ABSTRACT
The purpose of these chapters is not to add yet one more set of generalizations to the theoretical discussion of class so vigorously waged by American sociologists, but rather to provide a detailed historical account of behavior-in this case behavior of the urban upper class. Such detail on a neglected era should be valuable to those theorists who hold tentatively to their abstract formulations, always prepared to modify them in the face of new data. The evidence underlying much of the modern thinking about class is quite general and drawn primarily from studies of twentieth-century class behavior; when social scientists invoke earlier history they sometimes make large assumptions about the alleged "inner directedness" of personality or the "egalitarianism and mobility of pre-industrial society,"— assumptions that turn out to be unfounded. W hat follows is historical detail on the uses of leisure, the social lives, the marital behavior, and the residential patterns of the urban rich. When this information is added to the data from the fore going chapters-on the scope and sources of their wealth, the proportion of the community's riches they owned and the tenacity with which they held on to it, the material situation and status of their parents and families, and the unusual opportunities available to them-the nature of the urban upper class in antebellum America is illuminated perhaps more brightly than it would be by a theoretical discussion whose abstrac tions are based primarily on data drawn from other periods.
