Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan (review)

Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan. By John W. Quist (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1999) 562 pp. $57.50.

With exception of passing reference to its limited impact on Southern society, antebellum reform has rarely lent itself to a comparative treatment of the free North and the slave South. In a seemingly exhaustive examination of reform movements in Washtenaw County, Michigan, and Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, Restless Visionaries attempts to fill this gap. Responding to what he feels has been the "greatly understudied and misunderstood" nature of reform in the South, Quist seeks to show that reform activities in these two community settings shared more similarities than differences and that, indeed, evangelically inspired and market driven reform was as deeply entrenched in the South as in the North (17).

Alternating between, first, his Alabama county and then its Michigan counterpart, Quist lays out his evidence in six long, topically organized chapters that cover evangelical benevolence, temperance, colonization of African-Americans, and abolition. The main outlines of his argument quickly emerge. In both counties, reformers emerged from town-oriented elites, sharing a Whiggish outlook in politics, an evangelical stance in religion, and an entrepreneurial vision in economic affairs. Both sets of reformers pushed for the same goal of an orderly and morally purified Protestant Republic in which all individuals embraced the virtues of self-discipline and productive work.

Although noting that in Washtenaw, women were more active and aggressive in reform and that such utopian alternatives as Fourierism attracted some supporters, Quist repeatedly insists that only the absence of abolitionism on the reform agenda in Tuscaloosa marked any significant difference in the ethos and patterns of reform in the two sections. Even in this context, as when he argues that "both abolitionists and slaveholders endorsed benevolence itself," he holds that the contrast should be minimized (153).

Yet, such a stand assumes that evangelicalism meant the same thing to Northern and Southern believers. He flattens out, indeed ignores, the ethical dynamics involved in the widening sectional dispute over slavery. There is no room in his analysis for the evangelically related values of honor and shame, or conscience and guilt, that figure so prominently in Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge, 1995). Surely the refusal of white Alabamians even to give abolitionism a hearing is a difference of kind, not just of degree. In large measure because of abolitionism, the reform impulse in the North was increasingly spiraling out of control in the minds of Southern whites. In fact, and especially after the 1830s, Southern reformers rejected any dissenting ideas that threatened racial and gender hierarchies of white male power.

Quist overstates his case for sectional similarities, and the readability of his study would have been greatly enhanced by cutting and streamlining much of his ponderous, repetitive narrative. Who needed to be told, for example, that "one of the greatest differences between temperance in Washtenaw and Tuscaloosa Counties was the heavy involvement of abolitionists in temperance activity in the northern county" or that "the occasionally stated fear of alcohol falling into the hands of slaves constitutes a key difference between northern and southern temperance rhetoric" (300, 301, 337)? Nonetheless, this is a valuable study that deserves a wide audience for its painstaking compilation of vast socioeconomic data concerning a multitude of hitherto forgotten reformers at the local level, much of which is presented in tables throughout the text and in an appendix.

William L. Barney
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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