Chapter 15 Overview
The Second Great Awakening
• 1800s-1830s
• Emphasized the importance of religion
• Reaction against declining church membership
and deism
• Emphasized emotion over reason
• Used camp meetings (revival meetings)
• Emphasis on the ability of an individual to earn
salvation (as opposed to predestination)
• Led to the growing popularity of new
denominations
• Actively sought female participation
Charles Grandison Finney
• "America's foremost
revivalist"
• Encouraged women
• Innovative techniques
• Humans can earn
salvation
• Abolitionist
Camp Meetings
The camp meeting is a phenomenon of American frontier
Christianity. The "camp meeting" was a response to the
lack of established churches on the frontier. Word of mouth
told that there was to be a religious meeting at a certain
location. Due to the primitive means of transportation, if
this meeting was to be more than a few miles' distance
from those attending, it would necessitate their leaving
home for its entire duration, or as long as they desired to
remain, and camping out at or near its site. Unlike
traditional religious events these meetings could provide
their participants with almost continuous services; once
one speaker was finished (often after several hours)
another would often rise to take his place.
New Sects & Denominations
• Baptists & Methodists grew the most
Other Examples:
• Millerites (Adventists)—Jesus would return
on October 22, 1844
• Unitarians—Jesus was not divine
• Mormons—New American scriptures
Reform Movements
Partly inspired by the Second Great
Awakening, Americans began to look
for new ways to improve society.
Temperance
• Opposed excessive (and sometimes any)
alcohol consumption
• American Temperance Society (1826)
• Northern states experimented with
prohibition laws in the 1850s.
Public Schools
• Reformers believed that better organized
schools were needed to cope with growing
industrialism and immigration.
• Horace Mann advocated 1) state funded
schools, 2) assigning students to specific
grades, 3) longer school years, 4) required
attendance, and 5) standardized text books.
• In 1852 Massachusetts passed the first
compulsory school attendance law.
Horace Mann
Abolition
• Sought the abolition of slavery
• Some favored immediate, uncompensated
abolition
• Others favored gradual forms of abolition
• William Lloyd Garrison
• Frederick Douglass
Abolitionists
Women’s Rights
• Lucretia Mott &
Elizabeth Cady
Stanton
• Seneca Falls
Convention (1848)
Declaration of
Sentiments
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and
women are created equal.
• The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries
and usurpations on the part of man toward woman,
having in direct object the establishment of an absolute
tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to
a candid world.
• He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable
right to the elective franchise.
• He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation
of which she had no voice.
• He has withheld from her rights which are given to the
most ignorant and degraded men--both natives and
foreigners.
• Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the
elective franchise, thereby leaving her without
representation in the halls of legislation, he has
oppressed her on all sides.
• He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
• He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages
she earns.
• He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and
from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty
remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth
and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself.
As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
• He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough
education, all colleges being closed against her.
• He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate
position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the
ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public
participation in the affairs of the church.
• He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a
different code of morals for men and women, by which moral
delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only
tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.
Things have changed…
Asylums
• Dorothea Dix:
Champion of
better treatment
on the mentally ill.
Prisons
• Debtors prisons were being abolished
• Capital punishment was being used less
frequently
• Brutal punishments (whipping, branding)
were being eliminated
• Prisons were to reform as well as punish
Utopias
• Experiments in cooperative communities
• Over 40 utopian communities were set up