Antebellum Reform: 1790-1860

Themes

• Second Great Awakening re-energized American religion

• Led to new reform movements seeking a perfect society – no cruelty, war, drink, discrimination, slavery

• A new national culture emerged

“The Pursuit

of Perfection” In

Antebellum America

A Third Revolution! 1. Politics

2. Economics

3. Social – commitment to improve the character of ordinary Americans

– Begins with religion

– REFORM MOVEMENTS: Women’s rights, temperance, education, literature, utopias, anti-slavery

Religion • ¾ still going to church regularly

• Softer orthodoxy – NOT like Calvinism

• Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason

– Churches were set up to terrify and enslave mankind; Monopolize power and profit

• Liberal Enlightenment views challenged traditional religious beliefs

– Deism – reason over revelation, science over Bible

• Rejected original sin & denied Christ’s divinity

• Supreme Being created universe and let it run; Humans willfully made moral choices

– Unitarianism (Deism spin-off)

• God exists in 1 person, not the Trinity

• Humans are good, have free will, salvation through good works

• God is a loving father

• Appealed to intellectuals, rational and optimistic

• Describe religion in the early 1800s.

The Second Great Awakening

– Reaction against liberalism – a religious revival

– Spiritual fervor = converted souls, reorganized churches, new sects

– Huge camp meetings to spread message to the masses (25,000 listen for days)

– Engaged in frenzies of rolling, dancing, barking, jerking

– Boosted church membership and stimulated other reforms

– Many went back to old ways – Led to feminization of religion

• Middle class women were most enthusiastic; Offered them an active role in society

The Second Great

Awakening

“Spiritual Reform From Within” [Religious Revivalism]

Social Reforms & Redefining the Ideal of Equality

Temperance

Asylum Reform

Education

Women’s Rights

Abolitionism

• Methodists and Baptists – stressed personal conversion, democratic control over church affairs, emotionalism

Religious Camp Meeting by J. Maze Burbank, 1839

Methodist camp meeting, March 1, 1819, Engraving

Peter Cartwright – best of Methodist circuit riders – traveling frontier preachers -very aggressive – punched those who tried to break up his meetings

Charles Grandison Finney- greatest of the revival preachers

-perfectionism – wanted a perfect Christian kingdom on Earth

-massive revival in NY

-denounced alcohol and slavery

-anxious bench – repentant sinners sit in full view of congregation

-women pray in public

• Connect to the 1st Great Awakening

– Similar? Different?

– Preachers?

“The Benevolent Empire”:

1825 - 1846

Second Great Awakening

Revival Meeting

Denominational Diversity • Western NY known as the “Burned-Over

District” – sermonizers preached hellfire and damnation

– Many Puritan descendants

• Millerites/Adventists – William Miller

– Christ would return on October 22, 1844; Didn’t come = dampened movement

• New sects + Methodists + Baptists = less prosperous areas, less literate in South and West

– North and East – conservative denominations (Presbyterian, Congregationalist)

• Churches split due to slavery issue

The “Burned-Over” District

in Upstate New York

Mormons in Utah • Joseph Smith – Church of Jesus Christ

of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon)

– Golden plates given to him by an angel were deciphered into the Book of Mormon

– Opposition (OH, Missouri, Illinois) toward Mormons due to polygamy, drilling militia, and voting as a unit

– Smith and brother were

murdered and mangled by mob

in Carthage, IL

His successor, Brigham Young, (“Mormon Moses”) led followers to Utah –made desert bloom with irrigation

• 5000 settlers by 1848

• Rigid discipline = frontier cooperative theocracy

• Young had 27 wives, 56 children

• 1000s of immigrants came

• Young became governor in 1850 – federal govt didn’t like this – no control

– Federal army marched there in 1857 – Utah War • Young stepped down as governor

– Congress passed anti-polygamy laws – Mormons didn’t follow

– Unique marital customs kept Utah from becoming a state

Violence Against Mormons

The Mormon “Trek”

The Mormons (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)

Desert community.

Salt Lake City, Utah

Brigham Young (1801-1877)

• What might be a possible test question on the Mormons?

Public Education • Many didn’t want free public education

– Pay taxes to educate poor?

