Cover Slide
The American
Pageant
Chapter 15
The Ferment of
Reform and Culture,
1790-1860
Adapted from Ms. Susan M. Pojer
Horace Greeley HS Chappaqua, NY
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
The Rise of Popular Religion
In France, I had almost always seen
the spirit of religion and the spirit of
freedom pursuing courses diametrically
opposed to each other; but in America,
I found that they were intimately
united, and that they reigned in common
over the same country… Religion was the
foremost of the political institutions of
the United States.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1832
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Reviving Religion
• 1850: church attendance = regular
– 3/4 of population attended
• Many relied on Deism
– reason rather revelation
– Rejected original sin of man
– denied Christ’s divinity
– believed in a supreme being that created
universe with an order
– similar to a clockmaker
• Put everything in order and let it run
Reviving Religion
• Unitarian faith begins (New England)
– believed God existed in only 1 person
• not in the orthodox trinity;
– stressed goodness of human nature
– believed in free will
– salvation through good works
– pictured God as a loving father
– appealed to intellectuals with rationalism &
optimism
The Second Great
Awakening
“Spiritual Reform From Within”
[Religious Revivalism]
Social Reforms & Redefining the
Ideal of Equality
Temperance
Education
Abolitionism
Asylum &
Penal Reform
Women’s
Rights
The Benevolent Empire
• Definition: A broad ranging campaign
of moral & institutional reform inspired
by Evangelical Christian ideals &
created by middle class men & women.
In the 1820s “benevolence” became a
seminal concept in American spiritual
thinking during the Second Great
Awakening
Reviving Religion
• 2nd Great Awakening
– tidal wave of spiritual fervor
– Results?
•
•
•
•
•
prison reform
church reform
temperance movement (no alcohol)
women’s rights movement,
abolition of slavery movement in 1830s
– spread to the masses through huge “camp
meetings”
– East went to the West to Christianize Indians
Second Great Awakening
Revival Meeting
Reviving Religion
• 2nd Great Awakening (continued)
– Methodists & Baptists stressed
• personal conversion
• democracy in church affairs
• emotionalism
• Peter Cartwright
– best known of the “circuit riders” or traveling
preachers
• Charles Grandison Finney
– greatest revival preacher, led massive revivals in
Rochester, NY
Charles G. Finney
(1792 – 1895)
“soul-shaking”
conversion
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The ranges of tents, the
fires, reflecting light…; the
candles and lamps illuminating
the encampment; hundreds
moving to and fro…;the
preaching, praying, singing,
and shouting,… like the sound
of many waters, was enough
to swallow up all the powers
of contemplation.
Denominational Diversity
• The revival furthered fragmentation of
religious faiths
– New York, with its Puritans, preached
“hellfire” and was known as the “BurnedOver District”
– Millerites (Adventists) – predicted Christ to
return to earth on Oct 22, 1844
• When prophesy failed to materialize, movement
lost credibility.
The “Burned-Over” District
in Upstate New York
Denominational Diversity
• Second Great Awakening
– widened lines between classes the region (like
1st Great Awakening)
– conservatives were made up of:
• propertied Episcopalians, Presbyterians,
Congregationalists, Unitarians
– the less-learned of the South the West (frontier
areas)
• usually Methodists or Baptists
The Mormon Experience
• Joseph Smith
(founder) believed
God had singled
him out to receive
a special
revelation of divine
truth—The Book of
Mormon.
The Mormon Experience:
Joseph Smith
• Organized the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints
• Affirmed traditional patriarchal
authority
• Encouraged hard work, saving of
earnings, & entrepreneurship
• Started a church-directed community
intended to inspire moral perfection.
The Mormon Experience
• Mormons eventually settled in Nauvoo,
Illinois, & became the largest utopian
community in America
• Resentment toward the Mormons turned
to overt hostility when Smith refused to
abide by some Illinois laws
– He asked that Nauvoo be turned into a
separate federal territory
– Declared himself candidate for president.
