Abstract
The 1839 marriage of the Philadelphia gentleman Joshua Francis Fisher with the South Carolina aristocrat Elizabeth Middleton illuminates some of the tensions between class and sectional identity in the Civil War-era United States. Neither family had much in common with ordinary people in its respective region. Because of their wealth, privilege, and travels, both families shared a cosmopolitan, elitist sensibility that marked them as members of a national, and even transatlantic, leisure class. Because of their reactionary attitudes, the Fishers were in some ways more southern than northern, despite their residence in Philadelphia. During the Civil War, the Fishers were active supporters of the Confederacy, whose defeat they interpreted as the triumph of middle-class, democratic values in the United States. After the war, Joshua Francis Fisher sought to memorialize his family history as a record of a vanished aristocracy as well as, he hoped, an admonition to his children.
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