United States
History
Chapter 15
The Spirit of Reform
1820-1860
American Literature and Art
• Early America used the art and literature
that they brought with them from other
countries.
• Soon, though America began developing
her own themes and voice in literature and
art.
• Famous American Writers:
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James
Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Edger Allen Poe
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1832)
In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson
defined American
transcendentalism by saying the
individual should be completely
reliant on God, and that every
person has been put into their
certain life and position by God
… He said that God has put the
power to handle things, think,
and act into each individual and
that the individual needs to trust
what God has put inside them to
do things with their lives.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
American author, naturalist,
transcendentalist, pacifist,
philosopher who is most famous for
his written account, Walden, a
reflection upon simple living
amongst nature, and his essay, Civil
Disobedience, an argument for
individual resistance to civic
government as moral opposition to
an unjust law. This essay has had a
wide influence on many later
practitioners of civil disobedience.
In the essay, Thoreau explained his
reasons for having refused to pay
taxes as an act of protest against
slavery and against the MexicanAmerican War
Brook Farm, Massachusetts
The transcendentalists sought harmony, the merging
of values, ideas, and spiritual matters with physical
events, the union of mind and body, spirit and flesh.
At Brook Farm, and in other communities, physical
labor is perceived as a condition of mental well-being
and health. They believed that manual labor was
uplifting, and thus, every member, even the writers
and poets, spent at least a few hours a day in physical
effort. Another expression of the connection of flesh
and spirit is manifested through the abundance of
physical tasks performed at Brook Farm. The
members of Brook Farm believed that they could
create a micro utopia of society that would eventually
serve as a model of social macrocosm.
James Fenimore Cooper
- The Last of the Mohicans • The story is set in the British province of New
York during the French and Indian War, and
concerns a massacre of a colonial garrison and
a fictional kidnapping of two sisters, who were
the daughters of the commander. Hawkeye
and his Mohican companions escort sisters,
Cora and Alice, through the woods of New
York to Fort William Henry. They engage in
deadly fights along the way against Hurons.
Herman Melville’s Moby
Dick Moby-Dick describes the ill-fated
voyage of the whaling ship Pequod
to find and destroy the white
whale, driven by the obsessive
Captain Ahab. The language is
highly symbolic and many themes
run throughout the work. The
narrator's reflections, along with
complex descriptions of the
grueling work of whaling and
personalities of his shipmates, are
woven into a profound meditation
on providence, nature, society,
and the human struggle.
Nathanial
Hawthorne
The Scarlet
Letter (1850)
Hester Prynne’s husband was
presumed to have been lost at sea.
She begins a secret adulterous
relationship with the town preacher
and becomes pregnant. She is forced
to wear the scarlet letter "A" on her
clothing to identify her as an
adulteress, but her loyalty refuses to
reveal the identity of her lover. She
accepts the punishment with grace
and refuses to be defeated by the
shame inflicted upon her by her
society. Her virtue becomes
increasingly evident to the reader,
while the community vilify her, and
are shown in varying states of moral
decay.
Washington
Irving
Rip Van
Winkle
The story is set in the years before and after the
American Revolutionary War. Rip Van Winkle escapes
his nagging wife by wandering up the Catskill Mountains
near his home town in New York. He settles down under
a shady tree and falls asleep. He wakes up 20 years later
and returns to his village. He finds out that his wife is
dead and his close friends have died. He immediately
gets into trouble when he hails himself a loyal subject of
George III, not knowing that in the meantime the
American Revolution has taken place.
Edger Allen
Poe
Fall of the
House of
Usher (1838)
The tale opens with the narrator
having arrived at the house of his
friend, Roderick Usher. Usher
complained of an illness and asked
for his comfort. Usher informs the
narrator that his sister has died
and insists that she is entombed in
the house. After two weeks Usher
admits that strange sounds are
being made by his sister, who was
in fact alive when she was put in
the vault. Madeline escapes,
appears, falling on her brother and
they both die. The narrator
quickly escapes from the house,
and as he hurries away, he sees
the house sink into the bog.
James
Whistler
(Painter)
“Whistler’s Mother”
Winslow
Homer
(painter)
Homer’s
Paintings
Winslow Homer’s “Breezing Up”
Notable American Scientists
• Science advanced during this time period
• Using the Scientific Method, men and
women began to study creation and
discover more deeply how things worked.
• Medicine, astronomy, physics, physical
sciences and geology all took leaps forward.
• Maria Mitchell
– Taught
herself
astronomy
and found a
comet in
1847
• Joseph Henry
– Invented an
electromagneti
c motor that
helped predict
weather
Matthew Maury
Developed a way
to predict winds
and ocean tides
• Dr. Crawford Long &
Dr. William Morton
– Developed a way to use
ether as an anesthetic
(numbing solution)
Early Education in the U.S.
• In the 1830’s reformers began demanding
better schools
• Common School Movement – Led by
Horace Mann, wanted to raise the
standards of schools across the country
and pay for them through taxes.
• Most people didn’t pay any taxes in the
1830’s and they didn’t support paying a
school tax
Horace Mann
McGuffey Readers
Minorities Education
• Women only received a basic education if
any (they were taught morals & manners)
• African Americans were generally not
allowed any education (some exceptions
existed on the lower levels)
• Hearing & Visually Impaired were also not
educated prior to the early 1800’s
– 1817 the first school for the hearing impaired
opened, and in 1831 the first school for the
blind opened.
Teaching sign language
Prison Reform
• In the early 1800’s many wanted to reform
prisons.
