AN AGE OF REFORM

SOCIAL REFORMS

• By the mid 1800s there was a growing movement to

reform many aspects of American Society.

• These reform movements focused on:

religion, temperance (alcohol abuse), prison,

education, women’s rights, and abolitionism (ending

of slavery.)

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INDIVIDUALISM

Rapid economic growth and geographical expansion had weakened traditional institutions, forcing individuals to fend for themselves. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville coined the word individualism to describe the result.

The restless, competitive world of the market revolution strongly encouraged the identification of American freedom with the absence of restraints on self-directed individuals seeking economic advancement and personal development.

Transcendentalists rejected the theory that all knowledge comes to the mind through the senses. Truth, rather, “transcends” the senses: it cannot be found by observation alone.

One group of philosophers and writers were known as the Transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the leading voice of transcendentalism, an intellectual movement rooted in the religious soil of New England.

TRANSCENDENTALISM

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• Transcendentalism was based on the idea that people can

overcome their mind’s limitations. It emphasized feeling over

reason and sought communion with nature.

• Influential transcendentalists were writers Ralph Waldo

Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau.

TRANSCENDENTALISM

EMERSON’S LITERARY INFLUENCE

Even as Emerson urged his fellow citizens to break free from tradition and expand their spiritual awareness, he issued a declaration of literary independence. In “The American Scholar” (1837), Emerson urged American authors to free themselves from Old Europe and find inspiration in the experiences of ordinary Americans.

New England intellectual, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) heeded Emerson’s call and sought inspiration from the natural world. In 1854, he published Walden, or Life in the Woods, an account of his search for meaning beyond the artificiality of civilized society.

EMERSON’S LITERARY INFLUENCE

As Thoreau was seeking self-realization for men, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was exploring the possibility of freedom for women. She published Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1844.

Fuller embraced the transcendental principle that all people could develop a life-affirming mystical relationship with God.

EMERSON’S LITERARY INFLUENCE

The poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) also responded to Emerson’s call.

In Leaves of Grass, a collection of wild, exuberant poems first published in 1855, Whitman recorded in verse his efforts to transcend various “invisible boundaries.”

EMERSON’S LITERARY INFLUENCEEmerson’s writings also influenced two great novelists, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, who had pessimistic worldviews.

Hawthorne brilliantly explored the theme of excessive individualism in his novel The Scarlet Letter (1850).

Herman Melville explored the limits of individualism in even more extreme and tragic terms and emerged as a scathing critic of transcendentalism. His most powerful work was Moby Dick (1851), the story of Captain Ahab’s obsessive hunt for a mysterious white whale that ends in death for Ahab and all but one member of his crew. Here, the quest for spiritual meaning in nature brings death, not transcendence.

UTOPIAN SOCIETIES

Between 1820 and 1860, thousands of Americans grew dissatisfied with life in America’s emerging market society and retreated into rural areas of the Northeast and Midwest.There they sought to create ideal communities, or utopias, that would allow people to live differently and realize their spiritual potential.

UTOPIAN SOCIETIESThe Shakers, so named because of the ecstatic dances that were part of their worship, was the first successful communal movement. Ann Lee Stanley (Mother Ann) started the community in 1774. Shakers founded twenty communities, mostly in New England, New York, and Ohio.

The Shakers disdained sexual intercourse relying on conversions and the adoption of thousands of young orphans. Shaker communities died out by 1900.

UTOPIAN SOCIETIESThe Oneida Community was a religious commune founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned to earth (the Second Coming) and therefore people could aspire to perfection in their earthly lives (a belief called Perfectionism). The Oneida Community practiced Communalism in the sense of communal property and possessions.

Noyes rejected traditional marriage, calling it a barrier to perfection. Instead he embraced free love or “complex marriage” in which all members of the community were married to one another.

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE MORMONS

Like many social movements of the era, Mormonism emerged from religious ferment among families of Puritan descent who lived along the Erie Canal.

The Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was the most successful of the religious communitarians. They hoped to create a kingdom of god on earth.

• The Mormons were founded by Joseph Smith in 1830.

• Antagonism grew toward Mormons because of their practice of polygamy.

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE MORMONS

Smith was arrested and murdered while in jail.

He was succeeded by Brigham Young who led Mormon followers to Utah seeking a refuge where they could practice their faith undisturbed.

About 6,500 Mormons fled the United States. Beginning in 1846, they crossed the Great Plains into Mexican territory and settled in the Great Salt Lake Valley in present-day Utah.

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE MORMONS

Utah grew quickly in 1850s by birth and immigration from Europe.

Polygamy prevented Utah’s entrance to United States until 1896.