The Mormon Experience
• Smith believed in polygamy—having
more than one wife at a time.
• 1844: Smith was murdered in jail after
being arrested for trying to create a
Mormon colony in Mexico.
The Mormon Experience
• Led by Brigham
Young, the Mormons
settled in the Great
Salt Lake Valley
– Planned agricultural
communities across
present- day Utah
(then part of Mexico)
Mob Violence against
Mormons (p. 349)
• In this lithograph, Martyrdom
of Joseph and Hiram Smith in
Carthage Jail, June 27, 1844,
the artist G.N. Fasel after
C.G. Crehen evokes
sympathy for the fallen
Mormon leader by depicting
an assailant as a masked
ruffian, prevented from
•
mutilating the corpse only by
the intervention of a
gentlemen. In fact, many
leading Illinois politicians and
businessmen feared Smith
and welcomed the mob’s
action.
The murders prompted
Brigham Young, the leader of
a large group of Mormons, to
move his followers into
territory claimed by Mexico,
where they hoped to escape
religious persecution
The Mormon Experience
• Mormons who did not support polygamy
remained in the U.S., (led by Smith’s
son) they formed the Reorganized
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints.
• The “Mormon War”
– Was a bloodless encounter
– President James Buchanan was afraid that
if he tried to eliminate polygamy it might set
a precedent that could be used to end
slavery
The Mormon Experience
• Mormons in Utah & the Midwest
succeeded because:
– They reinvigorated the patriarchal
family, endorsed private ownership of
property
– Accepted the entrepreneurial spirit of a
market economy
– They renounced polygamy & dropped
overt political agenda.
of their unorthodox
Map 12.2 The Mormon• Because
religious views & communal
Trek, 1830-1848 (p. 350) solidarity, Mormons faced
hostility first in New York &
then in Missouri & Illinois.
Following the murder of
Joseph Smith, Brigham
Young led the polygamist
faction of Mormons into
lands thinly populated by
Native American peoples.
From Omaha, the migrants
followed the path of the
Oregon Trail to Fort Bridger
and then struck off to the
Southwest, settling in
Mexican territory along the
Wasatch Mountains in the
basin of the Great Salt Lake
in present-day Utah.
Free School for a Free People
• Tax-supported, compulsory (mandatory),
primary schools was opposed (thought to be
a hand-out to paupers)
– Gradually, support rose
• uneducated “brats” might grow up to be rabbles with
voting rights
• Free public education, triumphed in 1828
– Part of the democratization of Jackson era
– Teachers = ill-taught & ill-trained
Free School for a Free People
• Horace Mann
– fought for better schools
– Known as the “Father of Public Education”
• School = too expensive for many
communities
– blacks were mostly left out from education
• Important educators = Noah Webster
(dictionary & Blueback Speller); William H.
McGuffey — McGuffey’s Readers)
Free school for a Free people
Religious Training  Secular Education
 MA
 always on the forefront of public
educational reform
* 1st state to establish tax support for
local public schools.
 By
1860 every state offered free public
education to whites.
* US had one of the highest literacy rates.
Horace Mann (1796-1859)
“Father of
American Education”
 children were clay in the
hands
of teachers and school officials
 children should be “molded”
into a state of perfection
 discouraged corporal
punishment
 established state teachertraining programs
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The McGuffey Eclectic
Readers
 Used religious parables to teach “American
values.”
 Teach middle class morality and respect for
order.
 Teach “3 Rs” + “Protestant ethic” (frugality,
hard work, sobriety)
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Women Educators
 Troy, NY Female Seminary
 curriculum: math, physics,
history, geography.
 train female teachers
Emma Willard
(1787-1870)
 1837  she established
Mt. Holyoke [So. Hadley, MA]
as the first college for women.
