Welfare and Charity in the Antebellum South (review)

Although scholars have produced scores of studies of antebellum reform movements, almost every study has focused on the northern United States. Even the few studies that have examined reform in the South have focused on the work of northern societies there and the conflicts their presence engendered.¹ Only a handful of scholars have attempted to shed light on reform movements within the South, and all but one have limited their examination to a particular city or county. Timothy Lockley’s Welfare and Charity in the Antebellum South steps into this void and illuminates the vast networks of reform societies that permeated the antebellum South. Although sources for these organizations are scant (90% have no antebellum records at all), Lockley has identified more than 600 public or private societies (excluding non-poor-relief groups such as temperance societies and missions), which sought to relieve “want, suffering, and sickness”—an astonishing revelation, considering their virtual absence in the voluminous literature on antebellum southern society (2).

Besides making a novel contribution to the literature of reform, Lockley joins two other historiographical conversations regarding the antebellum South. First, like historians Suzanne Lebsock, Harriet Amos, and Gail Murray, Lockley argues that southern women often treated activities outside the home as extensions of the “virtuous Republican Motherhood” that they practiced within (62). However, he widens the scope of this argument, emphasizing not only women’s civic republicanism, but also the Christian and humanitarian beliefs that profoundly influenced how and why they took part in organized benevolence. Second, Lockley contributes to one of the most pressing historiographical questions about the antebellum South—what caused white southerners, despite their differences, to unite in 1861? While some historians have emphasized class, family authority structures, and shared economy, Lockley sides with historians who pinpoint race as the primary issue around which southern whites eventually united, identifying the elites as the primary source of this active ideology. Through the organization and distribution of welfare and charity, he argues, elites made “a public statement . . . that poor whites . . . had a special status in society merely because of their skin color” (59). While white plain folk and blacks often forged relationships according to community or need, elite whites sought to unite white society according to race, often using the avenues of welfare and charity.²

Welfare and Charity is organized into five thematic chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of reform, including the structures of urban and rural reform, men’s and women’s contributions, personal charity, and public education. Lockley is especially adept at explicating the complex motives behind charitable endeavors and their place within a broader social and geographical context. When he discusses southern women’s societies, for example, Lockley explains their multifaceted motives, compares their work with that of organizations in other southern states, and contrasts their progress with women’s societies in the North, which after 1830 embarked on a divergent path of embracing the antislavery and women’s rights movements.

In addition to discussing the centrality of race in each chapter, Lockley engages the perennial question of the nature of reform societies—benevolent uplift, or social control? Lockley walks the line between the two with skill, asserting, “Empowerment and control were by no means mutually exclusive and often worked in harmony” (213). Thus in the first chapter, Lockley demonstrates the depth of elite control over welfare, yet he also shows how often the poor refused to cooperate with the rules, especially when societies began adopting the northern, market-driven institutionalization of benevolence. In chapter 4, he describes the complex relationships that existed between elite creditors and plain-folk debtors. He highlights the fact that although plain folk lost power by borrowing money and owing deference to elites, they also gained a measure of economic independence previously unattainable. In all cases, Lockley exhibits a fair-minded understanding of the variegated nature of authority in reform.

Throughout the book, Lockley places the motives of women’s societies...