To “Converse with The Most Excellent Men”: Classical Education, Cultural Capital, and The Formation of a Ruling Class in The Antebellum South

A planter was expected to be a certain kind of person, possess certain kinds of tastes, and be exposed to certain kinds of learning. Those practices and ideas constitute what Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital. Bourdieu argued that cultural capital could be as important as economic capital in defining and perpetuating membership in a ruling class. For Southern planters, an important component of that cultural capital was a classical education.

Looking at several selected members of the planter class and several institutions responsible for the education of the sons of planters, my paper will examine how classical education served to distinguish the Southern ruling class from those over whom they were able to exercise political, economic, and social power. The dissemination of classical learning became the principal means of cultural reproduction for the planter class and served not only as a class marker, but helped shape the world they helped to create. Their reading of classical antiquity offered Southern planters a model for reconciling in their own minds the ineradicable contradictions that a belief in a democratic republic and a slaveocracy entailed.