Mary Lyons
(1797-1849)
Higher Goals for Higher Learning
• 2nd Great Awakening led to the building of small
schools in South & West (mainly for pride)
– curriculum focused = Latin, Greek, Math, moral philosophy
• 1st state-supported university = the Univ. of North
Carolina, in 1795;
• Jefferson started University of Virginia next
– UVA was to be independent of religion or politics
• women were thought to be corrupted if too educated
– That’s why they were excluded
• Libraries, public lectures, and magazines
flourished
An Age of Reform
• reformers opposed:
– Tobacco
– Alcohol
– Profanity
• In favor of women’s rights
• Middle-class women = important in
motivating these reform movements
Penitentiary Reform
Dorothea Dix
(1802-1887)
1821  first
penitentiary founded
in Auburn, NY
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Dorothea Dix Asylum - 1849
Demon Rum—The “Old Deluder”
• drunkenness was widespread
• The American Temperance Society
formed at Boston (1826) –
– = “Cold Water Army” (children)
• signed pledges
• made pamphlets
• Wrote an anti-alcohol novel called 10 nights in
a Barroom and What I Saw There
Demon Rum—The “Old Deluder”
• Attack on the demon drink adopted 2
major lines attack
– stressed temperance (individual will to
resist)
– legislature-removed temptation - Neal S.
Dow becomes the “Father of Prohibition”
• sponsored Maine Law of 1851 - prohibited
making & sale of liquor (followed by others)
Annual Consumption of Alcohol
“The Drunkard’s Progress”
From the first glass to the grave, 1846
Women in Revolt
• 19C women stayed home
– No voting rights
– American women were generally better off than in
European women
• many women avoided marriage altogether
becoming “spinsters”
Early 19c Women
1. Unable to vote.
2. Legal status of a minor.
3. Single  could own her own
property.
4. Married  no control over her
property or her children.
5. Could not initiate divorce.
6. Couldn’t make wills, sign a
contract, or bring suit in court
without her husband’s permission.
“Separate Spheres” Concept
“Cult of Domesticity”
A woman’s “sphere” was in the home (it was a
refuge from the cruel world outside).
Her role was to “civilize” her husband and
family.
 An 1830s MA minister:
The power of woman is her dependence. A woman
who gives up that dependence on man to become a
reformer yields the power God has given her for
her protection, and her character becomes
unnatural!
Women’s Movement
• led by
– Lucretia Mott
– Susan B. Anthony (Suzy Bs)
– Elizabeth Candy Stanton
– Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (1st female medical
graduate)
– Margaret Fuller
– the Grimke sisters (anti-slavery advocates)
– Amelia Bloomer (semi-short skirts)
Angelina Grimké
Angelina Grimké
Born in the south to a prominent
slaveholding family, Angelina Grimké
moved to the north to distance herself
from an institution she hated. When she
discovered that northerners were no
more sympathetic about the plight of
slaves than southerners and would not
give abolition a free hearing, she chose
to do something about it. She toured the
northeast, speaking first to groups of
women and then to large mixed
audiences. She capped her tour by
becoming the first woman to address the
Massachusetts state legislature. Her
courage won new respect both for
abolitionists and for women. (Library of
Congress)
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and sons, 1848
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and sons,
1848
Elizabeth Cady Stanton posed in 1848
with two of her sons, Henry Jr., left, and
Neil. Stanton, one of the organizers of
the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights
Convention, traveled widely and agitated
for women's equality while raising five
children. (Collection of Rhoda Jenkins)
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Women’s Movement
• The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention
(1848)
– held in NY
– major landmark in women’s rights
– Declaration of Sentiments
• written in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence
• said that “all Men and Women are
created equal”
– demanded ballot for women
– launched modern women’s rights movement
• temporarily eclipsed by slavery w/ the Civil War
• = foundation for future
What It Would Be Like If Ladies Had Their
Own Way!
