Republican Society 1790-1820

1. How did Americans' pursuit of republican ideals after the Revolution

transform the nation into a more egalitarian society?

2. How did the role of women change in republican society?

3. How and why did African Americans create a distinctive society in the South?

4. Describe the social order of the South.

5. How did Protestant Christianity act as a force for social change?

Between 1790 and 1820, three variants of republican society developed in the United States. In the North, the ideal of a democratic republican society based on liberty and equality encouraged the ambitions of a white male citizenry that demanded voting rights, pursued social mobility, and looked with suspicion on those with aristocratic pretensions. Political and religious leaders promoted a different path for women, developing the notion of a separate sphere consisting primarily of domestic responsibilities.

Republicanism and sentimentalism influenced the private lives of many Americans, encouraging young people to marry for love as well as for economic security and prompting parents to raise their children using reason as well as authority. Responding to the demand for cotton, southern planters extended slavery into the Old Southwest.

This expansion led to a sectional confrontation over slavery that the Missouri Compromise did not resolve. Enslaved blacks adopted English and some white religious practices but, along with free blacks in northern cities, forged a distinct African American culture. Slaves developed increasingly strong family, community, and religious values that helped them to survive the forced migration to the cotton belt and the relentless demands of gang labor.

The planter elite solidified its control of the southern social order, constructing an elaborate intellectual defense of slavery and depicting itself as a natural aristocracy.

A series of revivals planted the values of Protestant Christianity deep in the American national character and created new public roles for women. The Second Great Awakening spawned a wide variety of organizations dedicated to the cause of social and political reform and shifted the denominational base of American religion away from the leading churches of the colonial period toward more evangelical and democratic ones.

Democratic Republicanism

Republican ideology proclaimed legal equality for all tree men, yet Americans did accept social divisions if they were based on personal achievements.

Some Americans from long-distinguished families questioned the morality of a social order based on mobility and financial success.

By the 1810s, Republicanism meant voting rights for all free white men.

The expansion of suffrage changed the tone of politics; Americans increasingly rejected the deferential political views of Federalists who called for "a speaking aristocracy in the face of a silent democracy."

***As legislators eliminated property qualifications for voting by white men (all or most white males in the majority northern states were given the vote), they erected barriers for women and black men; deferential politics and social behavior declined. regardless of their wealth, custom and prejudice ruled out their participation in public affairs.

Toward a Republican Marriage System

European and American husbands had long dominated their wives and controlled the family's property.

Women argued that the subordination of women was at odds with the republican belief in equal natural rights.

Economic and cultural changes eroded customary paternal authority, as parents could no longer use land as an incentive to control their children's lives and marriages.

Young men and women began to be influenced by the new cultural attitude of sentimentalism, which originated in Europe as part of the Romantic movement and celebrated the importance of "feeling."

As the passions of the heart overwhelmed the cool logic of the mind, a new marriage system appeared.

Rather than seeking to control them, fathers now sought to protect the best interests of their children in their marriages.

***The new version of marriage in the early nineteenth century was based on love and companionship, with women filling the moral role of republican mothers, but the birthrate declined during this period.

Theoretically, the republican ideal of "companionate" marriage gave wives equality with their husbands; in reality, husbands still controlled the property and governments accepted no obligation to prevent domestic abuse.

Though few sought divorces, before 1800, most petitioners for divorce charged their spouses with neglect, abandonment, or adultery; after 1800, emotional grounds dominated divorce petitions.

Republican Motherhood

The main responsibilities of a married woman were running the household and raising the children.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the United States experienced a sharp decline in the birthrate; causes included the following: westward migration of men leaving women without mates for life or delaying marriage, and thus childbirth, and an increase in the deliberate limitation on the size of families (birth control).

***Republican motherhood, although not revolutionary, brought a limited revision to the traditional domestic roles of women. It represented a political ideal created by men that bound women to the republic in a way that reflected and made use of women's "natural" roles.

Republican motherhood was limited because it still reflected a world where women were restricted to the domestic sphere, but it altered behavior patterns, especially in the home. Its widespread application bears out the fact that it was not merely an ideal with no objective reality, and it was certainly not a concession made by men to soothe women's anger over a patriarchal system

Fewer children meant fathers could provide more adequately for each, while mothers were no longer willing to spend all their active years bearing and rearing children.

