Antebellum
Revivalism
&
Reform
BY: Susan M. Pojer
Pamela K. Montague
The Rise of Popular Religion
In France, I had almost always seen
the spirit of religion and the spirit of
freedom pursuing courses diametrically
opposed to each other; but in America,
I found that they were intimately
united, and that they reigned in common
over the same country… Religion was the
foremost of the political institutions of
the United States.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1832
The Second Great
Awakening
“Spiritual Reform From Within”
[Religious Revivalism]
Social Reforms & Redefining the
Ideal of Equality
Temperance
Education
Abolitionism
Asylum &
Penal Reform
Women’s
Rights
“The Pursuit
of Perfection”
In
Antebellum America
How did the transportation revolution and
the market revolution lead to this desire?
“The Benevolent Empire”:
1825 - 1846
Where did the movement begin?
The “Burned-Over” District
in Upstate New York
Many NE Puritans had settled there
Second Great Awakening
Revival Meeting
Spread to the masses on the frontier by multi-day camp meetings
Charles G. Finney
(1792 – 1895)
The ranges of tents, the fires,
reflecting light…; the candles
and lamps illuminating the
encampment; hundreds moving
to and fro…;the preaching,
praying, singing, and shouting,…
like the sound of many waters,
was enough to swallow up all the
powers of contemplation.
“soul-shaking”
conversion
2nd Great Awakening led to the
feminization of religion - women make
up majority of Church membership and
move into charity work in the reform
movements it sparked.
The Mormons
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)
 1823  Golden
Tablets
 1830  Book of
Mormon
 1844  Murdered in
Carthage, IL
Why?
Joseph Smith
(1805-1844)
Violence Against Mormons
Why were the Mormons persecuted?
The Mormon “Trek”
Why Utah?
The Mormons
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)
 Deseret
community
 Salt Lake City,
Utah
 Frontier
theocracy
 Later flouted
what laws in UT?
Brigham Young
(1801-1877)
Temperance Movement
1826 - American Temperance Society
“Demon Rum”!
Frances Willard
Lyman Beecher & the
Beecher Family
Annual Consumption of
Alcohol
“The Drunkard’s Progress”
From the first glass to the grave, 1846
What social problems were attributed to alcohol?
NEAL DOW
• Father of Prohibition
• MAINE LAW, 1851
– First U.S. Law to ban the manufacture and sale
of alcohol.
• Temperance is the most widely supported,
least sectional and most successful of all
the reform movements
• What groups will be most resistant?
Early 19th Century Women –
Rights?
1. Unable to vote.
2. Legal status of a minor.
3. Single  could own her own
property.
4. Married  no control over her
property or her children.
5. Could not initiate divorce.
6. Couldn’t make wills, sign a
contract, or bring suit in court
without her husband’s permission.
“Separate Spheres” Concept
“Cult of Domesticity”
 A woman’s “sphere” was in the home (to be a
refuge from the cruel world outside).
 Her role was to “civilize” her husband and family
– had great moral power.
 Seen as physically/emotionally weak….but also as
artistic and refined.
 Republican Motherhood idea still alive.
 An 1830s MA minister:
The power of woman is her dependence. A woman who gives up
that dependence on man to become a reformer yields the power
God has given her for her protection, and her character
becomes unnatural!
What It Would Be Like If
Ladies Had Their Own Way!
Cult of Domesticity = Slavery
The 2nd Great Awakening inspired women
to improve society – many began with
abolitionism.
Lucy Stone
Angelina & Sarah Grimke
 Southern Abolitionists
R2-9
 American Women’s
Suffrage Assoc.
 edited Woman’s Journal
Women’s Rights
1840  split in the abolitionist movement
over women’s role in it.
London  World Anti-Slavery Convention
Susan B. Anthony
Lucretia Mott,
a Quaker
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
1848  Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments
Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
What did the Declaration of Sentiments call for?
Who attended?
Educational Reform
Religious Training
Secular Education
• More people have right to vote, so more need for
education
• Also, many immigrants to be Americanized!
• MA – 1st state to establish free public education –
tax supported
• However, many communities unwilling to tax to raise
the $ needed
– Lots of private, religious schools - did not want
to pay taxes to support public ones
• By 1850 – free public ed. in most of North; even
some high schools
• Better teacher training
• Mostly women as teachers – CATHERINE BEECHER
– didn’t have to pay them as much as men
Horace Mann (1796-1859)
“Father of
American Education”
Children were clay in the hands
of teachers and school officials
Children should be “molded”
into a state of perfection
Discouraged corporal punishment
Established state teachertraining schools (“normal schools”)
Noah
Webster
• “American
Spelling Book”
• Encouraged
Americans to
respect their own
literature
• Later, dictionaries
The McGuffey
Eclectic
Readers
 Used religious parables to teach “American values.”
 Teach middle class morality and respect for order.
 Teach “3 Rs” + “Protestant ethic” (frugality,
hard work, sobriety)
Women Educators
 Troy, NY Female Seminary
 Curriculum: math, physics,
history, geography.
 train female teachers
Emma Willard
(1787-1870)
 1837 - she established
Mt. Holyoke [So. Hadley, MA]
as the first college for women.
