ABSTRACT
Even a region as stubbornly resistant to change as the Old South had its share of reformers. We tend to think of the Burned Over District as an area not just aflame with revivalist fervor but also alive with reformist movements, such as temperance, anti-slavery, and women's rights. That would be quite true, of course, yet the early national and antebellum South—particularly the border states—enjoyed their share of activists and reformers, albeit usually Whig reformers of a particularly conservative bent. Politicians like Henry Clay and Charles Fenton Mercer, on both the state and federal level, dabbled in educational reform, internal improvements, African colonization, and especially economic modernization, which is to say, the creation of a capitalist, free labor system below the Mason-Dixon line. Indeed, to a very large extent, the American System, Henry Clay's interconnected economic platform, may essentially be seen as his prescription for what ailed his adopted state of Kentucky.
