By Neil Hammond
Millbrook High School

• The economic transformation had two facets:
– the increase in production known as the
Industrial Revolution
– the expansion of commerce known as the Market
Revolution.
• Water and steam were crucial ingredients in both revolutions—driving factory machinery, carrying goods to market in canals and rivers, and propelling steamboats and railroad engines.

• Part of this is your essay…
• Benevolent Empire

• A broad-ranging campaign of moral and institutional reforms inspired by
Evangelical Christian ideals and endorsed by upper-middle-class men and women in the 1820s.
• Goal = “to restore the moral government of
God” (Lyman Beecher)
– By moral persuasion
– Or by law

• The Benevolent Empire targeted old evils: drunkenness, adultery, prostitution and crime
• But NEW methods of combating them by establishing various societies (e.g. Prison
Discipline Society, American Society for
Promotion of temperance)
– Institutionalize charity
– Combat evil

• First, they campaigned for temperance and “regular habits”
• Second, the Second, they devised new institutions to help those in need and to control those they considered threats to society.
– Reformers provided homes of refuge for abandoned children and asylums for insane individuals, who previously had been confined by their families in attics and cellars. They campaigned to end corporal punishment and to rehabilitate criminals in new penitentiaries designed to modify criminal behavior.
• Women played a huge role in these societies

• 1828 L. Beecher and other ministers campaigned for Americans to observe the sabbath… General Union for Promoting the
Observance of the Christian Sabbath. General
Union chapters—replete with women's auxiliaries—sprang up from Maine to the Ohio
River Valley
– But working class men who worked six days a week refused to spend the seventh praying
– Erie Canal shipping companies demanded that lock keepers worked on Sundays
• Stuff like this LIMITED the appeal of the
Benevolent Empire

• This evangelical minister had success with revivals along the Erie Canal. He appealed to all classes (although he emphasized middle class values) with his message that anybody could change and choose salvation
• In Rochester, wealthy merchants and manufacturers agreed to give up alcohol, attend church and encourage their employees to do the same.

• Finney's efforts to create a harmonious community of morally disciplined Christians were not completely successful.
– Skilled workers who belonged to strong craft organizations—boot makers, carpenters, stonemasons, and boatbuilders—argued that they needed higher wages and schools more urgently than sermons and prayers.
– Poor people often ignored Finney's revival, as did the
Irish Catholic immigrants who had recently begun arriving in Rochester and other northeastern cities, bringing with them a hatred of Protestants as both religious heretics and political oppressors.

nd
• Ignoring this resistance, revivalists from New
England to the Midwest copied Finney's evangelical message and techniques. In New
York City, wealthy silk merchants Arthur and
Lewis Tappan founded a magazine, The
Christian Evangelist, which promoted Finney's ideas. The revivals swept through
Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Tennessee, and
Indiana, where, a convert reported, “you could not go upon the street and hear any conversation, except upon religion.” The success of the revivals “has been so general and thorough,” concluded a Presbyterian general assembly, “that the whole customs of society have changed.”

• 1832 the Temperance Movement was taken over by
Evangelicals
• Self-discipline only part of it…people had to experience a religious conversion. This evangelical message fostered individual enterprise and moral discipline not only among middle-class Americans but also among many wage earners. Thus, religion and the ideology of social mobility served as powerful cement that held society together in the face of the divisions created by industrialization, the market economy, and increasing cultural diversity.
– Throughout America, the consumption of spirits fell dramatically, from an average of five gallons per person in 1830 to two gallons in 1845.

• Vast wave of immigrants from
1840 to 1860
– 2m Irish; 1.5 Germans; 750,000
Brits
– Different prosperity levels, destinations
• Poorest were the Irish
– They headed to the cities of NE and
NY
– men took low-paying jobs as factory hands, construction workers, and canal diggers, while the women took positions as domestic servants in middle- and upper-class homes.
Irish families crowded into cheap tenement buildings with primitive sanitation systems and were the first to die when disease struck.

• In times of hardship and sorrow, immigrants turned to their churches. Many Germans and virtually all the Irish were Catholics, and they fueled the growth of the Catholic Church. In
1840, there were sixteen Catholic dioceses and seven hundred churches in the United States; by 1860, there were forty-five dioceses and twenty-five hundred churches. Under the guidance of their priests and bishops, Catholics built an impressive network of institutions— charitable societies, orphanages, militia companies, parochial schools, and political organizations—that helped them maintain both their religion and their German or Irish identity.

• The 2 nd Great Awakening’s impact meant that Catholic immigrants faced opposition/resentment
• In 1834, Morse published Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, which warned of a
Catholic threat to American republican institutions.
Morse believed that Catholic immigrants would obey the dictates of Pope Gregory XVI, who in an encyclical in 1832 had condemned liberty of conscience, freedom of publication, and the separation of church and state, and had urged Catholics to repudiate republicanism and acknowledge the “submission due to princes.”
Republican-minded Protestants of many denominations shared Morse's fears, and Foreign Conspiracy became their textbook.

• Bad economic times saw violence against
Catholics? Why?
– Religious divisions hurt the nascent labor union movement
• Other Protestants organized nativist clubs, which called for limits on immigration, the restriction of public office to native-born citizens, and the exclusive use of the Protestant version of the
Bible in public schools. Benevolent-minded
Protestant reformers supported the anti-Catholic movement for reasons of public policy. As crusaders for public education, they opposed the diversion of tax resources to Catholic schools; as advocates of a civilized society, they condemned the rowdyism of drunken Irish men.

• In many northeastern cities, religious and cultural conflicts led to violence.
– 1834 Charlestown, Massachusetts…a convent burned down
– 1844 Philadelphia, violence erupted in 1844, when the Catholic bishop persuaded public-school officials to use both Catholic and Protestant versions of the
Bible.
– Anti-Irish rioting incited by the city's nativist clubs lasted for two months and escalated into open warfare between Protestants and the Pennsylvania militia.
• Even as economic revolution brought prosperity to many Americans and attracted millions of immigrants, it divided the society along the lines of class, ethnicity, and religion.