which thought begets action and personal experience shapes public
identity.

The chapters are divided into three sections. Section I looks primar-
ily at the role of identity within the southern regional context. In chap-
ters variously weighing the burdens of southern history, the authors
explore the ways in which family, law, religion, politics, and slavery
shaped southerners' decisions about personal and public morality and
obligation and, in the case of David Walker, led to a direct challenge to
the assumptions and institutions undergirding the conservative social
order of the Old South. That the white southerners studied in these
chapters risked less than the black one speaks to the powerful, if also
paradoxical, cultural and social restraints on southern intellectuals
such as the Percy family of Mississippi, lawyer James Petigru of South
Carolina, and educational reformer and proslavery apologist Calvin
Wiley of North Carolina.

Section II surveys antislavery and moral reform within the antebel-
lum northern regional context. What emerges from studies of aboli-
tionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, colonizationist
Leonard Bacon, and "true woman" editor Sarah Josepha Hale is an
appreciation of the varieties of reform sensibility and interest and of
the reformer personality. Despite very different individual family and
life histories, Garrison and Phillips found common ground in an ardent
abolitionism that sought not only to liberate slaves but also to free the
United States itself from a history of moral corruption. By tempera-
ment and association, Bacon recoiled from abolitionist vehemence, even
as he preached antislavery colonization. Likewise, Hale emphasized the
importance of historical memory (for example, in pushing for a Bunker
Hill monument and for a national Thanksgiving day) in building a sta-
ble social order, even as she expanded the roles of women to include
support for patriotic memorials and involvement in public education.

Section III examines the responses of several individuals to the facts
of emancipation. For General George Thomas, the needs of battle and
military Reconstruction forced him to rethink and finally abandon his
prewar racial prejudices and also to accept a larger role for the military
in political administration than he earlier would have tolerated. For
abolitionist James Redpath, the need to provide schooling for the freed-
men led him to reconsider his preemancipation assumptions about the
pace of black adjustment to freedom and American social responsi-
bility. For Massachusetts historian George Moore, the need to write an
honest history based on primary sources and new concepts of historical
writing caused him to revise his own state's claims to moral superiori-
ty and antislavery prominence. Except for abolitionists like Walker,
Garrison, Phillips, and, to some extent, Redpath, the "reformers"
studied in all these chapters were reconcilers in their approaches to
reform and history, revealing a conservative trend among American
reform that often has been obscured by contemporary emphasis on, and

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