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An Affair of Class: Western Virginia Eccentric versus New York Tobacco Magnate

An Affair of Class: Western Virginia Eccentric versus New York Tobacco Magnate Ann Clymer Bigelow t is well known that members of early New York City's mercantile elite-- the Livingstons, the Morrises, the Jays--intermarried with an eye to enhancing their financial well-being. As Sven Beckert says, "The family parlor was the cockpit of early-nineteenth-century businesses." But the city's early artisans-turned-manufacturers also employed this strategy--for example, the 1789 marriage of Peter Lorillard and Maria Dorothea Schultz, who were of divergent national background but similar in their rising prosperity. The vicious hostility that broke out between brothers-in-law Peter Lorillard and Christian Schultz once the financial parity had dissolved shows just how transactional the original marital vow had been.1 Beckert writes that "the working-class backgrounds of these manufacturers, their often rough manners and lack of genteel education, their dearth of kinship links to the mercantile elite, and the nature of their work itself marked them as upstarts." Although the Schultz family appears to have valued charitable social behavior to a greater extent than the Lorillard family, when financial gains and losses were at stake, the contempt that came with class pretensions could lead men to do desperate things, particularly when honor was involved.2 Such was the case in the feud between Schultz and http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies West Virginia University Press

An Affair of Class: Western Virginia Eccentric versus New York Tobacco Magnate

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Publisher
West Virginia University Press
Copyright
West Virginia University Press
ISSN
1940-5057
Publisher site
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Abstract

Ann Clymer Bigelow t is well known that members of early New York City's mercantile elite-- the Livingstons, the Morrises, the Jays--intermarried with an eye to enhancing their financial well-being. As Sven Beckert says, "The family parlor was the cockpit of early-nineteenth-century businesses." But the city's early artisans-turned-manufacturers also employed this strategy--for example, the 1789 marriage of Peter Lorillard and Maria Dorothea Schultz, who were of divergent national background but similar in their rising prosperity. The vicious hostility that broke out between brothers-in-law Peter Lorillard and Christian Schultz once the financial parity had dissolved shows just how transactional the original marital vow had been.1 Beckert writes that "the working-class backgrounds of these manufacturers, their often rough manners and lack of genteel education, their dearth of kinship links to the mercantile elite, and the nature of their work itself marked them as upstarts." Although the Schultz family appears to have valued charitable social behavior to a greater extent than the Lorillard family, when financial gains and losses were at stake, the contempt that came with class pretensions could lead men to do desperate things, particularly when honor was involved.2 Such was the case in the feud between Schultz and

Journal

West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional StudiesWest Virginia University Press

Published: Dec 11, 2016

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