Political leaders called upon women to become "Republican wives" and "Republican mothers "who would correctly shape the characters of American men.

Christian ministers readily embraced the idea of republican motherhood, though most, but not all, urged their audiences to dismiss the idea of public roles for women, such as voting and office holding.

***Although republican motherhood was promoted by many different people, it was first espoused by political leaders who wanted to protect the republican legacy of the Revolution by ensuring that its values would be passed on to American children. Protestant ministers, as just noted, embraced the moral connotations of the concept, as did evangelical women. Feminist writers were less enthusiastic about the limited potential of restricting women's roles to motherhood.

Raising and Educating Republican Children

Unlike the English custom of primogeniture, most American states required the estate of a man be divided among all his children if he died without a will.

***St. Jean de Crevecoeur lauded the lack of an aristocracy in America and its corresponding inherited social privileges. He did not concern himself too much with agricultural or economic matters, and his writing preceded the development of political parties in the United States

Some felt that Republicanism encouraged American parents to relax parental discipline and give their children greater freedom.

A rationalist mode of childrearing became the preference among families in the well to-do and the rapidly expanding middle class, influenced by the Enlightenment belief that children were "rational creatures" who could be trained to act properly and responsibly.

By contrast, many poor families influenced by the Second Great Awakening had much stricter, authoritarian childrearing practices.

The values taught within families were crucial because most education took place within the home.

In the 1790s, Bostonian Caleb Bingham called for "an equal distribution of knowledge to make us emphatically a 'republic of letters' "; Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush proposed ambitious schemes for a comprehensive system of primary and secondary schooling; ordinary citizens thought such educational proposals smacked of elitism.

Although the constitutions of many states encouraged the use of public resources to fund primary schools, there was not much progress until the 1820s.

To instill self-discipline and individual enterprise in students, reformers chose textbooks that praised honesty and hard work while condemning gambling, drinking, and laziness. American history was also required learning.

Noah Webster championed the goal of American intellectual greatness and his "blue-backed speller," first published in 1783, gave Americans of all backgrounds a common vocabulary and grammar.

Other than Washington Irving, no American author was well known in Europe; not until the 1830s and 1840s would American born authors make a significant contribution to the great literature of the Western world.

Aristocratic Republicanism and Slavery

The North and the South Grow Apart

Both in theory and in practice, republicanism in the South differed significantly from that in the North, and European visitors commonly noted the poverty and lack of strong work ethic there.

Some southerners admitted that slavery corrupted their society and contributed to the ignorance and poverty of the white population

***Southern society was far more restrictive in its allowance for social mobility and economic opportunity than northern society, as that style of egalitarianism, so prominent in the North, would have undermined the economic and political control of the elite planters who wielded sole power in the South. Yeoman farmers, with or without slaves, were far less powerful than their counterparts in the North.

Slavery quickly found its way into national politics and remained a contested issue; when Congress ended American participation in the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, northerners called for the regulation of the interstate trade in slaves and the emancipation of illegally imported slaves while ***southerners mounted a vigorous defense of their labor system.

After 1800, political conflict over slavery increased as northerners ended slavery, and southerners expanded their slave-based agricultural economy into the lower Mississippi Valley as the decline of the tobacco economy was replaced with the cotton boom.

In 1817, the founders of the American Colonization Society proposed to end slavery by encouraging southern planters to emancipate their slaves; the Society would then arrange for their resettlement in Africa to prevent racial conflict.

Lacking support from either blacks or whites, the American Colonization Society was a dismal failure, transporting only 6,000 African Americans to Liberia, a colony it established on the west coast of Africa.

The American Colonization Society was established in 1816 by Robert Finley as an attempt to satisfy two groups in America. Ironically, these groups were on opposite ends of the spectrum involving slavery in the early 1800's. One group consisted of philanthropists, clergy and abolitionist who wanted to free African slaves and their descendants and provide them with the opportunity to return to Africa. The other group was the slave owners who feared free people of color and wanted to expel them from America.

Both the these groups felt that free blacks would be unable to assimilate into the white society of this country. John Randolph, one famous slave owner called free blacks "promoters of mischief." At this time, about 2 million Negroes live in America of which 200,000 were free persons of color.

Henry Clay, a southern congressman and sympathizer of the plight of free blacks, believed that because of "unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country."

