This dissertation examines how and why social and moral reformers, philanthropists, social activists, and charitable givers became fixated on human migrations in the pre-Civil War United States. In this period, Americans created and participated in philanthropic organizations, preached to congregations and readerships, and lobbied the public and the government in order to encourage, aid, or curtail the international and internal migrations of European immigrants, enslaved and free Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and white western settlers. In doing so, reformers promulgated rhetoric and engaged in argument about humanitarian responsibility to people in the process of resettlement. Additionally, they sought to manage migratory flows and intervene into the lives of people on the move in order to craft what they envisioned as a more perfect world.

By placing eighteenth and nineteenth-century discourses about migration in the context of social benevolence and middle-class reform culture, this dissertation demonstrates how a variety of shared concerns about human mobility informed reformers’ ideologies and efforts across social movements and across time. Reformers debating the moral nature of migration worked through several questions: whether migratory flows and mass population transfer would strengthen or imperil American society; whether migration and migrants should be encouraged, discouraged, assisted, or otherwise organized by benevolent men and women; and whether and how individuals’ moral and social characters might be reshaped through the process of geographical relocation and transplantation. In answering these questions, reformers, philanthropists, and activists engaged in significant debates about foreignness and belonging, race, charity and poverty, religion, territorial expansion, and exclusion and inclusion in the American body politic.