Chapter 15
 About ¾ of the 23 million Americans
went to church each week.
 Thomas Paine’s widely circulated book
The Age of Reason (1794) declared that
all churches were set up to, “terrify and
enslave mankind, monopolize power,
and profit.”
 Many of the Founding Fathers (Jefferson
and Franklin especially) were Deists.
 Deists relied on reason rather than
revelation, on science rather than the Bible.
 Deists did believe in a Supreme Being who
had created a knowledgeable universe and
endowed humans with a capacity for moral
behavior.
 Through all of this religious liberalism, the Second
Great Awakening roared through the country.
 In its wake were left many new sects as well as
reforms such as prison reform, the temperance
movement, the women’s ,movement, and the
crusade to abolish slavery.
 People (as many as 25,000) would go to huge
“camp meetings” that lasted for days to listen to
preachers’ gospels.
 In 1830 Joseph Smith said that he received
some golden plates from an angel, which he
deciphered into the Book of Mormon and the
Church of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons)
was launched.
 Non-Mormons were upset with some of the
things that Smith was preaching, including
accusations of polygamy.
 Smith and his brother were murdered in
Carthage, IL
 The movement was near collapse until
Brigham Young stepped in and moved the
group to Utah.
 The settlement began to thrive as more and
more followers made their way out to Utah.
 European settlers also came after Mormon
missionaries spread their word in Europe.
 There were many people against schooling
for
everyone during this time.
 Wealthy Americans began to see the light as they
thought people needed to be educated in order to
vote responsibly.
 Horace Mann, sec. of MA Board of Education,
stepped in and pushed for more and better
schoolhouses, longer school terms, higher pay for
teachers, and expanded curriculum.
 As late as 1860, the nation counted only
about a hundred public secondary
schools- and nearly a million white
adult illiterates.
 Black slaves were legally prohibited
from learning to read and write.
 Free blacks in the North and South
were usually excluded from the schools.
 Many new colleges and universities
popped up across the country during
this time.
 Most of the time, these places were
built more out of community pride
than as institutions of higher learning.
 The education was mostly left to men,
as the woman’s place was in the home.
 Oberlin College bucked the trend as it
admitted both women and black men
in 1837.
 The same year, Mary Lyon established
Mount Holyoke Seminary (later
College) in MA.
 Custom, combined with hard and monotonous
life, led to the excessive drinking of hard liquor
by women, clergymen, and members of
Congress.
 Weddings and funerals often became brawls
and occasionally a drunken mourner would fall
into the open grave with the corpse.
 After previous efforts, the American
Temperance Society was formed in MA in 1826.
 Some people felt that others should stiffen their
will to resist the little brown jug, while others felt
that the temptation should be removed by
legislation.
 The Maine Law of 1851, passed by Portland mayor
Neal S. Dow, prohibited the manufacture and sale
of intoxicating liquor. Dow is often called the
“Father of Prohibition”.
 By 1857, 12 other states passed various prohibitory
laws.
 Female reformers, most well-to-do, began fighting for
temperance and the abolition of slavery.
 Prominent in the women’s rights movement were;
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Lucretia Mott
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Susan B. Anthony
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell
Margaret Fuller
Sarah and Angelina Grimke
Lucy Stone
Amelia Bloomer
 These feminists met in 1848 in a memorable
Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls,
New York.
 Stanton read a “Declaration of Sentiments,”
which echoed the Declaration of
Independence.
 Still, the crusade for women’s rights was
overshadowed by the campaign against
slavery.
Chapter 16
 People predicted that the iron logic of
economics would eventually expose the
unprofitability of slavery, spelling its
demise.
 The introduction of Eli Whitney’s
cotton gin in 1793 scrambled these
predictions.
 As the use grew, cotton rapidly became
the dominant southern crop, eclipsing
tobacco, rice, and sugar.
 This explosion of cotton culture
created an insatiable demand for labor.
 Quick profits drew planters to the
loamy bottomlands of the Gulf states.
 As long as the soil was still rich, the
yield was bountiful and the rewards
were high.
 Northern shippers reaped a large part
of the profits from the cotton trade.
 Cotton accounted for half the value of
all American exports after 1840.
 The South produced more than half of
the entire world’s supply of cotton.
 Britain was tied to America through
cotton;
 If war were to break out between North
and South, northern warships would cut
off the outflow of cotton.
 The British factories would then close
their gates and the London government
would be forced to break the blockade
and the South would triumph.
 In 1850 only 1,733 families owned more
than 100 slaves each, and this select
group provided the cream of the
political and social leadership of the
section and nation.
 Even in its best light, dominance by a
favored aristocracy was basically
undemocratic.
 It widened the gap between rich and poor
and it also hampered tax-supported
public education because the rich could
send their children to private institutions.
 The plantation system also shaped the
lives of southern women who
commanded sizable household staff of
female slaves.
 Quick cotton profits led to excessive cultivation or
“land butchery”, which led to heavy population
migration to the West and Northwest.
 This migration gave more and more land to large
southern landowners.
 Cotton had its drawbacks as its price was
determined by world conditions, as was the case
when only one product was determined upon.
 Southern planters resented the Northern
middlemen, bankers, agents, and shippers to
whom they felt in servitude to for the rest of their
lives because the North made most of what they
owned.
 The South also repelled large-scale European
immigration, which created manpower and wealth
in the North.
 The South was the most Anglo-Saxon section of
the nation.
 There were 250,000 free Southern blacks in
1860, many of whom owned property.
 The free blacks were kind of a “third race”;
people who were prohibited from working in
certain occupations and forbidden from
testifying in court against whites.
 Also, they were always vulnerable from
being hijacked back into slavery by slave
traders.
 250,000 free blacks lived in the North,
where they were also unpopular.
 Several states forbade their entrance, most
denied them the right to vote or to enroll in
public schools.
 Much of the agitation in the North against
the spread of slavery grew out of race
prejudice, not humanitarianism.
 Antiblack feeling was in fact frequently
stronger in the North than in the South.
 It was observed that white southerners, who
were often suckled and reared by black
nurses, liked the black as an individual, but
despised the race.
 The white northerner, on the other hand,
often professed to like the race but disliked
individual blacks.
 Abolitionist sentiment first stirred at the
time of the Revolution, especially among
Quakers.
 Some early abolitionist movements focused
on sending blacks back to Africa (American
Colonization Society).
 The Republic of Liberia, on the West African
coast, was founded for former slaves.
 By 1860 virtually all southern slaves
were no longer Africans, but nativeborn African Americans, with their
own distinctive history and culture.
 The first antislavery newspaper, The
Liberator, was published in 1831 by William
Lloyd Garrison.
 In 1833 the American Anti-Slavery Society
was born.
 The greatest black abolitionist was Frederick
Douglass, who escaped from bondage in
1838 at age 21.