Joseph Jenkins Roberts was the first president of Liberia. Roberts was born in Virginia, and emigrated to Liberia when he was twenty years old. He served as lieutenant-governor of Liberia for three years. When Thomas H. Buchanan, the white governor appointed by the American Colonization Society, died, Roberts assumed his position. Roberts served as Liberia's president from 1848-1856 and from 1872-1876.

Jane Waring Roberts emigrated to Liberia from Virginia in 1824. In 1836, she married Joseph Jenkins Roberts, who became Liberia's first president. In 1887 she started a project to build a hospital at Monrovia, Liberia's capital.

Edward Roye was born into a prosperous family in Newark, Ohio. He emigrated to Liberia in 1846 and set up business as a merchant. In 1849, Roye became active in Liberian politics, rising to the position of President of the Republic in 1870. Roye took office in the midst of a fiscal crisis and was ultimately ousted by his opponents in 1871.

Toward a New Southern Social Order

The South was changing in ways that encouraged the expansion of slavery; in 1780, the western boundary of the plantation system ran through the middle of Georgia; by 1820, the plantation frontier stretched through the middle of Louisiana, doubling the area cultivated by slave labor.

Despite an influx of new slaves, the demand for labor in the Southwest far exceeded the supply; consequently, white planters purchased or moved black workers from long-settled regions that had a surplus of labor.

Slave families were torn apart and many long-established African American communities were destroyed as slaves were moved to the fertile lands of the Mississippi Valley by their white owners.

***Despite the fact that marriages were broken up by sale, African Americans still managed to maintain stable relationships and extended families. The birthrate was relatively high, as the population of slaves increased despite the end to the transatlantic slave trade. Naming practices were a combination of African traditions and those borrowed from Europeans.

***African Americans developed a unified cultural identity during the nineteenth century for a number of reasons. The end of the transatlantic slave trade led to an entirely American-born black population, which, combined with the movement of slavery into the Mississippi Valley, served to gradually diminish cultural differences among slaves. Free blacks, in search of an American identity, actively sought to create an American black culture. Old African tribal identities were diluted by these new factors but not before their synthesis contributed to the formation of a diverse and rich slave culture.

By 1820, a much smaller proportion of southern whites owned slaves; the wealthy and influential slave owners dominated society and gave an aristocratic republican definition to politics.

In the new southwestern economy, the prospect of a more equal political and social order raised during the Revolutionary era had been counterbalanced by the expanding aristocratic republican plantation society based on cotton.

Slave Society and Culture

The end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 gradually created an entirely American-born black population.

The movement of slavery into the Old Southwest slowly reduced cultural differences among slaves; despite the black population becoming more homogeneous, African cultural influence remained important.

African Americans continued to respect African incest taboos in marriage and, while southern states prohibited legal marriages between slaves, slaves devised their own marriage rituals.

Many recently imported slaves gave their children African names to maintain their cultural identity.

By forming stable families and strong communities, African Americans tried to create a sense of order in the harsh and arbitrary world of slavery.

Some blacks won substantial control over their lives; for example, the right to labor "by the task" and the ability to spend their free time working their private fields.

A few blacks plotted mass uprisings and murders, but slaves lacked the strong institutions needed to organize a successful rebellion.

Escape was also problematic in that slaves had limited options of where to escape so most had no choice but to build the best possible lives for themselves on the plantations where they lived.

***Free blacks in the North were treated as second-class citizens. They were without voting rights in most cases, restricted to menial types of labor, and segregated socially. Free blacks in the South were subjected to capture and re-enslavement, but this was not a large problem in the North, although it would become more common by the 1850s.

The Free Black Population

Between 1790 and 1820, the number of free blacks rose from 8 percent to 13 percent of the total African American population.

Free blacks were usually forbidden to vote, attend public schools, or sit next to whites in churches; only Vermont and Maine allowed free blacks to vote.

A few free blacks in the North achieved great distinction: the mathematician Benjamin Banneker, the painter Joshua Johnston, and the merchant Robert Sheridan among them.

At 21, Banneker saw a pocket watch that was owned by a traveling salesman named Josef Levi. He was so fascinated by it that Levi gave it to him. Banneker spent days taking it apart and reassembling it. From it Banneker then carved large-scale wooden replicas of each piece, calculating the gear assemblies himself, and used the parts to make a striking clock. The clock continued to work, striking each hour, for more than 40 years.

