Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan.

Abstract

Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan. By John W. Quist. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 562. $57.50, ISBN 0-8071-2133-9.) This comparative study of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, and Washtenaw County, Michigan, argues that antebellum reform, except where slavery was at issue, was the same regardless of section. Challenging the widespread assumption that abolition tainted all reform in the South, John W. Quist first compares Bible and tract societies and Sunday schools and the secular crusade against intemperance of both counties. Only then does he contrast how each county addressed slavery. Because the secondary literature on northern reform is already so rich, the author treats Tuscaloosa's experience more comprehensively than Washtenaw's even though his examination and quantification of Michigan public, church, and associational records is the more extensive. Quist's central theme is comparability. Each county contained a thriving market town that served rural populations growing at similar rates. The political leadership of each was more Whig than Democratic; in each the prevailing churches were evangelical--chiefly Presbyterian and Congregational in Wisconsin, Methodist and Baptist in Alabama. Consequently their Christian benevolence, shaped by a propertied Whig elite of urban professional and commercial men dedicated to forwarding the self-control compatible with a market economy, was similar. Female participation was limited to aiding the poor, raising funds for male-led societies, and teaching Sunday School. The outstanding sectional difference was that, even though few were planters, officers of Alabama's benevolent organizations were overwhelmingly slaveholders. The temperance movements were similarly congruent, largely because each county followed patterns set in the Northeast. An initial campaign of elitist moral suasion against the consumption of hard liquor but not wine and beer was, by the late 1830s, ratcheted up to the teetotalism endorsed by artisans as well as professionals in Washingtonian and Sons of Temperance societies that provided a community of support. By the mid-1840s, however, the limited success of voluntary abstinence drove the urban elite, with considerable rural support, toward temperance by legislation. Thwarted in achieving statewide prohibition, both counties attempted instead to control the retail liquor trade by imposing high license fees. Although in doing so they stirred up working-class resentment and made temperance a political issue that attracted more Whig than Democratic support, in neither county did liquor become a defining party issue. …