ABSTRACT
Who would discuss social mobility must first make clear what he means by the term. As a vast modern literature attests, no topic exerts greater fascination for sociologists than social mobility. Fifteen years ago Bernard Barber noted that about a hundred articles and books on the concept were appearing each year.1 Even a hasty glance at the articles and book reviews in the A m erican Sociological R eview of the past decade indicates that the pace of publication on social mobility has, if anything, quickened. The clearest point made about the topic in the literature is its complexity; for as Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset have observed, "the concept of social mobility is ambiguous," depending among other things on men's subjective perception of changes in that most elusive phenomenon, their status.2 Few students would dissent from the conclusion reached by Thomas Fox and S. M. Miller that "there are a host of different ways of measuring mobility," or that "mobility has many varied contours." Another study finds that at least twenty-two different ingredients of social mobility have been used by scholars.3 Nor was this list exhaustive. In view of the’varying definitions given the concept and the unlike aspects of it emphasized by different scholars, one appreciates Ralf Dahrendorf's judgment that "the concept of social mobility is too general to be useful." 4
The chapters in this section, therefore, consider not social mobility in general but three significant facets of antebellum mobility: the social and economic situation of parents and families of the rich (or intergenerational social and economic mobility); the extent to which fortunes rose and fell during the era (or intragenerational economic mobility); and the classic issue of equality of opportunity. If the discussion will not reveal or even purport to reveal the full extent of social mobility in antebellum America-an impossible task given the elusiveness of that
topic and the diverse ways of measuring it-its purpose is more modest and therefore perhaps more useful. The evidence illuminates important aspects of American social development that have been obscured in myth and neglect.
