1821 – 1855

Challenges to traditional values & institutions

Social injustice & instability

The emergence of mvmts. to “reform” the nation

Women’s rights, school reform, abolition

Optimistic faith in human nature

Decay of piety

Deism – “rational” religious doctrines

Universalism & Unitarianism – salvation was available to all

Decline in commitment to organized churches & denominations

Most Ams. continued to hold strong religious beliefs

Second Great Awakening (~1801)

Efforts to fight spread of religious rationalism

Methodism founded by John Wesley

Revivals – religious gatherings designed to awaken religious faith

Combined a more active piety w/a belief in a God whose grace could be attained through faith & good works

Individual & social reform were possible

Influential leaders – Charles Finney & Lyman Beecher

Female converts outnumbered male

Enslaved blacks interpreted the Christian message as a promise of freedom

In the East, many free African Americans worshipped in separate churches

John Lewis Krimmel, Black People's Prayer Meeting, watercolor, ca. 1811, depicting a Methodist service in Philadelphia

Gabriel Prosser’s plan for slave rebellion (1800)

Captured & hanged

Spirit of revivalism was also strong among Nat. Ams. – Handsome Lake

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon)

Romanticism

Am. artistic mvmt.

Valued strong feeling & mystical intuition over calm rationality

Appealed to feelings & intuitions of ordinary people

Innate love of goodness, truth, & beauty

Washington Irving

James Fennimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans)

Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

Nathaniel Hawthorne (Scarlet Letter)

Edgar Allen Poe

Philosophical & literary mvmt.

Emphasized living a simple life

Celebrated truth found in nature & in personal emotion & imagination

Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Nature” & “Self-Reliance)

Henry David Thoreau (Walden)

Experimental groups who lived together & tried to create a perfect place

Brook Farm in West Roxbury, MA

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Robert Owen & New Harmony (IN) 1825

Individual freedom vs. demands of communal society

Oneida community in upstate NY rejected traditional notions of family & marriage, founded by John Humphrey Noyes

Shakers commitment to complete celibacy, founded in late 1774 by Mother Ann Lee in England

Reform mvmts. were mostly led by women

Temperance

Education

Care of the poor, the handicapped, & the mentally ill

Treatment of criminals

Rights of women

Protestant revivalism – crusade against personal immorality

Temperance – crusade against drunkenness

Am. Temperance Society (1826) became a major national mvmt.

Education

Effort to produce a system of universal public education

Horace Mann – education was a way to protect democracy

Principle of tax-supported elementary schools est. in every st. by 1850s

Quality of public ed. varied widely

Institutions to help disabled

Rehabilitation

Prison & hospital reform

Mental health reform

Dorthea Dix

Early opposition to slavery

Colonization – effort to resettle African Ams. in Africa or Caribbean

American Colonization Society (1817)

Liberia est. 1821

The Liberator (1831)

Opponents of slavery should talk about its damage

Demand immediate, unconditional, universal abolition of slavery

Extension of all the rights of Am. citizenship

American Antislavery Society (1833)

Frederick Douglass founded North Star

Abolitionism divided, growing radicalism of Garrison

Division w/in Am. Antislavery Society (1840)

Underground railroad

Personal liberty laws (TBJ vs. FSL)

SCOTUS (1842)

Liberty Party (1840) stood for “free soil”

1st Am. feminist mvmt.

Lucretia Mott

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Dorothea Dix

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Drawing parallels between plight of women & slaves

Seneca Falls Convention (NY, 1848)

Adopted “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions”

Sojourner Truth

Family as an institution, inspired new conceptions of its role in Am. Society

Traditional inequalities remained

Oberlin College (OH, 1837)

Mt. Holyoke College (MA, 1837)

“Cult of domesticity” – new domestic ideology

Women as guardians of “domestic virtues”

Custodians of morality

Detached from public world

Had real meaning for relatively affluent women