ABSTRACT
The fascinating matters of influence and power in the antebellum urban community are among the themes considered in this chapter. The chapter focuses on the urban social or class structure, the characteristics of the classes composing that structure, the relationship among the classes, the extent of social movement among them, the social distances separating them in the “stratification space” they occupied, and signs of significant change during the decades before the Civil War. The nation’s urban communities have been categorized according to their antebellum populations. The metaphor for the class structure was the classic side of a pyramid, the hierarchy of social levels was essentially represented by different occupations, the requisite data were the stray facts and any appropriate contemporary observations that came to hand. The atomic human elements or units in antebellum social space were not individuals but families.
