Answer:
The middle class simultaneously emerged out of and contributed to a complex, uneven, and contradictory process of political, economic, and social change. Although the middle class owed much to a Revolutionary legacy that attacked rank and privilege, it also contributed decisively to the hierarchies that came to mark the antebellum United States. It was defined not simply by its members' income or occupations, but also by their culture. Indeed, by the 1830s the definitive feature of the middle class may have been its insistence that class, defined as a set of permanent, hierarchical, social and economic categories did not exist at all. And while historians have begun to locate the emergence of an American middle class in a transatlantic context, eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women and men insisted upon its distinctly American, republican character.
origins of the middle class
Eighteenth-century American society was marked by rank and deference. The middling rank, which formed a rough precursor to the middle class, included artisans and small proprietors along with professionals and semiprofessionals, who took their places in a strictly ordered social hierarchy. While particular individuals might rise beyond their beginnings, the vast majority were expected to remain within their rank. Strivers were viewed with enormous suspicion; indeed, the hallmark of successful striving was the ability to hide it altogether. But following the American Revolution (1775–1783), some men and women challenged the primacy of rank and deference by extending assertions of political equality to social and economic activities. Consequently, the early national period was marked by wide-ranging disputes over deference and hierarchy. These conflicts manifested themselves in battles between Federalists and Democratic Republicans over the degree of ceremony due the president. Such conflicts also registered among hired laborers who rejected the label "servant," insisting instead on new job titles free from degrading associations with dependency and servility.