CHAPTER 12
THE PURSUIT OF PERFECTION
REDEEMING THE MIDDLE CLASS
The author uses the revival organized in Rochester, New York, in 1830 as one example of the way the
middle class, especially in the urban North, attempted to reform themselves and the society around
them.
THE RISE OF EVANGELISM
The separation of church and state gave all religious denominations equal opportunity to attract
members and encouraged all denominations to seek converts actively. Alarmed by what they considered
“infidelity,” pious Protestants formed voluntary associations to combat sin.
A. The Second Great Awakening: The Frontier Phase
Camp meetings not only provided emotional religion for the frontier, but also one of the few
opportunities for social life for rural people whose everyday lives were often tedious and lonely. Camp
meeting revivals, however, did not usually lead to organized social reform because the thrust of the
religious message was so intensely personal.
B. The Second Great Awakening in the North
There were two branches of evangelical revival in the North. The first started in New England, where
theologians such as Timothy Dwight and Lyman Beecher preserved, but modified Calvinism by
emphasizing the doctrine of “free agency.” The second branch took root in upstate New York, an area of
transplanted New Englanders. There, the greatest revivalist was Charles G. Finney, who paid no
attention to theology and preached an unqualified doctrine of free will. Finney successfully
experimented with revival techniques, such as the “anxious bench,” and his revivals often led to the
organization of more churches.
C. From Revivalism to Reform
The northern revivals stimulated reform movements by appealing to middle-class citizens who had been
socially active before their conversions, and who now found a way to preserve traditional values in a
rapidly changing world. The various evangelical reform movements, known collectively as “the
benevolent empire,” actually did alter American life. The temperance movement, for example, enlisted
over a million members, mostly women, who successfully persuaded Americans to cut their
consumption of alcohol by more than 50 percent.
DOMESTICITY AND CHANGES IN THE AMERICAN FAMILY
Evangelicals and reformers assigned the family, and especially mothers, a crucial role in developing selfdisciplined Christian children.
A. Marriage for Love
By the nineteenth century, marriage had changed profoundly. Upper and middle class women expected
to marry for love, more forcefully demanded an end to the sexual double standard, were less deferential
to their husbands, and more willing to express their love in private correspondence and public display.
B. The Cult of Domesticity
“The Cult of True Womanhood” placed women in the home, but the home was glorified as the center of
all efforts to civilize and Christianize society. Most women who were married to farmers or laborers still
contributed to family income, but more and more middle- and upper-class women could afford to
dedicate themselves to the home, making it a sanctuary from the outside world. Many women who
found themselves liberated from the drudgery of farm chores used their leisure to improve themselves,
to get to know other women, and to lead crusades against vice; above all, however, they attempted to
become ideal mothers.
C. The Discovery of Childhood
In the nineteenth century, the child was placed at the center of family life. Each child was looked upon
as unique and irreplaceable. Ideal parents no longer “broke” a child’s will; they formed his character
with affection. Parental discipline was meant to instill guilt rather than fear, so that the child would
eventually learn self-discipline.
INSTITUTIONAL REFORM
Reformers hoped that public institutions such as schools would continue what the family had begun, or
that institutions such as asylums and prisons would mend what the family had failed to do.
A. The Extension of Education
Between 1820 and 1850, public school systems expanded rapidly, especially in the North. Originally
demanded by the working class as a means for advancement, the public schools were seized by middleclass reformers, who saw them as the ideal instrument for inculcating values of hard work and
responsibility. Horace Mann overcame the objections of taxpayers who resented having to subsidize the
education of the poor by pointing out that public schools would save children of the poor and
immigrants from becoming like their parents, vile and troublesome, and a public expense. Many
parents, especially Catholics, resented public schools, believing they alienated children from their
parents.
B. Discovering the Asylum
For those who lacked self-discipline, the poor, the criminal, and the insane, reformers hoped harsh
measures would lead to rehabilitation. Prisoners, for example, were put into solitary confinement and
had to conform to a strict daily schedule at such “model” prisons as the one at Auburn, New York.
Rehabilitation, however, seemed not to work. Public support was always skimpy, and most prisons,
asylums, and poorhouses became warehouses for the unwanted, who lived in abysmal conditions
despite the heroic efforts of Dorothea Dix, who worked tirelessly to bring some decency to these
institutions.
REFORM TURNS RADICAL
Most reformers wanted to improve society, but some of the more radical wanted to destroy society as it
existed and create a new, perfect social order.
A. Divisions in the Benevolent Empire
By the 1830s, radical perfectionists had become impatient with moderate reform and began to form
their own societies. The temperance and peace movements split into moderate and radical wings, but
the split among the opponents of slavery had more important consequences.
Moderate abolitionists hoped for a gradual end to slavery, which they saw as the only realistic
possibility, and they even supported removal of blacks from the United States as a concession to white
racism. Radical abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, demanded immediate emancipation and
formed the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.
B. The Abolitionist Enterprise
Abolitionists grew from the evangelical tradition and drew strength from it. A good example is Theodore
Dwight Weld, an itinerant minister who had been converted by Finney. When he became an abolitionist,
Weld simply adapted his revivalist techniques to a new cause. Weld was extremely successful in
northern Ohio and western New York, where he held mass meetings. The abolitionists appealed mainly
to ambitious and hard-working inhabitants of small towns, but often encountered opposition from the
working class, who disliked blacks and feared their economic and social competition, and from solid
citizens, who regarded abolitionists as anarchists.
Abolitionists tended to weaken their influence by perpetual in-fighting. Garrison disrupted the
movement by associating it with other radical reforms such as pacifism and feminism. White
Southerners, ironically, helped the abolitionists by trying to suppress the right of petition and by
censoring the mails to prevent abolitionist literature from being circulated. These attempts backfired.
The abolitionist movement succeeded in making slavery a matter of public concern, despite opposition
from without and divisions from within.
C. Black Abolitionists
African Americas always made up the majority of abolitionists, but black abolitionists had to struggle to
achieve leadership positions within abolitionist societies. Some, most notably William Douglass and
Sojourner Truth, became nationally known, and in 1830 the Negro Convention gave blacks an
independent organization. African Americans also published their own abolitionist newspapers, and
were the most important figures in running the “underground railroad.”
D. From Abolitionism to Women’s Rights
The abolitionist movement gave many women an opportunity to engage in a public reform program. In
advocating freedom for blacks, women began to realize their own inequality. When they discovered that
many male abolitionists refused to accept women as equal partners in protest, women led by Lucretia
Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, which was the
beginning of the movement for female rights.
E. Radical Ideas and Experiments
In addition to the reform movements inspired by evangelical piety, other attempts were made to create
perfect individuals or a perfect society. For example, a number of utopian communities were
established, such as the Oneida Community or Brook Farm, but most were short-lived. Intellectuals,
repelled by the crudities of the revivalists, sought intense religious experience in a literary and
philosophical movement called transcendentalism. Finally, weird reform movements, such as
phrenology, spiritualism, and diet fads, promised perfect health or instant self-knowledge.
CONCLUSION: COUNTERPOINT ON REFORM
Perceptive critics, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, regarded the nation’s pursuit of perfection with a skeptical
eye, but the reform impulse, no matter how eccentric at times, opened the way to necessary changes in
American life.