The Ferment of Reform & Culture

1790 - 1860

Reviving Religion

1850 – ¾ of population attended church regularly

Deism – very popular

Relied on reason

Rejected original sin

Denied Christ’s divinity but did believe in a supreme being

Unitarian Faith

Formal Puritans God existed in only one person not in

orthodox trinity

Stressed goodness of human nature

Belief in free will & salvation through good works

Pictured God as a loving father

Appealed to Intellectuals with rationalism & optimism

Second Great Awakening

Started in 1800 Tidal wave of spiritual fervor resulted in:

prison, church reform, temperance cause, women’s movement, & a push for abolish of slavery

Spread through huge “camp meetings”

Push to Christianize Indians

Methodists & Baptists stressed personal conversion

Peter Cartwright – “circuit riders”

Charles Finney – great revival preacher

Denominational Diversity

Revival furthered fragmentation of religious faith

NY with Puritans preaching “hellfire” known as the “Burned-out District”

Millerites (Adventists) – Christ would return on 10-22-1844

Widen lines between classes & region

Split on slavery issue

A Desert Zion in Utah

Joseph Smith (1830) - Mormons & The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

Antagonism for polygamy, drilling militia, & voting as a unit

Brigham Young took over after Smith’s death

Led followers to Utah

Grew quickly by 1850’s by birth & immigration from Europe

Problems in Utah

1857 – Federal government sent to Utah when Brigham Young became territorial governor

No bloodshed

Polygamy prevented Utah entrance to US till 1896

Free School for a Free People

Free education Originally opposed

Related to pauperism & used by poor

Gradually supported because poor could vote

Established 1825-1850 Ill taught & ill trained teachers

Horace Mann fought for better schools

Too expensive for many communities, blacks were exempted from education

Noah Webster – dictionary

Ohioan William H. McGuffey – McGuffey’s Readers

Higher Goals for Higher Learning

Second Great Awakening led to the building of small denominational, liberal art colleges in South & West

Taught Latin, Greek, math, & moral philosophy

1st state supported university – 1795 in NC

1819 – T.Jefferson – University of Virginia

Freedom from religion & political shackles

Focus on modern languages & sciences

Women in Education

Women were taught that too much education was bad

Injured the feminine brain, undermined health, & rendered a young lady unfit for marriage

Women’s Schools:

Emma Willard - Tory Female Seminary (1821)

Mary Lyon - Mount Holyoke Seminary (1837)

Oberlin College – accepted women & men (1837)

Thirst for Knowledge

Number of libraries increased

Both private & tax-supported

Lyceum lecture associations – traveling lectures

1835 – 3,000

Science, literature, & moral philosophy (Emerson)

Magazines

North American Review – 1815

Godey’s Lady’s Book – 1830 - 1898

An Age of Reform

Reformers attacked: (especially women)

Tobacco, alcohol, profanity, transit of mail on Sabbath, women’s rights, polygamy, medicines

Optimistic for a perfect society

Naïve & ignored problems of industrialization

Fought for no imprison for debt – gradually abolished

Criminal codes soften & reformatories added

Mentally insane treated badly – Dorothea Dix / classic petition of 1843

American Peace Society – 1828 / William Ladd

Demon Rum – The “Old Deluder”

Drunkenness was wide spread

1826 - American Temperance Society – Boston

Children’s clubs – “Cold Water Army” signed pledges

Used pamphlets & anti-alcohol tracts

Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There (1854)

Two lines of attack

Stressed temperance – individual will to resist

Legislature-removed temptation

Neal S. Dow – “Father of Prohibition”

Sponsored Maine Law of 1851 – prohibited liquor

Other states followed

Temperance pledge

Pressured by his determined wife and

pleading child, this reluctant tippler is

about to submit to "moral suasion" and

sign the pledge to abstain from alcohol.

(Library of Congress)

Temperance pledge

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Women’s Roles

Women stayed home with no voting rights

Some women avoided marriage all together

Gender differences separated women & men

Women - weak physically & emotionally but were the keepers of society’s conscience & fit for teaching

Men were strong but crude if not guided by women

Home was the center

Catharine Beecher – reformer agreed

Family group daguerreotype, 1852

This daguerreotype, taken about 1852,

reveals the little things so important to

etching a middle-class family's social

status: curtains; a wall hanging; a piano

with scrolled legs; a small desk with

elegantly curved legs; a pet; ladies posed

in nonproductive but "improving"

activities (music, reading); and a young

man seemingly staring into space--and

perhaps pondering how to pay for it all.