This event changed his life, and he became a watch and clock maker. One customer was Joseph Ellicott, a Quaker surveyor, who needed an extremely accurate timepiece to make correct calculations of the locations of stars. Ellicott was impressed with his work and lent him books on mathematics and astronomy.

Banneker began his study of astronomy at age 58. He was able to make the calculations to predict solar and lunar eclipses and to compile an ephemeris for the Benjamin Banneker's Almanac, which an anti-slavery society published from 1792 through 1797. He became known as the Sable Astronomer.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Banneker)

Joshua Johnson was one of few successful African-American portrait painters and the first to become established as a portrait painter. Joshua Johnson was a Freeman, or freed slave, who may have earned his freedom through the sale of his artworks.

He also may have been a blacksmith."Joshua Johnson" signed his name as such, and as "Joshua Johnston", while owners of portraits have said that his name was "William Johnson." The names "Joshua Johnston" or "Johnston" were listed in Baltimore directories from 1796-1824, as a "portrait painter." Johnson is listed in the city directories for 1817 under the heading "Free Householders of Color."

More enduring were the schools, mutual benefit organizations, fellowship groups, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church created by this first generation of free African Americans that provided a sense of cultural, if not political, autonomy.

Most free blacks who lived in slave states resided in the Upper South. To prove their free status, blacks had to carry manumission documents, but blacks became the backbone of the region's urban workforce due to the shortage of skilled workers in southern cities.

Though some well-to-do free blacks drew apart from the black community and even owned slaves themselves, most free blacks acknowledged their unity with the enslaved population, saw blacks as one people, and sought freedom for all those of African ancestry.

The Missouri Crisis

When Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a slave state in 1819, Congressman James Tallmadge of New York proposed a ban on the importation of slaves into Missouri and the gradual emancipation of its black inhabitants; when Missouri whites rejected Tallmadge's proposals, the northern majority in the House of Representatives blocked the territory's admission to the Union.

To underline their commitment to slavery, southerners used their power in the Senate (where they held half the seats) to withhold statehood from Maine, which was seeking to separate itself from Massachusetts.

Southerners advanced three constitutional arguments: they raised the principle of "equal rights" for the states; they argued that slavery was purely an internal "state" affair; and they maintained that Congress had no authority to infringe on the property rights of slaveholders.

Henry Clay finally put together a series of political arguments known collectively as the Missouri Compromise; the compromise set a precedent for admission of states to the Union in pairs- one free and one slave; southern congressmen accepted legislation that prohibited slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30', the southern boundary of Missouri.

The task of reconciling regional differences had become difficult, and the specter of civil war lurked in the background.

Protestant Christianity as a Social Force

Second Great Awakening

The Second Great Awakening or the Great Revival was the second great religious revival in United States history and consisted of several kinds of activity, distinguished by locale and expression of religious commitment. In New England, the renewed interest in religion inspired a wave of social activism. In western New York, the spirit of revival encouraged the emergence of new Restorationist and other denominations.

It was also one of the influences on the Holiness movement. In the west especially—at Cane Ridge, Kentucky and in Tennessee—the revival strengthened the Methodists and the Baptists and introduced into America a new form of religious expression—the Scottish camp meeting—and helped the creation of new denominations, especially the Campbellites.

During the Second Great A wakening, the Congregationalist, Episcopalian, and Quaker churches grew slowly in membership, while the Methodist and Baptist Churches grew spectacularly and became the nation's largest religious denominations.

Methodist "circuit riders" established new churches in remote areas by bringing families together for worship and then appointing lay elders to enforce moral discipline until the circuit rider's return.

In the late 1820s and 1830s a religious revival called the Second Great Awakening (a reference to a similar revival that had swept the colonies in the previous century) had a strong impact on antebellum American religion and reform. It grew partly out of evangelical opposition to the deism associated with the French Revolution and gathered strength in 1826, when Charles Grandison Finney, a charismatic lawyer-turned-itinerant preacher, conducted a revival in Utica, New York.

Finney argued against the belief that a Calvinist God controlled the destiny of human beings. He told congregations throughout the northern United States that they were "moral free agents" who could obtain salvation through their own efforts--but, he admonished, they must hurry because time was short.

Finney achieved his greatest success in New York State's "burned-over district," especially in the winter of 1830-1831 in Rochester, where prayer meetings were crowded almost every night, and conversions and confessions of sin were frequent. Finney and other preachers, such as Theodore Weld, tried to be entertaining and to appeal to the average citizen.

