CHAPTER 14
A NEW SPIRIT OF CHANGE
SECTION 1 - THE HOPES OF
IMMIGRANTS
• Define
–emigrant - people who leave
country
–immigrant - people who enter a
country
–steerage - cheapest deck on a ship
- filthy and illness or death
Briefly explain each Push Factor
– Population growth -better food and
sanitation caused overcrowding in
Europe
– agricultural changes
• make more money selling to cities
• forced tenants off land to use to plots
to make money
– crop failures
• poor harvests - unable to pay debts
• hunger caused people to emigrate
– Industrial Revolution
• goods became cheaper than those
produced by artisans
• some took factory jobs - others emigrated
– Religious and political turmoil
• Quakers and Jews left to avoid religious
persecution
• Germans came after a failed revolution in
Germany
PULL FACTORS
• Freedom - everyone has the freedom to practice the
•
•
teaching and religion he prefers
Economic opportunity
– looking for a land where they could support their
families and have a better future
– immigration varied depending on U.S. economy
Abundant land
– Louisiana Purchase and Mexican Cession - lots of
land
– land-starved Europeans saw as a land of opportunity
SCANDINANVIANS
• Where did they settle?
•
– regions like Midwest, especially Minnesota
and Wisconsin
Why did they settle there
– lakes, forests, and cold winters like their
homeland
– became farmers
GERMANS
• Where did they settle?
•
– Midwest - Wisconsin, Texas and cities
Why did they settle there?
– Wisconsin - could grow oats and Catholic
bishop
– Texas - brought land from German nobles
and founded Fredericksburg
– Cities - businesses as bakers, butchers,
carpenters, printers, shoemakers and tailors
– John Jacob Bausch and Henry Lomb world's largest lens maker
– Jews - salespeople who brought pins,
needles, pots and news to frontier homes and
mining camps
Irish
– Where did they settle?
• City dwellers
– Why did they settle there?
• few skills and had to take low-paying, back-breaking jobs
• women took in washing
• men built canals and railroads
– Why did they come?
• Irish Catholics could not vote, hold office, own land or go to
school
• famine - no potatoes - no food - forced to emigrate
OVERCROWDING OF CITIES
• New York, St. Louis and Cincinnati's population
•
grew greatly in small number of years
Problems
– not enough housing
– landlords squeezed large apartment buildings
in small lots
– cramped living quarters lacked sunshine and
fresh air
– outdoor toilets overflowed causing disease
– crime flourished
• City Problems
•
– New York no public police force
– only a volunteer fire department
– 138 miles of sewers for 500 mils of streets
Immigrant groups set up societies to help
newcomers and politicians offered help in
exchange for votes
OPPOSITION TO IMMIGRATION
• Prejudice
– a negative opinion that is not based on facts
– native-born Americans feared that immigrants
were to foreign to learn American ways.
– some feared that immigrants might come to
outnumber natives
– Some Protestants feared that Catholics
threatened democracy
• Nativists
– native-born Americans who wanted to
eliminate foreign influence
• refused to hire immigrants
• promised to not vote for any Catholics
or immigrants running for political
office
• Know-Nothing Party
– started by nativists
– wanted to an Catholics and the
foreign-born from holding office
– called for a cut in immigration and 21year wait to become an American
citizen
– disappeared when north and south
branches couldn't agree on slavery
What were the push-pull factors that led to
immigration?
• How did the arrival of so many immigrants
affect U.S. cities?
• What was the Know-Nothing Party, and
what was its point of view about
immigration?
SECTION 2
AMERICAN LITERATURE
AND ART
AMERICAN WRITERS
• Romanticism –
– stressed the individual, imagination, creativity,
and emotion.
– Drew from nature
• James Fennimore Cooper – The Last of
the Mohicans
• Frances Parkman – The Oregon Trail
• Noah Webster
– Published American Dictionary of the English
Language
– Gave American, not British, spellings and included
American Slang
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow –
– Wrote many poems that retold stories from history
– Paul Revere’s Ride
AMERICAN ARTISTS
• Hudson River School
– Artists painted peaceful landscapes of mountains,
forests and rivers
– Paintings that conveyed the majesty of the American
Landscape
• John James Audubon – sketched birds and
•
animals of his adopted country
African Americans
– Made beautiful baskets, quilts, and pottery
– David Drake signed pottery he created.
WRITERS AND WORK
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
– Urged Americans to cast off European influence and
develop their own beliefs
– Learn about life from self-examination and from
nature as well as books
• Henry David Thoreau
– Believed people should live by their own
individual standards
– Transcendentalism
• Taught that the spiritual world is more important
•
than the physical world
Taught people to find truth within themselves –
through feeling and intuition
– Civil disobedience
• Urged people not to obey laws they considered
unjust
• Peacefully refuse to obey laws
• Margaret Fuller – in magazine and book
she argued for women’s rights
• Walt Whitman
– Published Leaves of Grass
– He and Dickinson shaped modern poetry by
experimenting with language
• Emily Dickinson
– Wrote poems on pieces of paper that she
sewed into booklets
– Subjects of God, nature, love and death
– Most poems published after her death.
• Edgar Allan Poe – terrifying tales that
influence today’s horror story writers –
first detective story
• Nathaniel Hawthorne – depicted love,
guilt and revenge during Puritan times in
The Scarlet Letter.
• Herman Melville – wrote Moby Dick
about a man’s destructive desire to kill a
white whale
SECTION QUESTION
• What was romanticism and how did
Americans adapt it?
• • What is civil disobedience and what
did Thoreau do that is an example of it?
• • How did the writers of the mid-1800s
shape modern literature?
