Gentlemen merchants

"Gentlemen Merchants preserves the correspondence between members of two wealthy slave-holding merchant families, the Gourdins and the Youngs, in nineteenth-century Charleston, South Carolina. Because the correspondence lasts over forty years, the letters provide a significant record of historical southern themes. Plantation-born urban dwellers, the correspondents comment deeply and widely on their own family history, religion in the South, slavery and race, business, secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction."--BOOK JACKET.