Mary Lyons
(1797-1849)
Penitentiary Reform
Dorothea Dix
(1802-1887)
• Prisons are an American
creation
• Reformers hope to help
prisoners “repent” & learn to
lead normal lives, reflect on
sins, become better citizens
• Horrid conditions existed;
sane & insane together
• DOROTHEA DIX gets prison
reforms & gets insane out of
prisons; mental asylums
established
• Will be appointed as
Superintendent of Nurses
for Union forces in Civil War
Dorothea Dix Asylum 1849
Two Types of Prisons
Develop:
• Auburn System
• First in 1821,
Auburn, NY
• Congregate system
• Congregate work
by day BUT in
total silence
• Solitary at night
• Pennsylvania System
• Individual system
• Isolates inmate for
entire stay
• Blindfolded on
admittance, etc.
• Overcrowding a
problem
Utopian Communities
Robert Owen (1771-1858)
Utopian Socialist
New Harmony - “Village of Cooperation”
To be a model of the "New Moral World"
But will dissolve in less than 3 years.
Original Plans for New Harmony,
IN
Believed an individual's character was shaped
by his or her environment, therefore, by
controlling the environment, superior
character could be developed.
New Harmony,
IN
First American kindergarten
and free public school
George Ripley (1802-1880)
BROOK FARM
West Roxbury, MA 1841
“Plain Living & High Thinking”
Transcendentalists
Nathaniel Hawthorne was
a resident; eventually it
burns down
The Oneida Community
New York, 1848
 Millenarianism --> the 2nd
coming of Christ had
already occurred.
 Humans were no longer
obliged to follow the moral
rules of the past.
• all residents married to each other.
• carefully regulated free love.”
John Humphrey Noyes
(1811-1886)
 Silver plate, steel traps
The Oneida Community
Birth control, eugenic
selection of parents,
communal care of children
Noyes had to flee to Canada
to escape prosecution for
adultery
Survive for 30 years
(silverware!) and then change
in 1880 – no more
communism / became
monogamous
Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784)
The Shakers
 “If you will take up your crosses against the works
of generations, and follow Christ in the
regeneration, God will cleanse you from all
unrighteousness.
 Remember the cries of those who are in need and
trouble, that when you are in trouble, God may hear
your cries.
 If you improve in one talent, God will give you more.”
 God is dual sided – Christ is male side / Mother Ann
Lee is female side
Shaker Meeting
Religious fervor is sign of inspiration from God!
Shaker Beliefs
• Men / women equal spiritually
• Celibacy
– So how did they survive so
long?
Shaker Hymn
• Longest lasting sect – until
1940…….
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'Tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
'Till by turning, turning we come round right.
Shaker Simplicity & Utility
Artistic
Achievements
Gilbert Stuart, an
AMERICAN painter
Landsdowne Portrait
George Washington,
1796
Portrait of
George Washington, 1796
Charles Wilson Peale
ROMANTICISM IN ART
AND LITERATURE
• Hudson River School: Romantic, grandiose AMERICAN landscapes
• Thomas Cole, The Oxbow - 1836
Transcendentalism
(European Romanticism)
 Liberation from understanding and
the cultivation of reasoning.”
Truth “transcends” the senses.
 “Transcend” the limits of intellect
and allow the emotions, the SOUL,
to create an original relationship
with the Universe – man is divine.
Individualism in religion!
Transcendentalist Thinking
§ Commitment to self-reliance, self-culture,
self-discipline.
§ They instinctively rejected all secular
authority and the authority of organized
churches and the Scriptures, of law, or any
conventional wisdom
§ The role of the reformer was to restore man
to the divinity God had given them.
§ So…. man can’t be held in slavery or have his
mind corrupted by superstition or ignorance!
Transcendentalist
Intellectuals/Writers
Concord, MA
Ralph Waldo
Emerson
Nature
(1832)
Self-Reliance
(1841)
“The American
Scholar” (1837)
Henry David
Thoreau
Walden
(1854)
Essay on Civil
Disobedience
(1849)
The Transcendentalist Agenda
§ Give freedom to the slave.
§ Give well-being to the poor and the
miserable.
§ Give learning to the ignorant.
§ Give health to the sick.
§ Give peace and justice to society.
A Transcendentalist Critic:
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
 Their pursuit of the ideal led to
a distorted view of human
nature and possibilities:
* The Blithedale Romance
 One should accept the world as
an imperfect place:
* Scarlet Letter
* House of the Seven
Gables
Hawthorne also held minor political
offices under Van Buren, Polk, Pierce
Overview of Period Authors:
• James Fenimore
Cooper
– American themes
– Last of the Mohicans
• Walt Whitman
– Rambling, free-verse
poetry
– Leaves of Grass
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
– Evolved the essay
• Henry David Thoreau
– Activity in nature
– Walden
• Pessimists - a dark view
of human nature:
• Edgar Allen Poe
– Short story
– Terror, darkness
– The Raven
• Herman Melville
– Human psychology &
struggles
– Moby Dick
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
– Also focused on human
struggles
– Fascination with New
England Puritans
– The Scarlett Letter
The End of the Age of Reform?
• Caused by westward territorial
expansion which brings what issue
to the forefront and takes over
politics?
• SLAVERY!