JOSEPH SMITH AND THE MORMONS

EARLY ABOLITIONISM

• In 1817, the American Colonization Society was founded for the purpose of transporting Blacks back to Africa, and in 1822, the Republic of Liberia was founded for Blacks to live.

• Most Blacks had no wish to be transplanted into a strange civilization after having been partially Americanized.

• By 1860, virtually all slaves were not Africans, but native-born African-Americans.

EARLY ABOLITIONISM

• In the 1830s, abolitionism drew on the religious enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening.

• Around 1800, antislavery activists had assailed human bondage as contrary to republicanism and liberty.

• Theodore Dwight Weld was among those who were inflamed against slavery.

• Inspired by Charles Grandison Finney, Weld preached against slavery and even wrote a pamphlet, American Slavery As It Is (1839).

ABOLITIONISM

On January 1st, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison published the first edition of The Liberator triggering a 30-year war of words and in a sense firing one of the first shots of the Civil War. His paper called for the “immediate and uncompensated emancipation of the slaves.”

He also considered the Constitution an “agreement with Hell!”

Abolitionism

Other dedicated abolitionists rallied around Garrison, such as Wendell Phillips, a Boston patrician known as “abolition’s golden trumpet” who refused to eat cane sugar or wear cotton cloth, since both were made by slaves. Wendell Phillips dedicated his life to fighting for the freedom on which America was founded.

The Underground Railroad, a loose organization of sympathetic abolitionists who hid fugitives in their homes and sent them off to the next “station,” assisted some runaway slaves.

A few courageous individuals made forays into the South to liberate slaves. The best known was Harriet Tubman. Born in Maryland in 1820, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia in 1849 and during the next decade risked her life by making numerous trips back to her state of birth to lead relatives and other slaves to freedom.

ABOLITIONISM

ABOLITIONISM

• David Walker, a Black abolitionist, wrote Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829 and advocated a bloody end to white supremacy.

• Sojourner Truth, a freed Black woman who fought for black emancipation and women’s rights, and Martin Delaney, one of the few people who seriously reconsidered Black relocation to Africa, also fought for Black rights.

• In the age of “self-made” men, no American rose more dramatically from humble origins to national and international distinction than Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery in 1818, he became a major figure in the crusade for abolition, the drama of emancipation, and the effort during Reconstruction to give meaning to black freedom.

ABOLITIONISM

As a youth in Maryland, Frederick Douglass learned to read and write from his owner’s wife and then, after her husband forbade her to continue, with the help of local white children. He experienced slavery in all its variety, from work as a house servant and as a skilled craftsman in a Baltimore shipyard to labor as a plantation field hand.

He escaped to freedom in the North in 1838.

Frederick Douglass went on to become the most influential African-American of the nineteenth century and the nation’s preeminent advocate of racial equality despite being beaten and harassed.

His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, depicted his remarkable struggle and his origins, as well as his life.

ABOLITIONISM

While Garrison seemed more concerned with his own righteousness, Douglass increasingly looked to politics to solve the slavery problem.

He and others backed the Liberty Party in 1840, the Free Soil Party in 1848, and the Republican Party in the 1850s.

In the end, many abolitionists supported war as the price for emancipation.

ABOLITIONISM

Frederick Douglass was only one among many former slaves who published accounts of their lives in bondage.

The most effective piece of antislavery literature of the entire period, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was to some extent modeled on the autobiography of fugitive slave Josiah Henson.

ABOLITIONISM

Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more than a million copies by 1854.

By portraying slaves as sympathetic men and women, and as Christians at the mercy of slaveholders who split up families and set bloodhounds on innocent mothers and children, Stowe’s book gave the abolitionist message a powerful human appeal.

ABOLITIONISM

THE SOUTH LASHES BACK

• In the South, abolitionist efforts increasingly came under attack and fire.

• Southerners began to organize a campaign talking about slavery’s positive good, conveniently forgetting about how their previous doubts about “peculiar institution’s” morality.

• Southern slave supporters pointed out how masters taught their slaves religion, made them civilized, treated them well, and gave them “happy” lives.

• They also noted the lot of northern free Blacks, now were persecuted and harassed, as opposed to southern Black slaves, who were treated well, given meals, and cared for in old age.

• In 1836, Southern House members passed a “gag resolution” requiring all antislavery appeals to be tabled without debate, arousing the ire of northerners like John Quincy Adams.

• Southerners also resented the flood of propaganda in the form of pamphlets, drawings, etc…

THE SOUTH LASHES BACK

• For a long time, abolitionists like the extreme Garrisonians were unpopular, since many had been raised to believe the values of slavery compromises in the Constitution.

