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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
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