...fact, Simpson had already requested help locating a suitable teaching position from Francis H. Smith, the VMI superintendent. With his diploma and with this petition to Smith, Simpson, like many of his peers, accessed what has been an overlooked function of the late antebellum South's military schools: their role as a launching pad for the professional careers of nonagricultural, non-elite southerners. (1) Although the South's private and state military schools replicated the discipline and scientific curriculum of the United States Military Academy at West Point, these institutes lacked the national academy's preferential entry to the armed forces. As a result, 96 percent of those schools' matriculates had to find their ways in civilian careers. (2)

In the years following his graduation, Simpson found himself in the situation of many young southern men. The son of a teacher, Simpson's middling status left him without connections to either a plantation or an apprenticeship. His pursuit of social position returned him time and again to his alma mater. Almost yearly missives, commencing with the letter in 1845, asked the VMI superintendent for recommendations or placement in openings of which the professor knew. "You will doubtless receive applications for teachers from various quarters of the State and perhaps of the Union. You have done me the kindness to offer me several such situations which circumstances have prevented me from accepting," Simpson declared in 1849, "and now I trust I shall not be troublesome for soliciting another such offer from you." Throughout the years Simpson received references and returned the favors by encouraging his students to enroll at VMI. He dreamed of higher status occupations, first college professorships and then the more lucrative career of engineering; and as he was ready to move up, he repeatedly contacted his former professor for help. In exchange for assistance in securing an engineering job, for example, Simpson proffered his current teaching post, with a decent annual salary of five hundred dollars, to a VMI graduate of the superintendent's choosing. (3) Such exchanges, in which alumni requested jobs, offered soon-to-be-vacant positions, and sent students to their alma maters, illustrate the career networks in which alumni and military educators forged social stability and worked toward professionalization in the tenuous antebellum world of the southern middling class.

Military educator networks show that members of the developing southern middle class promoted professionalization to create social stability and that they did so not with patronage but with a quasi-bureaucratic system. Defying twenty-first-century perceptions that they embodied conservative values, military schools in the late antebellum years reflected the modernizing South; their curriculum, middle-class matriculates, and promotion of professions and professionalization were part of the region's participation in national trends. After describing the southern middle class, its use of the distinct characteristics of military education, and the operations of networks linking educators and alumni, this article focuses on how the networks created social stability for young southerners. Military alumni networks accomplished this stability through professionalization (i.e., the validation of specialized knowledge and professional status) of teaching. Their success shows in military education's expansion in the number of practitioners and locations, and it highlights the formation of the middle class in a new way, building on a vision of the increasing acceptance of professions. This analysis helps answer two significant questions in southern and American historiography: How did a middle class develop in the South absent the capitalist growth that spurred the process in the North? And how did early-nineteenth-century professionalization proceed? Finally, this study locates the military school networks in the social structure of the Old South among the myriad community connections that fostered them even as the new school ties created proto-bureaucratic avenues of advancement.

The southern military academy provides an excellent window to the makeup and priorities of the region's emerging middle class. The complex work of defining this class--were they small planters? were they yeomen?--has begun but is far from complete. Perhaps previous historians' best definition applies the term to nonagricultural professionals, as Jonathan Daniel Wells proposes in The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861. He estimates this group at 10 percent of the South's urban population by 1860. The number of VMI alumni who had attended by 1850 equaled 12 percent of the total of all students who were attending college that year at other institutions in the state. This large number of alumni of a single school suggests that the middle class may, in fact, have constituted greater than 10 percent of the overall population, especially if rural professionals are considered part of the class. (4) Clearly, however, a middle-class professional group, distinct from both yeomen and planters, developed as part of the modernizing slave society in the late antebellum years. Studying military alumni thus allows historians to further explore white social structure between the extremes of rich and poor. This article, building on the excellent scholarship on planters and plain folk, recent work on professionals and artisans, and vast historiography of the northern middle class, sees the southern middle class as connected to the elite but possessing separate status. As a result, it struggled to maintain a rank above the lower classes and developed social and cultural characteristics distinct from both groups. (5) Future scholarship must continue to explore different segments of the middle class, including urban professionals, rural professionals, and downwardly mobile planters' younger sons; such works will better reckon the number and location of the class throughout the Old South. (6) Though each subdivision of the middle class surely had its own interest in military education, this article focuses on its attraction to nonagricultural professionals, the largest portion of the group.

