In 1815, Susan Nye, a twenty-five year old living in Amenia, New York, left her family to teach in North Carolina. Unlike most Yankee teachers, she remained in the South for over thirty years, serving as instructress or principal in eight different schools in six different communities.

Tolley speculates that Nye attended Litchfield Academy in Connecticut. She apparently experienced a religious conversion at school, which left her with a desire to spread the Gospel and perform community service. When she finished her studies, she accepted a teaching position at the Raleigh Academy, a well-regarded school in North Carolina's capitol city known for providing both male and female students with a rigorous course of instruction. In Raleigh, she joined the Presbyterian Church and participated in church and community efforts to spread the Gospel. Eight years later, she and her sister, Amanda, moved to Augusta, Georgia, to teach. There she met and married Adam Hutchison, a widower with three children. Like many women in the early nineteenth century, she found neither economic security nor personal happiness as a wife. Her new husband, a cotton factor, possessed a fiery temper and was prone to depression. Shortly after her first son was born in 1825, her husband's business began to fail. In 1827, she turned educational entrepreneur and started her own school in Augusta. Unfortunately, her efforts did nothing to improve the family's financial situation, and her marriage began to deteriorate. By 1833 she was the mother of four sons and the wife of a man who was seriously ill. Again she returned to teaching, this time opening a school in the town of Beach Island near Augusta. When her husband abandoned her, she returned to her family's farm in Amenia. Her husband's death in 1834 left her responsible for supporting two sets of children, so she enrolled in Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary in order to enhance her teaching credentials, and then returned to Raleigh to open an Academy for Young Ladies. Between 1836 and 1847, she was the principal of schools in Salisbury, Charlotte, and Concord, North Carolina. By 1848 she had returned to the family farm in New York. She died there in 1867 at the age of 77.

Using Hutchison's journals, as well as correspondence, school records, newspapers, wills, court records, legislative reports, religious tracts, school books, church records, and published essays, Tolley places Hutchison's story in the context of the Second Great Awakening, which she successfully argues not only encouraged an expansion in American education, but also created the kind of community networks that allowed school mistresses like Hutchison to spearhead efforts to spread Enlightenment and evangelical ideas and promote female economic self-sufficiency. Forbidden to preach, these teachers acted as lay ministers and used those networks to find employment opportunities which allowed them the platforms necessary to carry out efforts to improve the world around them.

As Tolley points out, considering the political, social, economic, and legal constraints placed on free women in the early nineteenth century, Hutchison was exceptional on many levels. Most remarkable, however, was her willingness to publicly critique slavery while she lived among slave owners. Hutchison came to the South supporting gradual emancipation, and after she arrived in North Carolina, not only prayed with slaves and free blacks, but also used as one of her textbooks, William Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, which argued that owning human property was against the law of nature. While living in Augusta, she helped convert slaves to Christianity and welcomed an independent black congregation into her home to worship. When direct criticism of slavery became suspect after the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831, she began to advocate what Tolley calls “benevolent slaveholding,” which held that the worst aspects of slavery could be mediated by humane treatment and that slaves needed to be prepared for emancipation. In May 1836, she published an anti-slavery essay in the American Colonization Society's African Repository and Colonial Journal advocating abolition once the slaves had been converted to Christianity. Less than a year later, the Presbyterian editor of the Charleston Observer published an essay written by Hutchison expressing concern that the issue of slavery would divide the Presbyterian Church. And finally, when she was living in Salisbury, she flagrantly ignored the laws of North Carolina by secretly teaching four slave children to read and write.

Tolley's book is thoroughly researched and exceptionally well-written. Her impressive command of the secondary literature enables her to place Susan Hutchison's story in a wide variety of contexts making Heading South to Teach an important contribution to many subfields in American history, including religious studies, business history, labor history, education history, women's history, southern history, and the history of reform.