“Spiritual Reform From Within”
[Religious Revivalism]
Social Reforms & Redefining the
Ideal of Equality
Temperance
Education
Abolitionism
Asylum &
Penal Reform
Women’s
Rights
“The Benevolent Empire”:
1825 - 1846
Education
William H. McGuffey


A series of books designed to teach reading to schoolchildren.
Noah Webster


An educator and author of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, best
known for his American Dictionary of the English Language
Emma Willard


the first American woman publicly to support higher education for women
Horace Mann




considered father of American public school education
fought to increase the availability and quality of free, nondenominational public
schools
Schools should be places of morality and discipline
Immigration
•
Ireland
▫
Famine resulting from the failure of the potato crop
•
Northern Europe … mostly from Germany
•
Improvements in ship technology made the ocean
voyage relatively cheap and fast
•
The South attracted the least number of immigrants
•
Nativism (Anti Immigration)
▫
▫
The formation of the Know Nothing party
Anti-Catholicism

Still a man's world but women fared
better in U.S. than in Europe esp. on the
frontier where women were more scarce.

Seneca Falls Convention
 Issued a historic declaration of women’s
rights
 Declaration of Sentiments


Susan B. Anthony
Lucretia Mott
Utopian Societies

Wanted to perfect society

New Harmony
 Communitarian society founded the first American
kindergarten, first free public school and the first free
public library.

Brook Farm - "plain living and high thinking"
 Prospered until 1846 when new communal building
burned down.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne a resident (author of A Scarlet
Letter)
 Fourier


ideal community where each phalanx is to include a
balanced mix of workers, combining all the necessary
skills.
A community of 1620 people is suggested as the ideal
size
 The

Oneida Community
believed it liberated women from



Phalanxes - Charles Fourier
the demands of male "lust"
traditional bonds of family
eventually became a dominant manufacturer of silver
Utopian Societies
• Shakers --
▫ Opposition to both marriage and free
love led to their extinction.
▫ Believed in celibacy, equal spiritual value
of men and women, and simplicity of
architecture and furnishings.
▫ New members were adopted as orphans
or recruited through conversion.
Abolitionist Movement

Bringing the issue of slavery to the
forefront of the reform movement
◦ overshadow the others after 1830

William Lloyd Garrison and the
American Antislavery Society
◦ Immediate emancipation of slaves with
compensation to owners
◦ The Liberator

Harriet Beecher Stowe –Uncle Tom’s
Cabin
Prisons

Dorthea Dix
 Discovery
of the confinement of the mentally ill in local jails
 Prisons and asylums
 Traveled some 60,000 miles in 8 years compiling reports of
squalid conditions from first hand experiences in poorhouses
and basements where the insane were often kept in chains.
 Her efforts resulted in improved conditions and in a gain for
the concept that the demented were not willfully perverse but
mentally ill. -- 15 states created new hospitals and asylums as
a result.




German and Irish immigrants often
opposed the movement
By the 1850’s, the movement
advocated the legal prohibition of
alcohol
The early leaders of the movement
were Protestant clergymen
It was the most popular of the
Jacksonian era reform movements
Temperance
•
Neal Dow - Father of Prohibition"
– Maine Law 1851
•
completely prohibiting the sale of alcohol
– Illinois Quart Law 1851
•
•
banned the sale of alcohol in quantities less than a
quart.
T.S. Arthur
– Ten Nights In A Bar Room And What I Saw There
– Literature supporting temperance