The middling class differed from other groups by economic situation and in some, but not all, values. This core group can be seen, then, in the members' promotion of schooling, their professional and nonagricultural careers, and the networks they established. Indeed, the southern middle class's connection to education should be unsurprising. As Wells states, "[t]he importance of publicly funded education became a key element of southern middle-class ideology." (7) Efforts to gain public financing of military institutions--campaigns that were successful in twelve southern states before 1861--and the middle-class enrollment in those schools followed from the class's increasing articulation of that ideology throughout the period. Similar to the conclusions of Wells and Rod Andrew Jr., this research finds that cadets shared some northern middle-class values, such as self-discipline and industry, but also concurred with many southern beliefs, including ideas about community, hierarchy, honor, and proslavery arguments. The influence of northern middle-class ideals on southerners, emphasized by historians Wells and Peter S. Carmichael, certainly bears more exploration, but the southern middle class's southernness--for instance, a distinctive reliance on military education and its networks-needs to be incorporated into historians' understanding of America's nineteenth-century social structure and middle-class formation. (8) This article contends that middling southerners expressed educational prerogatives and began the process of professionalization via expert knowledge in a manner specific to the Old South. These southerners were a part of the turn to professionalization that surged in the region after 1840, and previous studies have passed over the decision of a portion of the antebellum southern middle class to gain formal education via military schools, using these particularly regional institutions to create social stability in an Old South dominated by the master class. (9)

Military institutes made professional training accessible for non-elite men, specifically those who were not planters. Cadet Simpson's father taught, leaving the family outside the upper class and providing little wealth, and most of Simpson's peers had similar or fewer resources. Scholar Nancy Beadle describes antebellum northern academies as "solidly middle class" institutions that made occupational mobility and networking possible. Uncovering southerners' connections to schooling will likewise shed light on the middle class and its support for education in the region. (10) An analysis of cadets' families demonstrates that fathers with professional employment enrolled their sons in military schools at greater rates than fathers with agricultural occupations. Just over 70 percent of military school alumni's fathers worked outside agriculture, and 90.8 percent of those men held professional careers; similar to their fathers, approximately 70 percent of alumni avoided agricultural positions. (11) In contrast, the family backgrounds of less than 18 percent of fathers can be traced to planters' families. The extent of the more elite constituency varied across institutions. For example, the South Carolina Military Academy superintendent listed nine planters (10.3 percent of alumni) as the only agriculturally employed graduates among the eighty-seven men who had graduated by 1854. The attention of agriculturalists, including on occasion the offspring of elite planters, to military schools was due to the limited schooling options available, the possibility of state funding, and family proclivities; cadets from elite families were usually younger sons or distant relatives, in a branch of the family tree tending toward employment in the professions. (12) The vast majority of the families of cadets at private and state military schools, however, practiced nonagricultural occupations, and their sons used that schooling to maintain the same standing. The biographies and correspondence of 1,057 cadets, approximately 10 percent of the total number of matriculates of military institutions in the South from 1839 to 1859, provide the source base for this analysis. The existent personal and institutional records, available at twenty-two archives and in various published items, allow analysis of military education and its primarily middleclass constituency. (13)

Military institutes, one type of specialized academy that developed during the elaboration and experimentation of schools nationwide in the antebellum period, flourished particularly in the South, where at least eighty-three schools with military programs opened: twelve state-funded institutes joined seventy-one private military schools, which varied in level from secondary through collegiate schooling. (14) Mirroring the broader pattern of antebellum educational growth, twice as many military academies started in the 1850s as began in the 1840s. These institutes allowed progressively more students, especially those in the middle class, into the level of post-primary--but not collegiate--institutions, a category of education that has been recently labeled "higher schooling." Curricular reform in academies and higher schools allowed them to attract non-elite students more successfully than did colleges: likewise, small colleges accepted nonclassical curricula and non-elite matriculates more often than larger state universities did. (15) Military schools compared themselves to both academies and colleges. Indeed, the number of military institutes nearly equaled the colleges enumerated in the 1850 census in the same states. For example, the 1850 census enumerated twelve private colleges with 1,343 students in Virginia, and VMI, which the census did not count, served 12 percent of that number. Simpson joined more than eleven thousand cadets throughout the Old South. (16)