• Also, his secessionist talks contrasted against Webster’s cries for union.

• The South owed the North $300 million by the late 1850s, and northern factories depended on southern cotton to make goods.

• Many abolitionists’ speeches provoked violence and mob outbursts in the North, such as the 1834 trashing of Lewis Tappan’s New York House.

THE ABOLITIONIST IMPACT IN THE NORTH

THE ABOLITIONIST IMPACT IN THE NORTH

• Yet by the 1850s, abolitionist outcries had made an impact on northern minds and were beginning to sway more and more toward their side.

In 1835, Garrison miraculously escaped a mob that dragged him around the streets of Boston.

Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy of Alton, Illinois, who impugned the chastity of Catholic women, had his printing press destroyed four times and was killed by a mob in 1837; he became an abolitionist martyr.

WOMEN IN REVOLT

• Women had no voting rights and

she could not retain title to her

property when she married. Yet

she fared better than European

women.

• Gender differences were

strongly emphasized separating

women and men into distinct

economic roles.

When the nineteenth century opened, it was still a man’s world, both in America and in Europe. A wife was supposed to immerse herself in her home and subordinate herself to her lord and master (her husband).

Women in RevoltWomen were thought to be weak physically and emotionally but had moral sensibility. Women had the responsibility to teach the children.

Men were considered strong but crude if not guided by women.

The home was a woman’s special sphere, the center of the “cult of domesticity.” Cult of domesticity was a widespread cultural creed in the early nineteenth century that glorified the customary functions of the homemaker.

WOMEN IN REVOLTThe prominence of women among the abolitionists reflected a broad shift in American culture. By joining religious revivals and reform movements, women entered public life.

Cartoon: “The Discord,” 1865, a marriage dispute over who wears the pants.Husband: “Rather die! than let my wife have my pants. A man ought to always be the ruler.”Wife: “Sam’y help me! Woman is born to rule and not to obey those contemptible creatures called men!”

Women in Revolt

Women set out to improve public institutions, and Dorothea Dix (1801-1887) was their model. She was an American activist on behalf of the indigent insane who, through a vigorous program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums.

Reform movements for treatment of the mentally ill were related in this period to other progressive causes: abolitionism, temperance, and voter reforms.

WOMEN IN REVOLT

• Women joined in the fight for temperance (abstain from alcohol) and to abolish slavery.

• The women’s movement was led by Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Blackwell (1st female medical graduate), Margaret Fuller, the Grimke sisters (anti-slavery), and Amelia Bloomer (semi-short skirts).

SOCIAL REFORMS

In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton

and Lucretia Mott organized a

gathering of women’s rights

activists at Seneca Falls, New

York. Seventy women and thirty

men attended the Seneca Falls

Convention.

It was the beginning of the

women’s movement for equal

rights. 39

WOMEN IN REVOLT

The Declaration of Sentiments

and Resolutions issued by the

Seneca Falls Convention

demanded greater rights for

women declaring “all men &

women are created equal.”

They demanded the ballot for

women.

Although the crusade for

women’s rights was eclipsed by

abolitionism, conditions

improved.

THE DAWN OF SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT

• Medicine in US was primitive, bleeding used for cure; smallpox and yellow fever killed many

• Life expectancy low• Self-prescribed patent

medicine common (often harmful)

• Surgery - tied people down

ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT

• U.S. imitated Europe on styles

• 1820-50 was Greek revival (independent from Turkey) later gothic forms

• Thomas Jefferson most ablest architect of generation (Monticello and University of Virginia)

• Artists were few because no leisure time; suffered from Puritan prejudice of art as sinful waste

• Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828)-painted Washington & competed w/ English artists

• Wilson Peale (1741-1827) painted 60 portraits of Washington

ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT

• John Trumbull (1756-1843)-captured Revolutionary War in paint

• During nationalism upsurge after war of 1812 -US painters portrayed human landscapes and romanticism

• Music shaken off because puritans frowned on non-religious singing

• “Darky” tunes popular-Stephen Foster-“Old Folk at Home” (most famous)

THE BLOSSOMING OF A NATIONAL LITERATURE

• Reading material was plagiarized from England

• Poured literature to practical outlet (ex. Federalist, Common Sense (Paine), Ben Franklin’s autobiography)

• Literature revived after war of independence & especially after War of 1812

• Knickerbocker group in NY• Washington Irving (1783-1859)-1st

American to have international acclaim The Sketch Book)

• James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)-1st US novelist-leatherstocking tales (popular in Euro)

• William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)-Thanatopsis (1st high quality poems in US)