• Changed minds – poor will grow up to be dangerous, ignorant rabble armed with the vote

• Tax-supported public education triumphs!

• Little red schoolhouse – 1 room, 1 teacher, 8 grades

– Open a few months of the year

– Teachers were typically men – ill-trained, ill-tempered, ill-paid

– 3R’s – reading, writing, arithmetic

– NEEDS REFORM!

Catharine Beecher a. Major advocate for public education being done by female teachers b. Major proponent of the cult of domesticity

“Father of American Education”

Horace Mann (1796-1859)

The McGuffey

Readers

Winslow Homer: the Country

School, 1871

Frontispiece of 1839 reissue of Noah

Webster's The Elementary Speller

Noah Webster

Higher Education • 2nd Great Awakening led to small, denominational

liberal arts colleges (S & W) – Academically weak, more about pride

– Traditional subjects: Latin, Greek, math, philosophy

• 1st state supported universities began in South – Land grants

– Univ of VA – more modern, science & modern languages

• Women’s higher ed – frowned upon – will injure her brain, make unfit for marriage

• Emma Willard – Troy Female Seminary in NY

• Oberlin College in OH opened doors to women and blacks

• Mary Lyon – Mount Holyoke Seminary in Mass.

– Outstanding women’s school

Demon Rum = Temperance Movement

• Hard and monotonous life = excessive drinking – Even women, clergy, politicians

– Weddings and funerals

• Less efficient labor, more accidents at work

• Threatened spirituality of family

• American Temperance Society – Boston – signed temperance pledges – 1000 local groups sprouted up

– Children’s clubs – “Cold Water Army”

• T.S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There - Village ruined by a tavern

Demon Rum • 2 lines of attack:

1. Resist little by little – temperance

2. Legislation

• Neal S. Dow – “Father of Prohibition” – mayor of Portland, Maine

• Less drinking by the Civil War

//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/NSDow2.jpg

Alcohol Consumption in the U.S.: 1800-1860

Women’s Rights

• Women stayed home, without voting rights – but better off than Europe

• Many women avoided marriage – 10% • Women were perceived as weak physically and emotionally,

but fine for teaching – Teach young how to be good, productive citizens

– Men – strong but crude, possible beasts if not guided by women

• Cult of domesticity 1. Piety – religious

2. Purity – used as weapon against sin, otherwise she is a “fallen woman”

3. Submissive – to God, man, duty

4. Domestic

– This was not enough for women anymore

Women’s Rights

• Lucretia Mott – Quaker – wasn’t recognized at the World’s Anti-slavery Convention

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton – advocated women’s suffrage

• Susan B. Anthony – militant lecturer for women’s rights – Progressive women called Suzy B’s

– Anthony and Stanton = National Woman Suffrage Association – equality in court, workplace, poll

What It Would Be Like If

Ladies Had Their Own Way!

R2-8

Women’s Rights

• Lucy Stone – kept maiden name after marriage – Others known as “Lucy Stoners”

• Amelia Bloomer – against typical women’s attire – wore a short skirt with Turkish trousers

• “Bloomers”

• Seneca falls Convention in NY (1848) – it was a major landmark in women’s rights – “Declaration of Sentiments”

Women’s rights movement was temporarily eclipsed by slavery issue

Anti-Slavery • Grimke Sisters

• Frederick Douglass

• William Lloyd Garrison

• Went hand-in-hand with the women’s movement

Angelina Grimké Sarah Grimké

R2-9

Utopias • Utopian spirit/perfectionism

• 40+ cooperative, communistic communities

• Robert Owen’s New Harmony

• Brook Farm, Mass.

• Oneida Community, NY – founded by John Humphrey Noyes – Practiced free love, birth control, eugenic selection of

parents to produce superior offspring

• Shakers – a religious community(led by Mother Ann Lee)

Utopian Communities

Transcendentalism • Truth transcends all – not just found by observation

• Each possesses an inner light that can illuminate highest truth and put him in touch with God

• Themes: – Individualism

– Self-reliance

– Non-conformity

– Exaltation of the dignity of the individual

*Against authority and conventional wisdom

Transcendentalist

Intellectuals/Writers

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

Nature (1832)

Walden (1854)

Resistance to Civil Disobedience

(1849)