(George Eastman House)

Family group daguerreotype, 1852

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Women’s Movement Fought for:

Women’s rights, temperance, abolition of slavery

Women’s Rights Convention – 1848 Seneca Falls – NY

Declaration of Sentiments

Demanded ballot for women

Launched women’ rights movement

Leaders:

Lucretia Mott

Susan B. Anthony (Suzy B’s)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Blackwell (first female medical graduate)

Margaret Fuller

Grimké Sisters

Amelia Bloomer (bloomerism)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and sons,

1848

Elizabeth Cady Stanton posed in 1848

with two of her sons, Henry Jr., left, and

Neil. Stanton, one of the organizers of

the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights

Convention, traveled widely and agitated

for women's equality while raising five

children. (Collection of Rhoda Jenkins)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and sons, 1848

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Angelina Grimké

Born in the south to a prominent

slaveholding family, Angelina Grimké

moved to the north to distance herself

from an institution she hated. When she

discovered that northerners were no

more sympathetic about the plight of

slaves than southerners and would not

give abolition a free hearing, she chose

to do something about it. She toured the

northeast, speaking first to groups of

women and then to large mixed

audiences. She capped her tour by

becoming the first woman to address the

Massachusetts state legislature. Her

courage won new respect both for

abolitionists and for women. (Library of

Congress)

Angelina Grimké

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Wilderness Utopians

Robert Owen – founded New Harmony – 1825 Confusion & contradiction

Brook Farm – Mass –1841 20 intellectuals committed to transcendentalism

Lasted until 1846

Oneida Community – NY – 1848 Practiced free love, birth control, eugenic selection of

parents to produce superior offspring

Shakers – 1770s – Mother Ann Lee Communistic community / Can’t marry so extinct

The Dawn of Scientific Achievement

Early American interested in practical science rather than pure T. Jefferson - plow

Nathaniel Bowditch – navigation & oceanographer

Matthew Maury – ocean winds & currents

Influential US scientists Benjamin Silliman – pioneer in chemist, geologist

Louis Agassiz – Harvard, insisted on original research

Asa Gray – Harvard – Botany

John Audubon – painted birds

Medicine in America

Primitive Bleeding – common cure/ curse

Smallpox & yellow fever killed many

Poor diet & ignorance of germs & sanitation

Life expectancy – 1850 – 40 years old

Self-prescribed patent medicine common & often harmful

Surgery Tied down with a shot of whiskey for pain

1840s – laughing gas

Artistic Achievement

US imitated European styles

Thomas Jefferson – great architect

Monticello & University of Virginia

Painting suffered - No leisure time & Puritan prejudice Gilbert Stuart – painted Washington & competed with

English artists

Wilson Peale – portraits of Washington

John Trumbull – painted American Revolution

After War of 1812 – human landscapes & romanticism

Music

Puritans frowned upon nonreligious singing

“Darky” tunes became popular

“Dixie” – 1859

Stephen C. Foster – “Old Folks at Home”

The Blossoming of a National Literature

Reading plagiarized from England

US literature was practical in nature

The Federalist, Common Sense, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography

Literature was revived after the War of 1812

The Knickerbocker Group – NY

Washington Irving 1st American to win international recognition

The Sketch Book

James Fenimore Cooper 1st American novelist

Leatherstocking Tales, The Last of the Mochicans

William Cullen Bryant 1st high quality poet in US

“Thanatopsis”

Trumpeters of Transcendentalism

Transcendentalists

Rejected Locke’s theory that all knowledge comes to the mind through the senses

Truth “transcends” the senses: it cannot be found by observation alone but with inner light

Dignity of the individual – black & white

Transcendentalists

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stressed self-reliance, self-improvement, self-confidence, optimism, & freedom

Henry David Thoreau

Condemned slavery

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience – idealistic thought

Walt Whitman

“Poet Laureate of Democracy” – Leaves of Grass

Glowing Literary Lights

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Poet

John Greenleaf Whittier – Poet

Against inhumanity, injustice, & intolerance

James Russell Lowell – political satirist

Oliver Wendell Holmes – poet

Louisa May Alcott – Little Women

Emily Dickinson – poet

William Gillmore Simms – southern themes

Literary Individualists & Dissenters

Edgar Allan Poe – “The Raven”

Fascinated with ghostly & ghastly

Reflected Calvinist obsession on original sin & struggle between good & evil

Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter

Herman Melvile – Moby Dick

Portrayers of the Past

George Bancroft

Founded naval academy

“Father of American History”