population of Alabama, 1820—1860…………………………………………….166

6. Professionals at the 1861 Alabama State Constitutional Convention………………………..178
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INTRODUCTION

In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton described professional men as “impartial
arbiters,” eager to promote a cause that “appears conducive to the general interests of society.”
Unlike farmers and mechanics, who would make public decisions based on their own self-
interests, Hamilton wrote that, “with regard to the learned professions, little need be observed;
they truly form no interest in society and according to their situations and talents will be
indiscriminately the objects of the confidence and choice of each other, and other parts of the
community.”1 Hamilton certainly overstated professionals’ magnanimity. Professionals were not
the altruistic, disinterested bedrocks of a burgeoning new nation. From the time they gathered in
Philadelphia to draft a federal Constitution, men have pursued professional careers in order to
advance their own interests as well as the interests of like-minded neighbors.
Yet in other ways, Hamilton had it right. In the pursuit of personal advancement,
professionals became the institution builders for the fast growing country. As Americans
experimented with representative government, a market economy, and an egalitarian society for
white males, professionals provided the sturdy underpinnings that allowed the new nation to
thrive. With professionals manning leadership positions in political and civic institutions, the
United States population increased from 3.9 million in 1790 to 31.4 million by1860. For a man
with a license or degree in hand, almost anything was possible. Of the country’s first sixteen
presidents, all but three—George Washington, William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor—

1 Found in Federalist Papers #35.Clinton Rossiter, ed., The Federalist Papers: Alexander
Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (New York: Signet Classic, 2003), 211.
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practiced law at one time or another. Lawyers, physicians and ministers were elected to
Congress. Professionals served as governors of states, state legislators, and were selected for
boards at universities, colleges, local schools and academies. They became federal, municipal,
circuit, and state judges. They were presidents of banks, railroads, and other commercial
ventures.
Objects of Confidence and Choice examines institution-building antebellum professional
communities by focusing on the role professionals played in the development of one slave state,
Alabama, from its territorial stage until the Civil War. The dissertation describes men who were
engaged in what Hamilton called the learned professions—doctors, lawyers, clergymen, teachers,
civil engineers, and others who held advanced degrees or licenses to practice a profession—and
looks at the personal and career choices they made. The study explains why these men came to
Alabama, and how they built and maintained the courthouses, jails, post offices, schools,
libraries, and other social and economic institutions that made towns physically safe and
attractive to new immigrants. Further, this dissertation considers the larger question of what it
meant to be a professional in the antebellum era, and in what ways the interests of the
professional community supported or undercut the interests of planters, merchants, yeomen, and
others.
Several professionals who appear in this study are widely known. The names of fire-
eating politician William Lowndes Yancey, racial theorist Josiah Nott, gynecological pioneer Dr.
Marion Sims, antislavery activist and presidential candidate James Birney, Confederate Secretary
of War Leroy Pope Walker, and Senator in both the United States and the Confederate States of
America, Clement Claiborne Clay, Jr., to list a few, are found in many books. Other names will
be recognizable to those who are familiar with the history of Alabama. Among those are Daniel
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Bestor, Clement Comer Clay, Noah Cloud, Thomas Fearn, Henry Hilliard, Henry Hitchcock,
Basil Manly, Harry Toulmin, John Williams Walker, Henry Watson, and Alva Woods. Each man
used his credentials and training as a springboard to a successful public career. They were
community leaders who left enduring legacies.2
Still, the majority of professionals mentioned will be unfamiliar to most modern readers.
Yet even these lesser-known professionals were conspicuous members of their local
communities. In order to build a collective profile, I constructed a database of 453 professionals
living in Alabama’s ten largest cities and towns. The ten largest towns and cities represented just
six percent of Alabama’s total population, but were home to twenty percent of its professional
population. The database includes information on age, marital status, children, occupation,
wealth, place of birth, number of slaves owned and their gender and ages. While I discovered

2 Among many works on selected Alabama professionals, see Eric H. Walther, William Lowndes
Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
2006); Reginald Horsman,, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician and Racial Theorist
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); D. Laurence Rogers, Apostle of
Equality: The Birneys, the Republicans, and the Civil War (Lansing: Michigan State University
Press, 2012); Ruth Ketring Nuermberg, The Clays of Alabama: A Planter-Lawyer-Politician
Family (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1958); L. Lewis Wall, M.D., “The Medical
Ethics of J. Marion Sims: A Fresh Look at the Historical Record,” Journal of Medical Ethics, 32
(2006), 346-350; and Durernda Ojnauga, “The Medical Ethics of the ‘Father of Gynecology,’ Dr.
J. Marion Sims,” Journal of Medical Ethics 19 (March 1993), 28-13. Also see William Rogers,
Warren, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, and Wayne Flint, Alabama: The History of a
Deep South State (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1994).

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