Weakening Weakening SpiritualitySpiritualityWeakening Weakening SpiritualitySpirituality
Symptoms:
The Enlightenment
Deism
Unitarianism
1. The Second GreatAwakening
“Spiritual Reform From Within”
[Religious Revivalism]
Social Reforms & Redefining the Ideal of Equality
Temperance
Asylum &Penal
Reform
Education
Women’s Rights
Abolitionism
In France, I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America, I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country… Religion was the foremost of the political institutions of the United States.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1832
The Rise of Popular Religion
R1-1
“The Pursuit of Perfection”
In Antebellum America
“The Benevolent Empire”:
1825 - 1846
The “Burned-Over” District
in Upstate New York
Second Great AwakeningRevival Meeting
The ranges of tents, the fires, reflecting light…; the candles and lamps illuminating the encampment; hundreds moving to and fro…;the preaching, praying, singing, and shouting,… like the sound of many waters, was enough to swallow up all the powers of contemplation.
Charles G. Charles G. FinneyFinney
(1792 – 1875)(1792 – 1875)
Said to have converted over 500,000 people
R1-2
1816 American Bible Society Founded
The Mormons(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints)
Joseph Smith (1805-1844)
e 1823 --> Golden Tablets
e 1830 --> Book of Mormon
The Mormon “Trek”
Mormon Trekkers Crossing the Mississippi on the Ice
•Driven out of Illinois after the murder of founder Joseph Smith in 1844, the Mormons wintered near Council Bluffs, Iowa Territory, before beginning the long overland trek to Utah.
The Mormon World•After Joseph Smith’s murder at Carthage in 1844, the Mormons abandoned their thriving settlement at Nauvoo, Illinois (which had about twenty thousand inhabitants in 1845) and set out for the valley of the Great Salt Lake, then still part of Mexico. When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 brought the vast Utah Territory into the United States, the Mormons rapidly expanded their desert colony, which they called Deseret, especially along the “Mormon Corridor” that stretched from Salt Lake to southern California.
The Mormons(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints)
e Deseret community.
e Salt Lake City, UT
Brigham Young(1801-1877)
Steve Young(1961-present)
Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784)
The Shakers(United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second
Appearing)
• Established a communistic society in Lebanon, NY
• Began in 1776. Five members left today in Sabbathy Lake Village, Maine
• Set up about 20 religious communities
• Membership about 6,000 by 1840
Shaker Meeting
2. Temperance Movement
Frances WillardThe Beecher Family
1826 - American Temperance Society
“Demon Rum”!
R1-6
Annual Consumption of Alcohol
Temperance Banner Lithograph, by Kellogg and Comstock, ca. 1848–1850
The Drunkard’s Progress
From the first glass to the grave, 1846
3. Penitentiary Reform
Dorothea Dix(1802-1887)
1821 first penitentiary foundedin Auburn, NY
R1-5/7
4. Social Reform Prostitution
The “Fallen Woman”Sarah Ingraham
(1802-1887)
e 1835 Advocate of Moral Reform
e Female Moral Reform Society focusedon the “Johns” & pimps, not the girls.
R2-1
5. The Anti-Masonic Movement
Freemasons Anti-Masons
e individual belief in God
e international brotherhood
e middle- and upper-classappeal
e elitist and secret
e un-American &un-democratic
e anti-republicanism
View of a MasonTaking His First Oath
6. Abolitionist Movemente 1816 American Colonization
Society created (gradual, voluntary emancipation.
British Colonization Society symbol
7. Women’s Rights“Cult of
Domesticity”e A woman’s “sphere” was in the home (it was arefuge from the cruel world outside).
e Market Revolution separated men and women into distinct economic roles
e Women viewed as physically and emotionally weak, but also as artistic and refined
e “Republican Motherhood”-Women seen as societies conscience with a special responsibility to raise children with to become productive citizens
Early 19c Women1. Unable to vote.2. Legal status of a minor.3. Single could own her own
property.4. Married no control over her
property or her children.5. Could not initiate divorce. If
her husband divorced her, she had no custody rights
6. Couldn’t make wills, sign a contract, or bring suit in court without her husband’s permission.
What It Would Be Like If Ladies Had Their Own
Way!
Cult of Domesticity = SlaveryThe 2nd Great Awakening inspired women to
improve society. Some women wanted to break away from the role of homemaker and participate in the public life.
Angelina Grimké Sarah Grimké
e Southern Abolitionists
Lucy Stone
e American Women’sSuffrage Assoc.
e edited Woman’s Journal
Women’s Rights
Lucretia MottElizabeth
Cady Stanton
1848 --> Seneca Falls Convention: Declaration of Sentiments
•Declared all men and women created equal•Formally demanded women’s suffrage•Launched modern feminist movement•Fiercely opposed by press and churchesResult-not much. Women’s movement overshadowed by abolitionists and Civil War
8. Transcendentalism(European Romanticism)
e “Liberation from understanding and the cultivation of reasoning.”
e Transcend” the senses and allow the emotions, the soul, intuition, to make meaning of the world around you.
e Every person possesses and “inner light” that can illuminate the highest truth and put him/her in direct touch with God, or the “Oversoul”.
