Unit 4
Reforming American
Society
Think about society today – what elements do
you think are in need of change?
- Write down one institution or concept
that you would like to reform
- List 5 specific bullet points of actions you
would take to reform that institution
Religion Sparks Reform
DO YOU BELIEVE RELIGIOUS LEADERS SHOULD TAKE AN ACTIVE
ROLE IN BRINGING ABOUT SOCIETAL CHANGE? WHY OR WHY NOT?
The Second Great Awakening
- Broad religious movement that swept the U.S after 1790
and into the early 1800s
◦ Rejected predestination
◦ Emphasized individual responsibility for seeking one’s own
salvation
◦ Insisted that people can take action to improve themselves
AND society
◦ Democratic God – one who extends possibility of salvation
to ALL people
◦ Revivals – outdoor camp meetings
◦ large gatherings (up to 20,000)
◦ Very emotional/dramatic (shouts, crying, fainting, etc.)
◦ Can last 4-5 days
nd
2
Great Awakening
- Swept across America – early 1800s
- Especially strong in W. NY – burned over
district
- Tremendous growth in local church
congregations and in people who went to
church
- 1/15 Americans belonged to church in 1800.
1/6 in 1850.
Charles Grandison Finney
- Most famous preacher of the time
- Traveled by horse back throughout
countryside to deliver his message
- High emotion/high drama
- Converts duty = spread the word to others
(evangelism)
- Religious activism part of larger reform
movement
Charles Grandison Finney – act on your
own free will to give yourself to God
Religion and Reform – go hand and hand
African American Churches
- Democratic impulse of 2nd GA impacted slaves. Strong impulse that all people – black/white belong to God
- Northeast – many free African Americans worshipped in separate black churches
◦ AME – African Methodist Episcopal Church
◦ Black churches became – political, cultural, social center for the black community – provided schooling and other
services denied blacks
◦ Involved in abolitionist movement
- South – slaves were segregated by pew, but heard the same preachers, worshipped in the same church, sang the same
hymns as slave owners
- Slaves interpreted the Christian message as a promise of freedom and deliverance
◦ Focused on Old Testament stories of deliverance through great miracles
(Moses and the Israelites) – God will remember and deliver His people
Transcendentalism
- A philosophical and literary movement that
emphasized
◦
◦
◦
◦
◦
Living a simple life
Celebrating nature and the truth found there
Personal emotion and imagination
Valued the individual – listen to inner voice
Championed – optimism, freedom, self-reliance
◦ Ralph Waldo Emerson –
New England writer – leading
Transcendentalist
Transcendentalist –
Henry David Thoreau
- Friends with Emerson
- Abandoned community life – built a small
cabin on shore of Walden Pond near Concord,
MA – where he lived alone for 2 years
◦ Follow your inner voice
◦ Individual conscience – civil disobedience – don’t
obey laws you think are unjust. Don’t protest
with violence but peacefully refuse to obey
unjust laws
◦ Ex: Thoreau opposed slavery and war with MX –
he refused to pay taxes and went to jail
Replica of Thoreau’s small cabin and
statue of him on Walden Pond
What would a follower of
transcendentalism look like today?
- What would they do or not do?
- What would they have or not have?
Utopian Communities
- Religious groups inspired by spirit of optimism and social reform – tried to establish a utopia – or perfect place
-Tried to achieve self-sufficiency
-Most utopian communities only last a few years
-Ex – Brook Farm – near Boston – est by transcendentalist George Ripley. Goal – “to prepare a society of liberal,
intelligent, and cultivated persons whose relations with each other would permit a more wholesome and simple
life than can be led amidst the pressure of competitive institutions.”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne lived at Brook Farm for 6 months. He hoped to find solitude to write but found himself
working 8-10 hours a day in fields and barn. He left and considered the life “unnatural and unsuitable” for him.
Later wrote a novel – fictional account of communal life based on Brook Farm.
