Susan M. Ryan explores antebellum Americans' preoccupation with the language and practice of benevolence. Drawing upon a variety of cultural and literary texts, she traces how people working and writing within social reform movements - and their outspoken opponents - helped solidify racial and class ideologies that ultimately marginalized even the most deserving poor. The links between race and the relations of benevolence occasioned much soul-searching among antebellum Americans, Ryan explains. In a period of heated public debate over issues such as slavery, Indian removal, and non-Protestant immigration, the categories of blackness, Indianness, and a generic 'foreignness' came to signify, for many whites, need itself.