Their approach and the new techniques of evangelizing--protracted meetings, communitywide campaigns, the "anxious bench" for those wrestling with the decision to convert, testimony meetings for the converted--worked: in 1831, for example, church membership grew nationally by 100,000.

While in college he became a disciple of the evangelist Charles G. Finney and was influenced by Charles Stuart, a retired British army officer who urged Weld to enlist in the cause of black emancipation. While studying for the ministry at Oneida Institute he traveled about lecturing on the virtues of manual labor, temperance, and moral reform.

After 1830 he became one of the leaders of the antislavery movement working with Arthur Tappan and Lewis Tappan, New York philanthropists, James G. Birney, Gamaliel Bailey, Angelina Grimké, and Sarah Grimké. Weld often had his meetings broken up and in Troy, New York, he was stoned by a mob. An inspiring speaker, Weld made many converts, including James Birney and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Weld also wrote several pamphlets for the organization including The Bible Against Slavery (1837) and Slavery As It Is (1839).

Weld married Angelina Grimké in 1838. Weld chose Lane Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, for the ministerial training of other Finney converts and studied there until the famous antislavery debates he organized (1834) among the students led to his dismissal. Almost the entire student body then requested dismissal, and it was from these theological students that Weld and Henry B. Stanton selected agents for the American Anti-Slavery Society. The “Seventy,” as the agents were called, gave character and direction to the antislavery movement and successfully spread the abolitionist gospel throughout the North.

From 1836 to 1840, Weld worked at the New York office of the antislavery society, serving as an editor of the society's paper, the Emancipator, and contributing antislavery articles to newspapers and periodicals. He also directed the national campaign for sending antislavery petitions to Congress and assisted John Quincy Adams when Congress tried Adams for reading petitions in violation of the gag rule. Theodore Weld was born in Hampton, Connecticut, on 23rd November, 1803. Raised near Utica, he met Charles Stuart whose financial support helped him study for the ministry at Lane Seminary, Cincinnati. While a student Weld became a strong opponent of slavery.

Francis Asbury (1745 - 1816), the founding bishop of American Methodism, set the pace. He traveled 270,000 miles and preached 16,000 sermons as he traveled the circuits.

Peter Cartwright (1785-1872) described the life of the circuit- rider. He wrote in his Autobiography: "A Methodist preacher, when he felt that God had called him to preach, instead of hunting up a college or Biblical Institute, hunted up a hardy pony, and some traveling apparatus, and with his library always at hand, namely, a Bible, Hymn book, and Discipline, he started, and with a text that never wore out nor grew stale, he cried, 'Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.'

In this way he went through storms of wind, hail, snow, and rain; climbed hills and mountains, traversed valleys, plunged through swamps, swollen streams, lay out all night, wet, weary, and hungry, held his horse by the bridle all night, or tied him to a limb, slept with his saddle blanket for a bed, his saddle-bags for a pillow.

Often he slept in dirty cabins, ate roasting ears for bread, drank butter-milk for coffee; took deer or bear meat, or wild turkey, for breakfast, dinner, and supper. This was old-fashioned Methodist preacher fare and fortune."

The most successful denominations--the Methodists and the Baptists--promoted egalitarian religious cultures and emphasized emotionalism, often at outdoor revivals. They also fostered a belief in universal salvation, rejected predestination, and preached to free blacks and slaves.

***Baptists and Quakers rejected a hierarchical structure in favor of more egalitarian church cultures, and Presbyterians democratically elected ordinary laymen to synods where they determined church doctrine. The Episcopalian Church was under the control of its wealthiest members and had a distinct hierarchical structure drawn directly from its roots in the Church of England.

***The Unitarians reacted against the emotionalism of the Methodists and Baptists and instead emphasized logic and reason in their doctrines and services. Their views were not widely adopted by other denominations. The Unitarians were popular with some New England Congregationalists but not with slaves, who relished the emotionalism of the Methodists and Baptists.

Evangelical ministers adopted "practical preaching" methods, theatrical gestures, and a flamboyant style to attract converts.

Christian Republicanism in the South added a sacred dimension to the ideology of aristocratic Republicanism, while Southern blacks adapted the teachings of the Protestant churches to their own needs.

Black Christianity developed as a complex mixture of stoical endurance and emotional fervor, and encouraged slaves to affirm their spiritual equality with whites.