Other Utopian
Communities
ONEIDA COMMUNITY
- Religious commune founded by John Humphrey
Noyes in Oneida, NY
- Believed Jesus had already returned in 70 AD
- Perfectionism – free of sin in this life
- Free love – complex marriage – open relationships
- Children raised communally
SHAKERS
- Followed Ann Lee - founded in England – brought to NY
and New England in America
- Off shoot from Quakers – “Shaking Quakers”
- Shared goods with each other
- men and women equal
- refused to fight for any reason - pacifism
- vow of celibacy - not to marry or have children
- dependent on converts and adopting children to keep
communities going
School and Prison
Reform
Asylums and Prisons
– Dorothea Dix
- crusade to improve health care conditions for the mentally ill
- horrified to discover many jails housed mentally ill
- prisoners confined in cages, pens, chained, beaten with rods
- 1840s/1850s - persuaded several states to set up public
hospitals for the mentally ill
- Dix and subsequently prison reformers emphasized
◦ Idea of rehabilitation – help the person get better so they can
take a useful position in society
◦ Humane treatment
School Reform
- School
conditions varied across regions
- MA and VT only states with compulsory ed
- Classrooms not divided by grade
- Few kids go to school past 10
- 1830s – Movement for tax supported public
ed
- Horace Mann – 1st Secretary of the
Massachusetts Board of Education
◦ Established teacher training programs
◦ Instituted curriculum reform
◦ Doubled the money the state spent on schools
Abolitionist
Movement
American Colonization Society
- Founded 1816 – repatriate free blacks back to Africa
- 1821 Founded Liberia – Latin for land of the free – to be colonized by
free blacks
- Over the years the society assisted 13,000 to return to Liberia
- received some Congressional money and fund raising by selling
membership (supported by Henry Clay)
- Differing motives
◦ Free blacks cause “perpetual excitement” among slaves
◦ Blacks and whites cannot live together
◦ Some abolitionists – pure motive to return African Americans to
Africa/freedom
ABOLITION
- 1800s African Americans were increasingly
joined by whites in public criticism of slavery
- Call to outlaw slavery – “a great national sin”
- William Lloyd Garrison – radical abolitionist
◦ Started own newspaper The Liberator in 1831 – means to deliver
message calling for immediate emancipation
◦ Free the slaves with no payment to slaveholders
◦ Garrison attacked churches and government for failing to
condemn slavery
◦ Founded New England Anti Slavery Society in 1832
◦ Founded national American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833
David Walker
-
Walker was a free black man
- 1829 published Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the
World
- advised blacks to fight for freedom rather than wait
for slave owners to end slavery
- “the man who would not fight ought to be kept with all
of his children or family, in slavery, or in chains to be
butchered by his cruel enemies”
Frederick Douglass
- Born into slavery – taught to read and write by his
master’s wife
- Douglass realized education would be his “pathway
from slavery to freedom”
- In the North becomes the most famous abolitionist –
teams up with William Lloyd Garrison and becomes
famous lecturer in the antislavery movement
- Started his own anti-slavery newspaper, The North
Star
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hi4jIZg0cI
Nat Turner’s Rebellion - 1831
- Nat Turner
– slave in Southampton, VA
- Gifted preacher – believed God chose him to lead his
people out of bondage
- Turner judged eclipse of the sun - divine signal
- 80 followers – attacked 4 plantations and killed almost
60 whites before being captured by state and federal
troops
- Turner escaped and evaded capture for 6 weeks
- Tried and hanged
- White retaliation – kill up to 200 blacks (some
innocent) for connection to the uprising
Slavery in
th
19
century America
-25-30% of Southerners owned slaves
◦ Large Plantations = 20+ claves – about 12%
◦ Small Farm slave owners = few slaves – 15-18%
◦ How would their experiences be different? Pros and cons of each?
◦ 70-75% white Southerners – no slaves – poorer yeoman farmers
◦ Vast majority of slaves
◦ Live on large plantations – overseer
◦ By 1800s most native born
Only restriction – cannot kill a slave without good cause – wide variation of experience based on owner
Southern Slave Holders Dig In
- Slave owners use Bible to defend “the peculiar institution” – passages about servants obeying
masters
- Contrast image of a happy, well cared for slave (like member of the family, cared for in old age)
on a Southern plantation with a free Northern wage slave – worked long hours, in dark
factories, for mere pennies and still could barely survive
-Rebellions lead to tighter/stricter controls by whites – slave codes
◦ Blacks cannot preach or hold own religious meetings unless “respectable” slave holders are
present
◦ Free blacks cannot vote
◦ Free blacks cannot own guns, purchase alcohol, assemble in public or testify in court
◦ Blacks could not own property in some Southern cities
Women and Reform
What, if any, difficulties do you think women
face in the workplace or in other areas of
society today?
