But which Britain? Travelers imprinted their regional, social, and political biases on what they sought out and observed in Britain, coloring the conclusions they brought back with them to the United States. Southerners looked to the English landed gentry (William Campbell Preston, James Henry Hammond); when they extolled the commonalities and bonds between England and the United States they thought primarily of the landed wealth and genteel culture of the English aristocracy. In contrast, travelers from New England, though thoroughly Anglophile, rejected the ways of the English aristocracy. Scientists (Benjamin Silliman) and urban elites (Joseph Ballard, Nathaniel Parker Willis) visited their counterparts in Edinburgh and London and in industrializing cities like Birmingham and Manchester to obtain scientific instruments and books and to learn about new ways of institution-building.
Different, though not mutually exclusive, conceptions of constructing civil society emerged from these encounters. The New Englanders observed an urban society in which the diffusion of knowledge and a broad variety of institutional frameworks in private clubs, subscription libraries, lyceums, and scientific associations constituted the foundations of civil society. Southerners took the private libraries and genteel dinner conversations of the manor houses as the primary embodiment of English civil society. Both urban and the aristocratic contexts of civil society, however, incorporated hierarchical and exclusionary practices based on class and gender. In this regard, the Americans discovered, the private relations among men formed the basis for civil society, not the open and free association of all interested and competent individuals.