Ministers began stressing human ability and individual free will, making American religious culture more compatible with republican doctrines of liberty and equality.

For some, individual salvation became linked with social reform through the concept of "religious benevolence."

Unlike the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening fostered cooperation between denominations.

Protestants across the nation saw themselves as part of a single religious movement that could change the course of history through politics.

Because the Second Awakening aroused such pious enthusiasm in many Americans, religion became a central force in political life, some urging the United States to become an evangelical Christian nation dedicated to religious conversion at home and abroad.

***The American Education Society and the American Bible Society were examples of organizations made up of various denominations that banded together to sponsor missionaries. They were involved in evangelizing and not primarily in charity. Although they certainly included Congregationalists among their members, these organizations were made up of many denominations. Women were influential in these organizations even though they were not female academies

Women's New Religious Roles

The upsurge in religious enthusiasm provided women with new opportunities to demonstrate their piety and even to found new sects-for example, Mother Ann Lee and Jemima Wilkinson.

Mother Ann Lee was the charismatic founder of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, commonly known as the Shakers. After a difficult early life, she joined a group of Christians in Manchester, England, who had split from George Fox's Quaker movement.

Their unorthodox views and impassioned convulsions in worship drew ridicule and persecution, along with the nickname of the Shakers. Imprisoned, Ann received a revelation that she was the embodiment of the second coming of Christ, in feminine form.

Later visions called her and a few followers to America, where in 1774 they settled near Albany, at present-day Watervliet, New York. They sought with some success to attract converts to a gospel of pacifism, celibacy, racial and gender equality, and industrious communal living. Mother Ann herself endured persecution and even physical attacks when traveling to evangelize. The movement expanded after her death, peaking in the 1830's with some 6,000 Shakers living in 19 communities under the leadership of male and female elders and deacons.

“A simple person, either blessed by God or a little insane depending on your point of view, she affected thousands of people, filling them with awe and inspiring devotion. One said, "Mother Ann's appearance seemed truly beauteous and heavenly ... such godly fear and heavenly love I never beheld in any person before ...." It was all "inner light," for Ann Lee was altogether a plain woman--thickset yet straight-backed, with keen blue eyes. She was able to perform miracles of healing, and many of her followers thought she was the mother of the race.”

– © 1975 - 1981 by David Wallechinsky & Irving WallaceReproduced with permission from "The People's Almanac" series of books.All rights reserved.

Mother Ann Lee was a woman of strong constitution, rather exceeding the ordinary size of woman; rather thick, but very straight and well proportioned in form; of light complexion, and blue eyes; her hair of a light chestnut brown. In appearance, she was very majestic, and her countenance was such as inspired confidence and respect; and, by many of the world, who saw her, without prejudice, she was called beautiful. To her faithful children (spoken of spiritually), she appeared to possess a degree of dignified beauty and heavenly love transcending that of mortals.

Jemima Wilkinson of Cumberland, Rhode Island was a 25 year old woman in 1776, and shortly thereafter became the first American-born woman to found a religious group. Her initial success was stunning. While Jemima was not completely successful in achieving all her goals and visions, she did blaze a trail that may have helped other passionate women bring their dreams to fruition in later times.

Women in more mainstream churches (who formed the majority in many denominations) became active in religion and charitable work partly because they were excluded from other spheres of public life and partly because ministers relied increasingly on women to do the work of the church.

The new practice of having church services for males and females together was accompanied by greater moral self-discipline.

Women's religious activities and organizations were scrutinized and sometimes seen as subversive of the social order.

***Women exercised their moral superiority. The new societal emphasis on the moral superiority of women saw many women assume more active roles in public life. They attended religious services with men, avoided premarital sex, and joined charitable organizations in large numbers. However, evangelical revivalism rejected stoicism in favor of charged emotional responses inspired by the European-born emphasis on sentimentalism.

By the 1820s, mothers across the nation had founded local maternal associations to encourage Christian childrearing.

Religious activism advanced female education as churches established seminaries and academies where girls received intellectual training and moral instruction.

Women gradually displaced men as public school teachers because women had few other opportunities and were willing to accept lower pay.

Along with republican and capitalist values, this Protestant religious impulse formed the core of an emerging national identity, even as the citizens of the North and the South defined republicanism and economic progress in distinctly different ways.