Cult of Domesticity
- Women in
early 1800s have few options – restrict
activities to marriage, home, and family
- Only 1 – 5 women had worked outside the home for
wages by 1850
- Earn half the pay of men for the same job
- Can’t vote
- Can’t sit on jury
- When she marries, her property becomes her
husband’s
Women were active in almost all of the reform
movements of the early 1800s
Seneca Falls Convention
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Lucretia Mott meet at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in
1840 – both offended that women not allowed
to participate
http://www.biography.com/people/elizabeth-cady-stanton-9492182#synopsis
- Vow to partner to advocate for rights of women
- 1848 – Seneca Falls Convention (NY) – planned and
run by women) – 300 men and women attend
Declaration of Sentiments
◦ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFOieRHRzh8
School House Rock – Women’s Suffrage Movement
Sojourner Truth
- Born
into slavery in NY, but became legally free
when slavery was abolished in NY in 1827.
- Deeply spiritual, Truth became a travelling
preacher and advocated for abolition, pacifism, and
equality
- Deep, thunderous voice and powerful speaker
(few people knew she was illiterate)
- for 40 years she travelled and spoke extensively for
reforms for women and blacks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRD-CTYFsek
Women in Reform
- Abolition – Sarah and Angelina Grimke – sisters and
daughters of wealthy,, prominent SC slaveholder. Left the
South, lived their adult lives in the North and advocated
against slavery. Angelina wrote An Appeal to Christian
Women of the South, where she called upon women to
“overthrow this horrible system of oppression and
cruelty.” Grimke sisters also ran a school for girls and
advocated for women’s education.
Sue Monk Kidd – “The Invention of Wings”
- Women and Health Care – Elizabeth Blackwell – first
woman to graduate from medical school. Opened NY
Infirmary for Women and Children. Advocated for better
health care for women
Women and Temperance
Prohibit consumption of alcohol
See drunkenness as serious problem
1825 – American Temperance Society founded
Later – almost 100 years later – 18th amendment
passed Prohibition
Work Place Reform
Industry expands in the North
◦ New jobs for unskilled workers
◦ Tedious, boring, repetitive work
◦ Long hours
◦ Low pay
◦ Many factories cramped, unhealthy,
dark, poorly ventilated
◦ Overseers often nailed windows shut
to keep humidity in (good for
threads)
Textiles New England –
Lowell Mills
Mill Girls – In 1828 women made up
9/10 of work force in the textile mills
and most were under 30
Live in crowded company owned
boarding houses
Women get lower wages than men
What would you do if you didn’t
like the conditions of your job and
felt like they were unfair?
Worker’s Strikes
Between 1836 and 1850 Lowell owners
tripled the number of spindles and
looms but only hired 50% more workers
to operate them. Then in 1834 Lowell
mills announced a 15% pay cut.
- 800 Lowell girls strike
- “Union is Power!” – girls refuse to
return to work until wages returned to
status
- Strike again in 1836 over an increase in
board charges
Owners prevail but sets precedent of
worker organization
-
National Trades’ Union – trade
union from specific trades
(carpenters, shoemakers,
weaving, etc.) begin to join
together into one large
organization (1834)
Strike Breakers
Owners often prevail in 1830s because
continual wave of immigrants willing to work
for low wages – fire strikers and hire
immigrants to work
-
- Most immigrants in 1830-1860 – German or
Irish – go to N. cities for factory jobs
- Irish potato famine – over 1 million left
Ireland for America
◦ Targets of prejudice
◦ Roman Catholic
◦ Poor
◦ American workers resented their strike
breaking
American Land
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqujfOYmM_A
Bruce Springsteen’s American Land
What is the narrative that the song tells? Do you
think it is an accurate story? Why or why not?
What countries did immigrants come from?
What type of work did they do?
Map – Irish Immigration
Settlement in America 1870