e Individualism in matters of religion as well as social.
e Commitment to self-reliance, self-culture, and self discipline.
e Hostile to formal institutions of any kind and conventional wisdom
Transcendentalist Intellectuals/Writers
Concord, MA
Ralph WaldoEmerson
Ralph WaldoEmerson
Henry DavidThoreau
Henry DavidThoreau
Nature(1832) Walden
(1854)
Resistance to Civil
Disobedience(1849)
Self-Reliance (1841)
“The American Scholar”
(1837) R3-1/3/4/5
e pursuit of the ideal led to a distorted view of human nature and possibilities: * The Blithedale Romance
The Anti-Transcendentalist:Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1804-1864)
e accept the world as an imperfect place: * Scarlet Letter * House of the Seven Gables
9. Utopian Communities
The Oneida CommunityNew York, 1848
John Humphrey Noyes(1811-1886)
e Millenarianism --> the 2nd
coming of Christ had already occurred.e Humans were no longer obliged to follow the moral rules of the past.• all residents
married to each other.• carefully regulated “free love.”
Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784)
The Shakers(United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second
Appearing)
• Established a communistic society in Lebanon, NY
• Began in 1776. Five members left today in Sabbathy Lake Village, Maine
• Set up about 20 religious communities
• Membership about 6,000 by 1840
Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784)
e If you will take up your crosses against the works of generations, and follow Christ in theregeneration, God will cleanse you from allunrighteousness.
e Remember the cries of those who are in need and trouble, that when you are in trouble, God may hear your cries.
e If you improve in one talent, God will give you more.
The Shakers
R1-4
Shaker Meeting
Shaker Hymn
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'Tis the gift to be free,'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,And when we find ourselves in the place just right,'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gainedTo bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,To turn, turn will be our delight,'Till by turning, turning we come round right.
Shaker Simplicity & Utility
The Last Shaker Village:
Sabbathy Lake, Maine
Last Shaker Village at Sabbathy Lake, Maine
Secular Utopian Communities
IndividualFreedom
Demands ofCommunity Life
e spontaneity
e self-fulfillment
e discipline
e organizationalhierarchy
Tension
Brook Farm 1841-1846
West Roxbury, MA
George Ripley (1802-1880)
Robert Owen (1771-1858)
Utopian Socialist
“Village of Cooperation”-New Harmony founded in 1835
Original Plans for New Harmony, IN
New Harmony in 1832
New Harmony, IN
10. Educational Reform
Move from Religious Training to Secular Education
e MA always on the forefront of public educational reform * 1st state to establish tax support for local public schools.
e By 1860 every state offered free public education to whites. * US had one of the highest literacy rates.
“Father of American Education”
Horace Mann (1796-1859)
e children were clay in the hands of teachers and school officialse children should be “molded” into a state of perfectione discouraged corporal punishmente established state teacher- training programs
R3-6
The McGuffey Eclectic Readers
e Used religious parables to teach “American values.”e Teach middle class morality and respect for order.e Teach “3 Rs” + “Protestant ethic” (frugality, hard work, sobriety)R3-8
Women Educatorse Troy, NY Female Seminarye curriculum: math, physics, history, geography.e train female teachers
Emma Willard(1787-1870)
Mary Lyons(1797-1849)
e 1837 she established Mt. Holyoke [So. Hadley, MA] as the first college for women.
► These artists captured the undiluted power of nature► Paint the nation’s most spectacular and undeveloped areas [the new Garden of Eden].► Nature was the best source of wisdom & fulfillment.► They created visual embodiments of the ideals of the Transcendentalists. * painting is the vehicle through which the universal mind could reach the mind of mankind. * art is the agent of moral & spiritual transformation.
The Hudson River SchoolThe Hudson River SchoolThe Hudson River SchoolThe Hudson River School
1. Paint grand, scenic vistas.
2. Humans are an insignificant [even non-existent] part of the picture.
3. Experiment with affects of light on water and sky.
4. Symbol of the school --> a broken tree stump
Characteristics of the Hudson River SchoolCharacteristics of the Hudson River School
“A new art for a new land.”
In Nature’s WonderlandThomas Doughty, 1835
Niagara – Frederic Church, 1857
View of the Catskills, Early AutumnThomas Cole, 1837
View from Mt. Holyoke: The OxbowThomas Cole, 1836
The Course of Empire: The Savage State
Thomas Cole, 1834
The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or The Pastoral State - Thomas Cole, 1836
Kindred Spirits – Asher Durand, 1849
Watercolors by John Audubon
Stanley Hawk Barred Owl
Neo-Classical Architecture: U. S. Customs House, 1836
Jefferson Rotunda (Univ. of VA), 1819-26
The Capitol Rotunda
The Landing of the PilgrimsUnknown Artist, 1830s
Washington Crossing the DelawareEmmanuel Gottlieb Leutze, 1851
George Washington Horatio Greenough, 1841
Our Banner in the Sky - Frederic Church, 1861
The Knickerbocker Group• First homegrown
American literature– Washington Irving: Rip
Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
– James Fenmore Cooper: Leatherstocking Tales, The Last of the Mohicans
– William Cullen Bryant: Thanatopsis. First high quality poetry by an American.