ABSTRACT
Reminiscing about social life in New York City during the 1830s, a member of the city's social and economic elite wrote that a "comfortable independence," ostensibly available to most persons, "assured cordial welcome by one class to the other." 1 If his recollection were accurate, antebellum New York would have been, if not a classless society, than an open society in which class had slight effect on the everyday lives of people. For, as modern scholars of class have noted, a class society man ifests itself above all in the exclusiveness and the walls of separation it erects around such institutions as marriage, "friendships characterized by mutual entertainment in homes, common memberships in 'social' or ganizations, and simply mutual visiting." Where, in the esoteric lan guage of sociological scholarship, "an essential characteristic of all known stratification systems is that they employ the kinship system as their agent of transmission of inequities," the folk wisdom would claim more simply that money marries money and people seek their own level.2 In the following chapters, the marital choices and private lives of the antebellum urban elite will be examined to see whether the facts of upperclass life bear out the cheerful conjecture that a "cordial welcome by one class to the other" characterized American society in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
