Culture and Reform
American History through 1865

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Two basic impulses:
– Optimistic faith in human nature
– Desire for order and control
New Types of Literature & Art
– Romanticism
– Nationalism
Attempts at reconnecting religion to social life
– 2nd Great Awakening
– Utopian societies/New religious movements
– New Social Movements
Constructing a place for women in American society
Underlying all change - Why this reform movement at this time?

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Or, Why this thing at this time?
Sudden rise in immigration - especially foreign born
Urbanization
Industrialization
So, what is being changed or reformed?
– Society
– Later – smaller groupings in society
» Communities
» Religion
» Prisons/Asylums
» Economic system
» Politics

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New communities &
New Religions
 Reforming or creating institutions
– Oneida - Shakers - Ann
Lee
– Schools
» Free public education
– Mormons – Joseph
Smith/Brigham Young
» Women’s institutions
– Socialists - New
Harmony - Robert Owen
– Asylums
– Orphanages
– Transcendentalism-
Brook Farm
– Hospitals
– Reservations
Reforming social ills – Jails
» Reform
– Prohibition/temperance
» Rehabilitation
– Public Health
» Punishment
Politics
» Pennsylvania System

 Art
 Literature
 Romanticism
 Naturalism
 Expressions of the reforming impulse

 Emerson and Transcendentalism
– Transcendentalist ideas
– Emergence of American literature
 The Clash between Nature and
Civilization
» Cooper and wilderness
» Thoreau and individualism
 Songs of the Self-Reliant and Darker
Loomings
» Whitman and democracy
» Melville and nature’s destructive power

Frederic Church

Thomas Cole
The Course of Empire:
The Pastoral State
Catskill Scenery

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Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper
Walt Whitman
Herman Melville
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Edgar Allan Poe
Beverly Tucker
William Alexander Caruthers
Augustus B. Longstreet
Mark Twain

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Transcendentalism
– creating a spiritual movement outside of church with the assistance of ministers
– transform society via the individual rather than via institutions
– Reason & Understanding
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,
Bronson Alcott
– Brook Farm
» George Ripley
» Destroyed by fire 1847
Charles Fourier
Amana

 The 2nd Great Awakening
– Charles Grandison Finney
– ideal of perfectionism
 Mormons
 Shakers
 Overlapping issues
– reform society
– social reform results in individual improvement
– individual improvement results in perfect societies

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Finney’s New Measures
– Charles Finney
– Conversion experience
The Philosophy of the New Revivals
– Free will and perfectionism
– Transformation of Protestantism
Religion and the Market Economy
» Finney’s Rochester revival
» Revivalism’s appeal to the middle class
» Workers and church membership
Revivalism and the Social Order
– The Significance of the Second Great Awakening
» Evangelicalism bolsters individualism and equality

The Rise of African American Churches
Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Library of Congress

Break then,
What are the sources of America’s reforms?
 What were the two basic impulses of reform and how did they appear to contradict each other?
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What were the new Types of Literature & Art appearing in America? How do they reflect a new idea of who we were?
What were the various attempts at reconnecting religion to social life? What other attempts at communal reform took place during this period?
Underlying all change - Why this reform movement at this time?
Going on - What was the woman’s and the African-
American’s (and other non-whites) place in American society?

 Women and Revivalism
– Women’s changing lives
 The Ideals of Domesticity
– “Sisterhood” and social networks
 The Middle-Class Family in
Transition
– Decline in the birthrate

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1830s & 1840s – period of rising anti-woman legislation in the north but increasing prowoman legislation in the south
Why this time?
– Industrialization
– Competition for jobs
– Immigration
Women reformers
– Grimké sisters
– Beecher sisters
– Lucretia Mott
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton
– Dorothea Dix

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Womens’ lives in the 1830 defined by:
– work, domesticity, education, religion, sisterhood
Cult of domesticity-
– leisured (middle) class women vs. working class women
– entangles women in changes in the work place/where work
& business are conducted
– moves women out of the public sphere and into the private
(women’s sphere)
– domestication of the family
Where could women exercise a public role?
– Church
– school/children’s institutions
– caring for the poor, sick, insane, imprisoned

 Troy Female Seminary, 1821
 Hartford Female Seminary, 1823
 World Anti-Slavery Conference, London,
1840
 Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
– Declaration of Sentiments

 The Beginnings of the Abolitionist Movement
– Free blacks oppose colonization
– Garrison’s immediatism
 The Spread of Abolitionism
» Geography of abolitionism
» Lane Seminary rebellion
» Black abolitionists
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Opponents and Divisions
» Divisions among abolitionists
Abolitionism
– The Schism of 1840

 Abolitionists
– William Lloyd Garrison - radical
» The Liberator, 1831
– Theodore Dwight Weld - moderate
» American Anti-Slavery Society, 1833
 Escaped slaves
– Frederick Douglass
– Harriet Tubman
 Converts
– Sarah Grimké, Angelina Grimké, James Birney

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– ACS – American Colonization Society
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– Benjamin Lundy – Genius of Universal
Emancipation
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– William Lloyd Garrison & The Liberator
– American Antislavery Society (AAS)
– Theodore Dwight Weld

 David Walker, Boston, 1829 “Walker’s
Appeal . . .to the Colored Citizens”
– “kill or be killed”
 Frederick Douglass
– Newspaper – North Star
– Biography – Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass

 Dangerous & threatening
 Increasing violence against abolitionists
– Garrison, Boston, MA, 1835
– Elijah Lovejoy, Alton, IL, 1837
 Extreme response to militant action?

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Growing radicalism of Garrison
– Split AAS in 1840
– 1843 – called for disunion from south over slavery
– Embracing violence
Moderate position
– “moral suasion”
– Amistad case
Rise of the Liberty Party – 1840
– James G. Birney
– Free soil not abolition
Publications
– American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand
Witnesses (1839)
– Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851-52)

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Leaders - but they couldn’t speak in public
– Lucretia Mott (abolition then women’s rights)
Liaisons to other movements
– Sarah Grimké, Angelina Grimké (abolition, education, and women’s rights)
Created new movements
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone , Seneca Falls convention (1848)
Exceptions - when women were caring for others
– Dorthea Dix

 Elijah Lovejoy - first man killed for abolition
 gag law
 Liberty Party - 1840

 Women and the Right to Vote
“Why shall [women] be left only the poor resource of petition? For even petitions, when they are from women, without the elective franchise to give them backbone, are but of little consequence.”
-The Lily

 The Maine Law
– Struggle over prohibition
 Abolitionism and the Party System
» Censorship of the mails
» Gag rule

 Lyman Beecher and the Lane Seminary
 Romanticism
 Political reform
 Making the private public