Antebellum Culture
& Reform
Mr. Owens
Essential Qestions
• What were the causes and effects of the Second
Great Awakening?
• What were the key voluntary organizations and
individuals that contributed to reform movement
like Temperance during the Antebellum Period?
• What were the goals and accomplishments of the
Abolition movement and the push for rights for
African Americans in the North and the South?
• What were the goals and accomplishments of the
Women’s Rights Movement including the Seneca
Falls Convention?
2nd Great Awakening
• Revivalism: salvation for all through faith, repentance, &
“good works”
• Charles G. Finney in 1823 series of revivals in upstate NY
“burned-over district” – emotional “hell-&-brimstone”
• Baptists & Methodists – camp meetings spread through
South & West – 2 largest sects by 1850
• Millennialism – world to end w/ Christ’s 2nd coming, led by
William Miller “Millerites” Oct 21, 1844 (7th Day Adventists)
• Mormons: founded by Joseph Smith in 1830, Book of
Mormon, after Smith’s murder in 1844 Brigham Young led
Mormons to “New Zion” (Salt Lake City, Utah) in 1847
Transcendentalists
• Inspired by Romanticism focused on individual discovering
inner self by trusting intuition & finding God in nature
• Centered in Concord, MA
• Challenged materialism, conformity to church & society
• Inspired reforms especially antislavery movement
• Ralph Waldo Emerson – speaker & essayist urged creating a
distinctive American culture, self-reliance, independent
thinking & spiritual over the material. Abolitionist.
• Henry David Thoreau – Walden (1854) & “On Civil
Disobedience” inspires Gandhi & MLK Jr.
• Brook Farm – 1841 movement inspired failed communal
experiment in Brook Farm, MA headed by George Ripley
included Margaret Fuller & Nathaniel Hawthorne
Utopias & Communal Experiments
• Shakers: founded by Mother Ann Lee, practiced
celibacy & common property – equality, peaked at
6,000 in 1840s in New England, chairs
• Amana Colonies: Germans in Iowa followed
“Pietism” focused & communal living individual
moral behavior
• Oneida Community: Founded by John Humphrey
Noyes focused on communal property & marriage,
criticized as “free love”, silverware
• New Harmony: Indiana, founded by Welsh
industrialist Robert Owen “Utopian Socialism”
• Fourier Phalanxes: followers of French socialist
Charles Fourier – shared work and housing
communities
Art & Literature
• Hudson River School of art: NY Thomas Cole &
Frederick Church – landscapes & romanticism of
nature
• Genre painting of everyday life – George Caleb
Bingham
• Literature: James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales (1824-1841) frontier,
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850),
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1855)
• Architecture: Greek columns – classical Athens
Reforming Society
• Inspired by 2nd Great Awakening, Transcendentalism &
“perfectionism”
• Temperance: “Demon Rum!”
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High rate of alcoholism(5 gallons per person in 1820)
American Temperance Society (1826) pledge of sobriety
1840 movement to treat alcoholism as a disease
Opposed by Irish & German immigrant groups
12 states passed prohibition laws between 1851-1860
• Asylum Movement: public institutions
– Mental Hospitals: Dorothea Dix in 1840s insane asylums
– Schools for the blind (Dr. Samuel Howe) & deaf (Thomas
Gallaudet)
– Prisons: PA, penitentiaries – use of rehabilitation & solitary
confinement, strict rules of discipline & reform – mixed results
• Public Education
– Free Common Schools – headed by MA reformer Horace Mann
– Moral Education – McGuffey Reader, protestant lessons
– Higher Education – expansion of small private colleges &
including Mount Holyoke & Oberlin College admitted women
Women’s Rights
• Causes: drop in # of children, more leisure time to
devote to religious & moral causes, & education
• “Cult of Domesticity”: emphasized women’s moral
role in home, idealized 4 “virtues” piety, purity,
domesticity, & submissiveness
• Women’s Rights: many inspired by other causes
especially antislavery
– Sarah & Angelina Grimke – Letter on the Condition of
Women and the Equality of the Sexes (1837)
– Lucretia Mott & Elizabeth Cady Stanton - began
campaign for women’s rights
• Seneca Falls Convention – NY 1848, 1st in
American history – issue “Declaration of
Sentiments”
• Stanton & Susan B. Anthony led campaign for
equal voting, legal, and property rights for
women.
• “Bloomers” feminism in fashion
Abolition Movement
• American Colonization Society (ACS) 1817 attempted to “recolonize” freed blacks to Africa – founded Monrovia, Liberia
in 1822 but only 12,000 left by 1860
• American Antislavery Society (1833) founded by William
Lloyd Garrison who began publication of The Liberator in
1831 – “immediatist” – later burned Constitution as a “pact
with the devil” (moderates were “gradualists)
• Liberty Party – goal to end slavery by political & legal means
ran James Birney for president in 1840 & 1844
• Black Abolitionists:
– Frederick Douglass – The North Star, Sojourner Truth
– Harriet Tubman (Underground Railroad)
– David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens” advocated immediate
rejection of slavery including using violence if necessary (blamed by
some for inspiring Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831