Self-Reliance (1841)

“The American Scholar” (1837)

• Their pursuit of the ideal led to a distorted view of human nature and possibilities: * The Blithedale Romance

A Transcendentalist Critic: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

• One should accept the world as an imperfect place: * Scarlet Letter * House of the Seven Gables

Transcendentalism • Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass – collection of poems

– “Poet Laureate of Democracy” – Romantic, emotional, unconventional

Penitentiary Reform

Dorothea Dix (1802-1887)

1821 first penitentiary founded in Auburn, NY

R1-5/7

Dorothea Dix Asylum -

1849

Scientific Achievement • Professor Benjamin Silliman – chemist and

geologist at Yale

• Professor Louis Agassiz – student of biology at Harvard, research emphasis

• John J. Audubon – naturalist – painted birds

with exact detail, Birds of America

• Medicine in the U.S. still primitive – bleeding was common cure

• Ill-health is typical – improper diet, germs, decayed teeth

– Life expectancy for white male - 40

Scientific Achievement • Most had decayed teeth

• Self-prescribed patent medicines were common, mostly alcohol and often harmful

• New medicines: – Robertson’s Infallible Worm Destroying Lozenges

– Fad diets – whole wheat bread and crackers

– Rub tumors with dead toads

• Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes – taught anatomy at Harvard Medical School

• Surgery – tied down, given whiskey, Sawed/cut with speed

– 1840 – laughing gas and ether as anesthetic

Art • U.S. had traditionally imitated

European styles of art

• 1800-1850 – was a Greek revival in architecture; Gothic forms gained popularity in 1850

• Early painters went to England – for training and patrons

– Charles Wilson Peale and John Trumbull

• Hudson River School – landscapes

– War of 1812 and nationalism

• Photograph – Louis Daguerre

A Family Portrait captured by

daguerreotype, c. 1852

Music • Rhythmic and folky, “darky” tunes

“Dixie” hymn – adopted by Confederates

• Minstrel shows – white actors with blackened faces

National Literature • Early writing was practical

– Federalist Papers, Common Sense

• Writers typically in North and NE (Boston)

• Mix of nationalism and romanticism – More emotional, celebrated human potential

• Knickerbocker Group in NY wrote the first truly American literature

– Washington Irving – 1st U.S. internationally recognized writings, The Sketch Book

•Rip Van Winkle and Legend of Sleepy Hollow

National Literature – James Fennimore Cooper – 1st U.S. Novelist

• Leatherstocking Tales (which included The Last of the Mohicans) featured Natty Bumppo – rifleman that meets Indians

• Contrasted values of wilderness with modern civilization

– William Cullen Bryant – “Thanatopsis” – the 1st high quality poetry in U.S.

• Editor of NY Evening Post – journalism model

Other Literary Greats • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – popular poet, European

themes + American traditions

• John Greenleaf Whittier – poet of antislavery crusade, influenced social action

• James Russell Lowell –Political satirist who wrote Biglow Papers- Mexican War and Polk administration

• Louisa May Alcott – wrote Little Women

• Emily Dickinson – poet, lived as recluse – Universal themes of nature, love, death, immortality

– 2000 poems published after death

• William Gilmore Simms – Southern - 82 books – Theme of southern frontier in colonial days and Rev. War

Literary Individuals and Dissenters

• Edgar Allen Poe – wrote The Raven and many horror short stories (drunken nightmares) – Invented the modern detective novel and psychological

thriller

– Fascinated by the supernatural and reflected a morbid sensibility (more prized in Europe)

– At odds with the optimistic spirit of this time

• Nathaniel Hawthorne – Puritan obsession with original sin and good v. evil – Scarlet Letter – psychological effects of sin

• Herman Melville –Moby Dick –allegory between good and evil told by a whaling captain

– Exotic tales of the South Seas

– Widely ignored – people liked more straightforward prose

Portrayers of the Past • George Bancroft – Sec. of Navy –

founded naval academy in Annapolis

– Father of American History – super-patriotic history of US to 1789 (6 vol.)

• William H. Prescott – conquest of Mexico and Peru

• Francis Parkman – struggle b/w France and GB over N. America

• Historians all from New England – books had an anti-South tone

• 1900 – more nationalistic view