<i>George Inness and the Science of Landscape</i> (review)

truly bourgeois” (102). Still, merchants’ social standing “remained tenuous” as “the region’s farmers, planters, and artisans often viewed the merchant’s commercial world” with “suspicion or outright hostility” (40). If the merchant operated “within a cultural and economic no-man’s-land” (75) in the antebellum period, he became “the ultimate outsider in the embattled Confederacy” (179). Merchants were often reluctant to secede, as they accurately foresaw the disruption that war would bring to their business and their families. They probably could not foresee the hostility and “flow of abuse” that by 1863 condemned them as “rapacious, unpatriotic, and alien” in a Confederate society suffering from shortages and rampant inflation (187). Yet merchants were an important element of continuity between the Old South and the New South and were ready at war’s end to “embrace the same goals as ‘bourgeois’ New York businessmen.” Byrne suggests that scholars have “underestimated the economic continuity that bound the antebellum, Confederate, and postbellum South into a commercial whole” (208). An appendix summarizes Byrne’s analysis of merchants in twenty-two counties selected from nine states in the 1850 census. Averaging only 1.8 percent of the free population, these merchants (virtually all of whom were male) were predominantly southern in origin, tended to be in their thirties, averaged $2,542 in real estate, and had an average family size of 4.5. Roughly one-quarter had a clerk living in their homes. Nearly onequarter owned slaves, and the average size of their slaveholdings was 7.9 (209-14). Wake Forest University Paul D. Escott