NOTES-Chapter 8 Section 1: New Movements in America
Main Idea: A revival in religion in the early 1800s helped lead to an era of reform.
Religion Sparks Reform
The Second Great Awakening
 1820s and 1830s revival preachers traveled across America calling them back to
Christianity
 Preachers like ______________________________________________ had thousands
embrace his message
 By 1850, twice as many Americans attended church than when Washington was
president
 People urged to live well and make society better in service to God
 Called the __________________________
The Temperance Movement
 Movement to reduce to use of alcoholic beverages (temperance means moderation)
 Reformers wrote books, plays, and songs about the evils of alcohol
 Claimed it led to poverty, sickness, abuse and the break-up of families
 12 states outlaw alcohol
Reforming Education
Common Schools & McGuffey
 Before 1840, public schools (called common schools) were poor and poorly attended
 People began to push for better public schools
 ___________________________________ wrote a series of books designed to teach
students both reading skills and morals
 Over 100 million books were sold in the middle and late 1800s
Horace Mann
 Was Secretary of Education in MA
 Started state-funded schools
 Compulsory attendance
 Created __________________________ to train teachers
 Other states followed his example, and by 1860 60% of white children attended public
school nation-wide
Reforming Prisons
 _____________________________ campaigned for humane treatment of both
prisoners and the mentally ill
 Mentally ill were often put in crowded, unsanitary prisons and were often abused
 Starting in MA, states began building ________________________________________
to house mentally ill citizens
Transcendentalism and Utopianism
 ___________________________________ he belief that knowledge is found by
observation, reason, intuition and personal spiritual experiences
 _______________________________________ leader of the movement; wrote that
people should be self-reliant and trust their intuition
 _______________________________________ tried self-reliance through living alone
at Walden Pond and living simply
 He also introduced the idea of ______________________________ disobeying the
government when you think they are wrong (went to prison for not paying taxes that
would help fight a war he disagreed with)
 Ideas are later adopted by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
 Some reformers wanted to create brand-new, perfect societies (called _____________)
 90 communities were founded in the early 1800s
 Most famous were New Harmony and Brook Farm
 Most successful were the Shakers
 All were small and short lived (conflict among members)
NOTES-Chapter 8 section 2: Early Immigration and Urban Reform
Main Idea: A wave of Irish and German immigrants entered the United States during a period of urbanization
and reform.
Irish and German Immigrants
Push and Pull Factors
 Pushes- reasons immigrants leave their home country
 Most common are poverty, disease, war/persecution
 Pulls- reasons immigrants come to a new country
 Most common are freedom and economic opportunity (jobs)
Irish and Germans
 1845-1849: blight (disease) destroys the potato crop in Ireland
 By 1850 more than a million die in the _________________________________________________
 More than 2 million leave Ireland, 1.5 million come to the US
 Germans came to the US to escape poverty, religious persecution, and unrest (about 1.5 million came
to the US)
The Lives of Immigrants
Irish versus Germans
 Irish faced the most hostility
 They were resented for their numbers, their poverty, and their religion (Catholic)
 They also tended to stay together within cities
 By contrast, Germans tended to be Protestant and were middle class
 They tended to spread out across the country (settled in the Midwest)
Nativism and the Know-Nothings
 As more immigrants entered the US _________________ increased (fear/hostility towards immigrants)
 Many viewed them as a threat to their way of life
 Anti-immigrant sentiment led to the creation of the _________________________________
 They later reformed as the American Party that ran on an anti-immigration platform
 They had more than a million members by 1850 and ran a presidential candidate in 1856
Reform, Urbanization, and Industrialization
Urbanization and Reform
 ________________________- rapid growth of cities
 Many were immigrants looking for work
 Many city dwellers lived in _____________________ poorly constructed, crowded apartment buildings
 Tenements had problems with sanitation, disease, and crime
 Some reformers tried to help tenement dwellers, but not much progress was made
Industrialization and Reform
 __________________________ making thing in factories
 From 1820 to 1850, the percentage of factory workers rose from 5% to 30%
 Led to a rise in the _________________________________, most of which were poor and uneducated
 Workers began to organize in groups to demand better pay and working conditions, most of these
efforts failed
NOTES-Chapter 8 Section 3: Women and Reform
Main Idea: After leading reform movements to help others, some American women began to work on
behalf of themselves.