• Focus turned from punishing to reforming
prisoners.
• Most reform came through work and bible
study.
Mentally Ill
• Dorothea Dix studied the New England
prison systems for two years.
• She investigated hundreds of facilities.
• Her greatest achievement was convincing
many states to open hospitals for the
mentally ill, and stop treating them as
criminals.
Dorothea Dix
New York Asylum 1850’s
Temperance Movement
• In the early 1800’s many saw alcoholism as a
primary reason for higher crime rates, poverty,
and abuse.
• The temperance movement was a campaign
against drinking alcohol.
• The movement called for the prohibition, or
banning, of alcohol all together.
• Southerners really pushed for prohibition
• 1851 Maine banned the manufacture and sale of
alcohol, several other states followed.
“The Evils of the bottle”
Drunkard’s progress
The Early Temperance Movement
Second Great Awakening
• This was a time period were people
wanted to renew religious faith and cure
the evils of society.
• Religious groups and revival meetings
increased, and thousands of new churches
were created.
• Charles Finney was influential as a “circuit
preacher” (or traveling preacher).
• This era saw the birth of “Dispensational
Theology”.
The Second
Great
Awakening
Charles
Finney the
Circuit
Preacher
Second Great Awakening (con.)
• Many different denominations and sects began
during this time as a split emerged from Christian
orthodoxy.
• Examples of groups: Mormons, Shakers,
Campbellites, Seventh-day Adventist, The Oneida
Community.
• Communal groups or communal living became a
popular idea from some groups in attempt to
create a “utopia” here on Earth.
Joseph Smith (1830)
Mother Ann Lee’s Shakers
Oneida Communal Living
Robert Owens's
New Harmony
Indiana
Wilderness Utopia
Antislavery Movement
• By 1840 nearly 2.5 million slaves were in the south.
• South depended on slave labor.
• Northern states abolished slavery by 1804 and slaves tried
to escape to the north.
• Antislavery movement began with the Quakers in 1775
• By 1792 antislavery groups were popping up all over the
U.S.
• American Colonization Society was established in 1817.
– Created a colony for free blacks in West Africa called Liberia
– Most free blacks didn’t want to leave the U.S. and felt like this was
an attempt to remove free blacks and their resistance to slavery
from the U.S.
Monrovia, Liberia.
Abolitionists
• Abolitionists were people who wanted to end
slavery
• They demanded the immediate emancipation, or
freeing, of slaves.
• Abolitionists created the American Anti-Slavery
Society in 1835.
• There were many famous abolitionists:
– William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina & Sarah Gimke, Elijah
Lovejoy, Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips, &
Sojourner Truth
– Most famous was Frederick Douglas
• A former slave that escaped in 1838 and began writing and
preaching about the brutality of slavery.
The masthead of William Lloyd Garrison's anti-slavery newspaper
was as uncompromising as the editor himself. "I come to break the
bonds of the oppressor," it proclaimed, with Jesus as the
figurehead. Abolitionists liked to portray the free north as heaven
and the slave owning south as hell, but the comparison made
tempers flare on both sides.
Frederick Douglas
Mob attacking an abolitionist
Underground Railroad
• This was not a real railroad, but a series of “safe
houses” called stations, that were used to
transport runaway slaves from the south to the
north.
• Conductors were those that helped guide
runaway slaves from station to station.
• The most famous conductor was Harriet Tubman
– Former slave that returned to the south 19 times and
led over 300 slaves out of the south.
– Slave owners offered a $40,000 reward for her dead
or alive.
Henry “box” Brown
Harriet Tubman
Response to Anti-Slavery
• North
– Many northerners disliked the movement
– They did business with the south and feared that this would hurt
business
– Northern factory workers feared that freed slaves would come
north and take their jobs
– Abolitionist speakers were outcast, ridiculed, attacked, and some
killed
• South
– Southerners defended slavery
– Southern way of life was threatened
– Southerners wanted abolitionist materials suppressed by the
government
• The Anti-Slavery Movement helped widen the gap
between the North & the South
Women’s Rights Movement
• Women were a large part of the AntiSlavery Movement.
• As they fought for abolition, many women
began to question their own social status
• Women could not vote, hold public office,
speak in public, & their husbands owned all
property.
Movement Begins
• 1840 nine women from the U.S. attended the
World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.
– They were not allowed to enter the convention.
– Two of those women decided to form a convention
back in America and make a stand for women’s rights
• Lucretia Coffin Mott & Elizabeth Cady Stanton
formed the Seneca Falls Convention eight years
later.
Lucretia Coffin Mott
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Seneca Falls Convention
• July 19, 1848 the first women’s rights convention
was held in Seneca Falls, New York
• They created the Seneca Falls Declaration which
said “all men and women are created equal”
– They attached many resolutions, one of which was the
right to vote (suffrage).
• This was a bold move that narrowly passed at the convention
• Women didn’t win all things that they wanted,
but some states began to slowly give women
more rights, such as property ownership
We hold these
truths to be selfevident: that all men
and women are
created equal...”
Seneca Falls
Convention,
NY - 1848
—Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Declaration of
Sentiments
Seneca Falls Convention
Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony
• Lucy Stone was a large part of the Women’s
Rights movement.
– She paid her own way through college (some help
from her father)
– Stone became a public speaker for the women’s rights
movement in 1847.
• Susan B. Anthony brought experience and
organization skills to the movement
• She had participated in the Temperance and AntiSlavery movements
• Became president of the American Woman
Suffrage Association
Lucy Stone
Susan B. Anthony