John W. Quist, Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998).

SYNOPSIS:

Quist's study looks at how deeply and extensively the antebellum reform climate penetrated into the lives of most Americans. He argues that a study of reform during this time must assess how "most Americans observed and experienced it--that is, as it functioned in the village and the countryside." (4) Quist examines two counties--Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Washtenaw, Michigan--and reveals that the residents of both counties embraced the antebellum reform impulse. Quist's study challenges the historiographical tendency to see the South, with its cotton-based plantation economy, as an increasingly distinctive region opposed to the North's free labor economy, because he finds just as vibrant a reform movement there as in his Northern community. In both places, Quist believes, market forces helped sustain and energize reform movements. Quist argues that the differences in the counties' reform movements resulted from the "greater intellectual ferment in Washtenaw County . . . rather than merely a deeper conservatism in Tuscaloosa County" and that this partly accounts for the counties' different receptivity to reform. (470) Quist's study emphasizes the similarities between these places and their reform histories. Slavery plays out differently, however, as a reform issue, and Quist notes that its effect in the Southern community was unifying, while its effect in the Northern community was fracturing.

EXCERPT:

"It was actually in Washtenaw County--not Tuscaloosa County--that slavery proved to be a divisive issue for proponents of benevolence. In Washtenaw, many abolitionists viewed slavery as a sin and believed that their association with any organization that tolerated slavery would taint them with the sin as well. Even if they endorsed the objectives of benevolence, they could not in good conscience pursue those ends by collaborating with national societies that refused to denounce slavery sufficiently." (152)

"The defense of slavery never disappeared from Tuscaloosa's newspapers for the remainder of the antebellum period, but it would be incorrect to focus on the mail controversy of 1835 and conclude that the defense of chattel slavery was white Tuscaloosans' foremost public preoccupation. . . the defense of slavery and the ferreting out of abolitionists were matters upon which white Tuscaloosans almost universally agreed. So strong was the consensus on these issues that during presidential elections, each party tried to outdo its adversary by proclaiming that the other candidate was a threat to the South and slavery, and that the opposition party in the North was the stronghold of abolitionists. But when Alabamians competed against one another for state offices, they contended over issues that characterized the second party system, and did not debate issues associated with slavery." (310-311)

"While it is undoubtedly true that some white southerners feared that any reform more radical than temperance was too closely linked to abolition and were thus unreceptive or hostile to it, it is also true that the greater intellectual ferment in Washtenaw County--rather than merely a deeper conservatism in Tuscaloosa County--partly accounts for the counties' different receptions to these two radical causes . . . . Despite their important differences, the similarities between Washtenaw and Tuscaloosa Counties with respect to antebellum reform are also important. During the antebellum years, more people participated in or in some way encountered temperance and evangelical benevolence than Fourierism, women's rights, and even abolitionism. In both counties, proponents of benevolence not only desired to provide people with the means to salvation; they also endeavored to transform the morals of Americans and to remove the barriers that they believed created social problems, hindered the development of human potential, and ultimately stood in the way of economic progress. Temperance devotees also promoted similar goals. These two reforms, as well as abolition, were advanced by individuals who identified closely--though at times elusively--with the growth of American towns and cities, education, and the market economy." (470)

RELATIONSHIP:

We find much to agree with in Quist's portrayal of counties farther west than Augusta and Franklin. Augusta County was as devoted to efforts at temperance, Sunday Schools, and tract societies as Franklin, perhaps more so because of its Whiggish orientation. While the Underground Railroad reportedly ran through Franklin County and while voters turned quickly to the Republicans, there is little evidence of organized abolitionism in this border community.

"White people in Augusta rarely discussed slavery openly and for the most part only did so under provocation when they hoped to defend their institution."

"Franklin County's papers spent more ink--almost all of it negative--on its nearly two thousand free blacks than Augusta did on its five thousand enslaved people."

"In the first half of 1860 Republican editors in Franklin's Repository and Transcript attacked slavery as a violation of nature that stole from the workingman the fruits of his labor; they focused mainly on slavery's potential to undermine free labor."

"In the first half of 1860 Democratic editors in Franklin County emphasized slavery's compatibility with the Northern economy and society and Northern complicity in the South's institution."