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Seneca Falls Declaration
Utopian Communities
Wilderness Utopias
• Robert Owen
– founded New Harmony, IN (1825)
– it failed in confusion
• Brook Farm – Massachusetts
– experiment (1841) where 20 intellectuals
committed to Transcendentalism (it lasted
until ‘46)
• Most major authors of the era spent some time
at Brook Farm
Robert Owen (1771-1858)
Utopian Socialist
“Village of Cooperation”
Original Plans for New Harmony, IN
New Harmony in 1832
New Harmony, IN
George Ripley (1802-1880)
Brook Farm
West Roxbury, MA
Wilderness Utopias
• Oneida Community —
– practiced free love, birth control, eugenic
selection of parents to produce superior
offspring
– survived ironically as a capitalistic venture,
selling baskets and then cutlery.
The Oneida Community
New York, 1848
 Millenarianism --> the
2nd
coming of Christ had
already occurred.
 Humans were no longer
obliged to follow the moral
rules of the past.
• all residents married
John Humphrey Noyes
(1811-1886)
to each other.
• carefully regulated
“free love.”
Wilderness Utopias
• Shakers – a communistic community
(led by Mother Ann Lee); they couldn’t
marry so they became extinct
Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784)
The Shakers
If you will take up your crosses against the
works of generations, and follow Christ in the
regeneration, God will cleanse you from all
unrighteousness.
Remember the cries of those who are in need
and trouble, that when you are in trouble, God
may hear your cries.
If you improve in one talent, God will give you
more.
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Shaker Village at Alfred, Maine, Joshua H. Bussell, 1845 (Plate XVI)
Shaker Village at Alfred, Maine, Joshua H. Bussell, 1845 (Plate XVI)
This map shows the layout of a Shaker Village. The Shakers, the largest of the
communal utopian experiments, reached their peak between 1820 and 1860. (Library
of Congress)
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Shaker Meeting
Shaker Hymn
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'Tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
'Till by turning, turning we come round right.
Shaker Simplicity & Utility
The Dawn of Scientific
Achievement
• Early Americans = interested in practical
science rather than pure science (i.e.,
Jefferson and his newly designed plow).
– Nathaniel Bowditch – studied practical
navigation and oceanography
– Matthew Maury - ocean winds, currents
The Dawn of Scientific
Achievement
• The most influential U.S. scientists…
– Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864) - pioneer in
chemistry geologist (taught in Yale)
– Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) - served at
Harvard, insisted on original research
– Asa Gray (1810-1888) Harvard, was the
Columbus of botany
– John Audubon (1785-1851) painted birds
with exact detail
The Dawn of Scientific
Achievement
• Medicine in the U.S. = primitive
– i.e., bleeding used for cure for smallpox, yellow
fever
• it killed many
– Life expectancy = low
– Self-prescribed patent medicines = common
• usually mostly alcohol & often harmful
– local surgeon = local barber or butcher
Artistic Achievements
• U.S. traditionally imitated European styles of art
– aristocratic subjects, dark portraits, stormy landscapes
• 1820-50 = Greek revival
– Gothic forms also gained popularity
• T. Jefferson = most able architect of his generation
– Monticello and University of Virginia
• Artists viewed as a wasters of time
– suffered from Puritan prejudice of art as sinful pride
• Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) - painted Washington
and competed with English artists
Artistic Achievements
• Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827)
– painted 60 portraits of Washington
• John Trumbull (1756-1843)
– captured the Revolutionary War in paint in dramatic
fashion
• Nationalism upsurge after War of 1812
– painters portrayed human landscapes & Romanticism
• Music:
– “darky” tunes became popular
– Stephen Foster wrote Old Folks at Home (AKA
Suwannee River, his most famous)
The Blossoming of a
National Literature
• Literature was imported or plagiarized from
England
• Americans poured literature into practical
outlets
– i.e. The Federalist Papers, Common Sense
(Paine), Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, Poor
Richard’s Almanack)
• literature = reborn after the War of
Independence & especially after War of 1812
The Blossoming of a
National Literature
• The Knickerbocker group in NY wrote the first
truly American literature
• Washington Irving (1783-1859)
– 1st U.S. internationally recognized writings, The
Sketch Book
• James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) –
– 1st US novelist, Leatherstocking Tales (which
included The Last of the Mohicans which was popular
in Europe)
• William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) –
– Thanatopsis, the 1st high quality poetry in U.S.
