CHAPTER 8: A PUSH
FOR REFORM
The Big Picture: The religious revival
called the Second Great Awakening set
off one of the great periods of social
reform in American history. Inspired to
do good works, the reformers changed
the face of America.
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
The Temperance Movement
• 1820s and 1830s revival preachers
traveled across America calling
them back to Christianity
• Preachers like Charles Grandison
Finney 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 Reform Era
• 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
Horace Mann
• Before 1840, public schools (called
common schools) were poor and
poorly attended
• People began to push for better
public schools
• William McGuffey 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
•
•
•
•
Was Secretary of Education in MA
Started state-funded schools
Compulsory attendance
Created normal schools to train
teachers
• Other states followed his example,
and by 1860 60% of white children
attended public school nationwide
Reforming Prisons
• Dorethea Dix 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 mental health institutions to
house mentally ill citizens
Transcendentalism and Utopianism
• Transcendentalist movement: the
belief that knowledge is found by
observation, reason, intuition and
personal spiritual experiences
• Ralph Waldo Emerson- leader of the
movement; wrote that people should
be self reliant and trust their intuition
• Henry David Thoreau- tried selfreliance through living alone at
Walden Pond and living simply
• He also introduced the idea of civil
disobedience: 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 utopias)
• 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)
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
Irish and Germans
• Pushes- reasons immigrants
leave their home country
• 1845-1849: blight (disease)
destroys the potato crop in Ireland
• By 1850 more than a million die in
the Great Irish Famine
• 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)
•
Most common are poverty, disease,
war/persecution
• Pulls- reasons immigrants come to
a new country
•
Most common are freedom and
economic opportunity (jobs)
The Lives of Immigrants
Irish versus Germans
Nativism and the Know-Nothings
• 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)
• As more immigrants entered the
US nativism 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 Know-Nothings
• They later reformed as the
American Party that ran on an antiimmigration platform
• They had more than a million
members by 1850 and ran a
presidential candidate in 1856
Reform, Urbanization, and Industrialization
Urbanization and Reform
Industrialization and Reform
• Urbanization- rapid growth of
cities
• Many were immigrants looking for
work
• Many city dwellers lived in
tenements: 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: making thing in
factories
• From 1820 to 1850, the percentage
of factory workers rose from 5% to
30%
• Led to a rise in the urban working
class, 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
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 19 th century
• Legal: Women were not allowed to vote or hold office; 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
cult of domesticity)
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
• Oberlin College: 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’s movement
• Women believed that having more political power would help them
achieve the reforms they were working towards
• Convention was organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia
Mott 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 Declaration of
Sentiments; modeled after the Declaration of Independence, it
listed abused men perpetrated against women and demanded
equality and the right to vote (suffrage)
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
Life Style
• 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
• 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
The Underground Railroad
• 1776-1860: over 200 slave
uprisings, most short lived
• 1830: Nat Turner’s Rebellion- 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
• Underground Railroad: an
informal system of escape where
free blacks and sympathetic whites
would aid runaway slaves as they
traveled North
• Quakers, a religious group that
disagreed with slavery were very
active in the movement
• most famous ‘conductor’ was
Harriett Tubman- led hundreds to
freedom
The Abolition Movement
Roots and Leaders
Opposition
• 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
• William Lloyd Garrison: wanted
immediate emancipation (not
gradual); published the anti-slavery
paper The Liberator
• Grimke sisters: Southern white
women opposed to slavery
• Frederick Douglas: 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
• 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 proabolition (feared job competition)