SECTION 3
REFORMING AMERICAN
SOCIETY
REVIVALS
• Second Great Awakening
– Revival – a meeting to reawaken religious faith
– Circuit riders – preacher who rode from town to town
holding meetings in a tent
– Preachers said that anyone could choose salvation
and this appealed to equality-loving Americans
– Charles Finney preached that “all sin consists in
selfishness” and that religious faith led people to help
others. – helped to awaken spirit of reform
Temperance
• a campaign to stop the drinking of alcohol
• Workers spent most of their wages on alcohol –
•
•
•
leaving families without enough money to live
on
Many women joined temperance movement
Business owners joined because they needed
workers who could keep schedules and run
machines
Alcohol made it hard for workers to do either
WORKERS RIGHTS
• Improvements in working conditions
• Factory work was noisy, boring and unsafe
• Labor union – a group of workers who
band together to seek better working
conditions.
• Strike – stop working to demand better
conditions
• Workers called for shorter hours and
higher wages
IMPROVING EDUCATION
• Horace Mann
– Public education “the great equalizer”
– “education creates or develops new treasures—
treasures never before possessed or dreamed of by
any one”
• Led to opening of public elementary and high
•
schools
Led to opening of hundreds of private colleges.
• Women not allowed into colleges
– Elizabeth Blackwell first women to obtain
Medical Degree in U.S.
• African Americans faced obstacles
– South illegal to teach an enslaved person to
read
– North most public schools barred AfricanAmerican children
– Colleges would only take 1 or 2 at a time.
CARING FOR THE NEEDY
• Dorethea Dix
– A reformer who discovered women who were
locked in cold, filthy cells because they were
mentally ill
– Found mentally ill received no treatment and
were usually chained and beaten
– Through her efforts 32 new hospitals were
built for mentally ill
• Thomas H. Gallaudet – opened the first
American school for deaf children
• Samuel G. Howe – opened Perkins
School for the Blind in Boston
• Prisons
– Debtors, lifelong criminals and child
offenders were put in the same cells
– Reformers demanded that children go to
special schools
– Called for rehabilitation of adult prisoners
PUBLICATIONS
• Penny Papers
– Cheaper newsprint and invention of the steam-driven
press lowered the price of a newspaper to a penny
– Carried serious news but also gripping stories of fires
and crime
• Ladies Magazines
– Sarah Hale – used writing to support her family
– Magazine advocated education for women
– Suggested that men and women were responsible for
different, but equally important, areas of life
IDEAL COMMUNITIES
• Utopia – an ideal society
• New Harmony, Indiana & Brook Farm
Massachusetts
– Residents received food and other necessities
in exchange for work
– Experienced conflicts and financial difficulties
– Ended only after a few years
• Shaker
– Called this because they shook with
emotion during church services
– Vowed not marry or have children
– Shared goods with each other and believed
that men and women were equal
– Refused to fight for any reason
– Farmed and built simple furniture
– Depended on converts and adopting
children to keep their communities going
SECTION QUESTIONS
• How did the Second Great Awakening
influence the reform movement?
• • How did labor unions try to force
business owners to improve working
conditions?
• • What were women’s contributions
to the reform movement?
SECTION 4
ABOLITION AND WOMEN’S
RIGHTS
ABOLITIONISTS
• People who led the movement to end slavery
• David Walker
– Wrote a pamphlet urging slaves to revolt
– Heard life was in danger – died mysteriously
• William Lloyd Garrison
– Published abolitionist newspaper called The Liberator
– Boston mob tried to hang but mayor stopped
• Grimke Sisters
– Believed that slavery was morally
wrong
– Joined Quakers and American AntiSlavery Society
– Spoke out for abolition even though
they were criticized for it.
• Frederick Douglass
– Career as a lecturer for the Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society
– Published a autobiography to prove his life as
a slave
– On return from a two year speaking tour he
brought his freedom and began publishing an
antislavery newspaper
• Sojourner Truth
– Started life as slave but went to live
with Quakers who set her free
– Helped her win court battle to win
young son from slavery
– Went out to declare truth to the
people and drew huge crowds in the
North
• Harriet Tubman
– One of the most famous conductors of
the underground railroad
– She escaped and make 19 dangerous
trips on the underground railroad
– Carried a pistol to frighten slave hunters
and medicine to quiet crying babies
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
• An aboveground series of escape routes
from the South to the North
• Was not underground or an actual railroad
• Traveled on foot, wagons, boats and
trains.
• Usually traveled by night and hid by day in
places called stations
• Stables, attics and cellars all served as
stations.
WOMEN REFORMERS
• World Anti-slavery Convention
– Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
went to attend
– Were not allowed to enter the convention
because they were women – not allowed to
speak in public
– Had to sit behind heavy curtain and William
Lloyd Garrisons joined them
• Women’s rights in 1800
– Few legal or political rights
– Could not vote, sit on juries or hold public
office
– Laws treated women as children
– Most states husband controlled any property
wife inherited and any wages she might
earn.
• Seneca Falls Convention
– Women’s right convention held by Stanton
and Mott
– Attracted men and women
– Wrote a Declaration of Sentiments that
declared all men and women were equal
– All resolutions passed except for suffrage –
right to vote
• Other Calls
– Sojourner Truth – gave speech that urged
men to give women their rights
– Maria Mitchell
• Founded Association for the Advancement of
women
• An astronomer who discovered a comet
• Elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences – first woman
– Susan B. Anthony
• Skilled organizer who worked in the temperance
and antislavery movements
• Built women’s movement into a national
organization
SECTION QUESTIONS
• Why were freedom of speech and freedom
•
•
of the press important to the abolitionist
movement?
• What were Frederick Douglass’s
contributions to the abolitionist movement?
• What were Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s
contributions to the women’s rights
movement?