Lyman Beecher, celebrity minister, who inspired his eleven
children to take leading roles in bringing about the
millennium, but they did it on their own terms..
The Fires of Perfection
Prophecies of the millennium
—Revelations: 1,000 years of peace, triumph,
and it all begins here?
Benevolent associations—missionary zeal for reform: another sign
of the Millennium?
But “The Benevolent Empire” exempted Unitarians, lower class types, and
Catholics as agents of “Antichrist,”
and Beecher’s church burned to the ground
Charles Finney
Conversion experience—Charles Finney urged
people to get off the “anxious bench” and be reborn
Free will and perfectionism—no predestination, “Do it!” emotionally
Finney’s Rochester revival—transformation in six months
Revivalism’s appeal to the middle class—reassurance from boom
and bust economy; success a badge of moral character, so losing wealth fearsome
Workers and church membership—religion can help you get ahead
Evangelicalism bolsters individualism and equality—how?
Women’s Sphere
 Women’s changing lives—marriage more
“iffy,” but important, so church a refuge, a moral base
 “Sisterhood” and social networks
—recharge the emotional deficit from “domesticity”
 Domesticity in Europe—middle class “Victorianism”
 Decline in
Catharine Beecher,
and above, Queen
the birthrate—later
Victoria, the
marriages, birth control,
expensive educations make
parents think twice: assets
now monetary burdens
domestic ideal,
with one of her
children.
“Victorianism”
came from her
reign.
American Romanticism
Walt
Whitman
made big
bucks at
Xmas.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau,
James Fennimore Cooper,
and Thoreau’s cabin at
Walden Pond.
Romantic movement—emotion, intuition, individualism
Transcendentalist ideas—above everyday materialism
Emergence of American literature—self-confidence
Cooper and Wilderness—noble frontiersman
Thoreau and individualism—self-reliance
Melville and nature’s
destructive power—individualism’s greed
The Age of
Reform
 The Shakers and “Utopia”
—male/female God; celibate,
communal
 The Oneida Community
and Complex Marriage
—new role for women,
“scientific” combinations
John Humphrey
Noyes; women of
Oneida community
Carthage, Illinois,
when Joseph Smith
and his brother
Hiram were taken
out of jail and shot.
The desperado was
going to behead
Smith when he was
stopped.
 Movement to restore the ancient church

Joseph Smith
—Mormonism, a new Christianity: unity of church/state, strong (Mormonism), Robert
Owen (New Harmony)
work ethic, secret temple rituals, continuing divine revelation
and George Ripley
(Brook Farm).
City of Zion: Nauvoo—after Ohio, Missouri;
despised by neighbors: baptism of the dead,
eternal marriage, polygamy (plural marriage)
 Robert Owen
and New Harmony—failed secular utopias
 Brook Farm—ditto
Attempts to curtail drunkenness and all its results were seen as a
crusade; Dorothea Dix, advocate for the mentally ill, and Horace
Mann, campaigner for the common school; Below is Mary Lyon,
founder of the first college for women, Mount Holyoke.
Attack on drinking—four gallons/triple today’s: abstinence not just drunkenness
 Common school movement—state support
first wanted by workers? Overall, a slow movement
 Female education—fragile female minds?
Oberlin first coed college—End of Reading
 Dorothea Dix and the insane—reported
existing rampant abuses: more humane asylums
Lane Seminary
Abolitionism

William Lloyd Garrison, his
Free blacks oppose
newspaper The Liberator; he
was a founder of American
colonization—Lundy’s solution
Anti-Slavery Society.
in newspaper The Genius of Universal
Emancipation: soon opposed by Garrison
 Garrison’s immediatism—colonization
racist, unequal; slavery a moral not economic question
 Geography of abolitionism—New England
and religious New Englanders, but weak in cities and in business
 Lane Seminary rebellion—Under Weld’s leadership, abolition blows
up in revivalist Beecher’s face; students, blacks move to Oberlin, but still rowdy
Elijah P. Lovejoy, killed
protecting his abolitionist
printing press.
 Black abolitionists—most favored
peaceful change, but David Walker urged violence;

The warehouse where Elijah Parish
Lovejoy, a Presbyterian minister
Harriet Tubman (200) and U.R.R.
and editor of the Alton Observer,
Divisions among abolitionists—Beechers and 20 of his supporters were
split;
standing guard over a newly arrived
printing press from the Ohio AntiGarrison
Slavery Society. This was the fourth
goes
press that Lovejoy had received for
radical,
his paper. Three others already had
including
been destroyed by people like the
women’s
mob that would kill Lovejoy this
rights
night.
Frederick Douglass, young and old.
 Seneca Falls convention
—after getting dissed at anti-slavery meet,
“Declaration of Sentiments” like D of I
Sarah and
Angelina
Grimke
 Reform enters politics—effective
Philadelphia
abolitionists,
including
Lucretia Mott.
for action over persuasion, but resisted
 Struggle over prohibition—Maine
 Censorship of the mails
—anti-slavery pamphlets blocked
 Gag rule—no anti-slavery petitions
1836-1844
Elizabeth Cady
Stanton with child.