When Cadet Simpson first hooked the special gold buttons on his VMI uniform, he entered a world with distinctive characteristics. Southern military schools possessed disciplinary systems, featured scientific (as opposed to classical) curricula, and in some cases received public funding, all of which enabled the development and perpetuation of middle-class career networks. Certainly the most visible trait of military schools was the system of discipline. Detailed regulations specified the cadets' uniform, conduct, and routine. A twenty-four-hour schedule included military drill, roll calls, marches, guard duty, curfews, and demerit points for infractions. State military institutes, specifically, used the military system because cadets guarded state armories; private schools, likewise, protected weapons they received from their states. Their popularity reflected in part sectional tension and militarism, as John Hope Franklin asserted. More than militarism was involved, however. Military schools also grew from the development of a southern middle class, national reforms expanding public and vocational education, state funding aiding the schools and their faculty, and growing southern support of professional values. (17)

The schools' educational plan was more reform minded than their disciplinary system. Though schools in all categories shared pedagogical adherence to the recitation method, the curriculum in military academies differed from those in universities and college preparatory academies because it de-emphasized the classics. The military institutes echoed calls nationwide for "practical" education, and their offerings dovetailed with curricular change in the common schools (even though these institutions had only minimal success in the South). Military schools' basic entrance requirements omitted Latin and Greek, the standard college fare. Some of the schools, including VMI, taught Latin but did not require it for entrance. Neglecting Latin and Greek, military institutes' curricula specifically reduced the antebellum colleges' and universities' emphasis on classical education. Academies, colleges, and universities in the North increasingly attracted students below the elite, but southern secondary education largely held to the classics, which required students to have elite resources and goals. Southern college students, particularly those at the state universities, thus remained elite while military schools taught middling-rank students. (18) Cadets like Simpson took courses focused on modern languages--English and French, the language of engineering--rather than classical ones. Military schools also promoted scientific studies, including up to four years of mathematics, at least two years of French, and a year each of English, chemistry, physics, drawing or drafting, and engineering. (19) Thus, admission and curricular requirements allowed men to enroll in higher schooling despite lacking sufficient resources for tutors in ancient languages.

The reduced classical requirements joined state tuition remission to offer Simpson and other young men an education they might not have been able to afford otherwise. Starting with VMI, which opened in 1839, state military institutes designated a number of young men (usually between the ages of sixteen and twenty) to receive free tuition, room, and board in exchange for two years of teaching in the state after graduation. The South Carolina Military Academy (SCMA), for example, funded at least one young man from each senatorial district, while the state university in South Carolina offered only one scholarship annually. Even so, fees for the scholarship students could run as high as a hundred dollars per year. As a result, scholarships enabled middle-class cadets, but rarely indigent ones, to attend. The schools did more than offer access to education, however. They also helped their graduates make their way in a changing world. (20)

Cadet Simpson's correspondence with Superintendent Smith reveals the military school alumni networks that assisted graduates, and an exchange of letters about an 1849 vacancy at Rappahannock Military Institute demonstrates how jobs came into the networks. When VMI superintendent Smith heard that a teacher was leaving Rappahannock, he wrote the school's superintendent to inquire if that were true. Rappahannock's superintendent confirmed that he needed a new teacher and asked about a VMI graduate who had already applied. Smith recommended that man in two separate letters. When that alumnus did not take the position, Smith suggested two other alumni. Separately, yet another VMI graduate applied for the job and wrote to Smith for a recommendation, which he sent. This final alumnus ended up with the job, but he wanted to leave it within three months. By January 1850 the VMI graduate about whom the Rappahannock superintendent had originally inquired started teaching at the school. Over the course of six months, the VMI superintendent had proposed four alumni for one military school position, and the two graduates who used his recommendations left after two years or less. All this fuss was for $350 a year and a furnished room. (21)

Exchanges such as that at Rappahannock demonstrate that cadets actively...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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