Limits on Women’s Lives
 Women had legal, economic, and cultural limits in the 19th century
 Legal: Women were not allowed to _____________________________; the only legal contract
they could enter into was marriage, but they were not usually allowed to divorce and the
husband gained custody of the children if they did divorce
 Economic: not allowed to own property; many women worked but they received low wages
that technically belonged to their husband
 Cultural: women were pressured to remain in the home taking care of children and household
tasks; books and magazines praised women who stayed at home and obeyed their husbands
(called the _____________________________________)
Women in the Reform Era
 Despite being excluded from most of public life, women did play an active role in the reform
movement (saw it as an act of ‘mothering’ society)
 Middle class women began forming reform societies in the 1830s and 1840s to promote social
reforms like moral improvement and aid to the poor
 Women like Catherine Beecher worked for better educational opportunities for boys and girls
 ________________________________: 1st American college to admit women (1833); 1837
Mount Holyoke: 1st women’s college
 women also work in labor movements to win better pay and working conditions in factories
 Women worked passionately in temperance reform because of the effects of alcohol use on
families
The Seneca Falls Convention
 Held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY; marks the beginning of the ____________________________
 Women believed that having more political power would help them achieve the reforms they
were working towards
 Convention was organized by _____________________________________________________
after they were not allowed to speak at an anti-slavery convention and were segregated from
the men
 300 attended the meeting and drafted the __________________________________________;
modeled after the Declaration of Independence, it listed abused men perpetrated against
women and demanded __________________________________________________________
NOTES-Chapter 8 Section 4: Fighting against Slavery
Main Idea: The movement to end slavery dominated the Reform Era.
The Lives of Enslaved African Americans
Work
 Slavery existed in every American colony and in the North until the 1840s
 1860: 4 million slaves in the South
 Most lived on farms and plantations cultivating cotton
 Slaves in cities were usually hired out as day laborers or in factories; the money went to
the owner
Life Style
 Worked from sun-up to sun-down
 Poorly fed, clothed, and sheltered
 Abuse was common and families were frequently split apart
 Major source of hope lay in their Christian religion and music
 Focused on the Exodus story
The Antislavery Movement in the South
Revolts
 1776-1860: over 200 slave uprisings, most short lived
 1830: ______________________________________- most deadliest slave revolt in US
history (killed dozens of white people before being captured
 White people in the Virginia community killed 100 slaves unrelated to the revolt to
prevent future actions
 About 40,000 were able to escape to freedom in the North before 1860
The Underground Railroad
 ______________________________________: an informal system of escape where free
blacks and sympathetic whites would aid runaway slaves as they traveled North
 ___________________, a religious group that disagreed with slavery were very active in
the movement
 most famous ‘conductor’ was _________________________________- led hundreds to
freedom
The Abolition Movement
Roots and Leaders
 Second Great Awakening led many Northerners to believe that slavery was evil and
should be abolished (ended)
 This was the LARGEST reform movement of the reform era
 ________________________________________ wanted immediate emancipation (not
gradual); published the anti-slavery paper __________________________
 ______________________________ Southern white women opposed to slavery
 ______________________________________ run-away slave who spoke against
slavery; wrote an autobiography to answer critics who claimed he was too well
educated and well-spoken to have been a slave
Opposition
 Southerners, even those who did not own slaves, saw the abolition movement as an
attack on Southern livelihood (money) and way of life
 Some tried to use the Bible to justify slavery
 Most claimed it was a economic necessity
 By 1860 cotton comprised 55% of all US exports and Northern factories were dependent
upon cheap Southern cotton
 Not all Northerners were pro-abolition (feared job competition)