Trumpeters of
Transcendentalism
• Literature dawned in the 2nd quarter of 19C
• transcendentalist movement (~1830)
– clashed with John Locke (who argued
knowledge came from reason)
– Believed truth came not by observation alone,
from with inner light
– stressed individualism, self-reliance, & nonconformity
Trumpeters of Transcendentalism:
Ralph Waldo Emerson
• translated vague ideas into examples that
made sense to ordinary middle-class
Americans
– Believed that all nature was saturated with the
presence of God
– Criticized the new industrial society, predicting
that it would drain the nation’s spiritual energy
• ideal of his essay, Self Reliance, reflected
the spirit of the U.S.
• Influenced Henry David Thoreau
Trumpeters of
Transcendentalism: Henry
David Thoreau
• Henry David Thoreau
– condemned slavery and wrote Walden: Or
life in the Woods
– also wrote On the Duty of Civil
Disobedience, which was
idealistic in thought
• forerunner of Gandhi & then Martin
Luther King Jr.
• said it is not wrong to disobey a wrong law
Transcendentalist Intellectuals/Writers
Concord, MA
Ralph Waldo
Emerson
Nature
(1832)
Self-Reliance
(1841)
Henry David
Thoreau
Walden
(1854)
Resistance to Civil
Disobedience
(1849)
“The American
Scholar” (1837)
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Trumpeters of Transcendentalism:
Walt Whitman
• a teacher, journalist, & publicist
for the Democratic Party
• 1855: published Leaves of
Grass
– recorded his attempts to pass a
number of “invisible boundaries.”
• did not seek isolation but rather
perfect communion with others
• celebrated democracy as well
as himself arguing that a poet
could claim a profoundly
intimate, mystical relationship
with a mass audience.
American Lyceum
• A lecture circuit beginning in 1826
that sent ministers,
transcendentalists, and scientists all
across the north on speaking tours.
The Lyceum movement helped to
spread transcendentalism and
reform ideas in the 19th C
The Transcendentalist Agenda
 Give freedom to the slave.
 Give well-being to the poor and the
miserable.
 Give learning to the ignorant.
 Give health to the sick.
 Give peace and justice to society.
Glowing Literary Lights (not
associated with transcendentalism)
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
– wrote poems popular in Europe such as Evangeline
• John Greenleaf Whittier
– poems that cried against injustice, intolerance, inhumanity
• James Russell Lowell
– political satirist who wrote Biglow Papers
• Oliver Wendell Holmes
– The Last Leaf
Glowing Literary Lights (not
associated with transcendentalism)
• Women writers
– Louisa May Alcott
• with transcendentalism wrote Little Women
– Emily Dickinson
• wrote of the theme of nature in poems
• Southern literary figure
– William Gillmore Simms “the cooper of the south”; wrote many books of life
in frontier South during the Revolutionary War
Literary Individualists and
Dissenters
• Edgar Allan Poe
– wrote “The Raven” and many short stories
– invented modern detective novel and
“psychological thriller”
– was fascinated by the supernatural & reflected a
morbid sensibility (more prized by Europe)
Literary Individualists and
Dissenters
• reflections of Calvinist obsession
with original sin & struggle between
good & evil
– Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet
Letter (psychological effect of sin)
– Herman Melville - Moby Dick, and
allegory between good & evil told of a
whaling captain
Portrayers of the Past
• George Bancroft
– founded the naval academy
– published U.S. history book
– known as the “Father of American History”
• William H. Prescott
– published on the conquest of Mexico, Peru
• Francis Parkman
– published on the struggle between France & England in colonial
North America
• Historians were from New England (had the most books)
– an anti-South bias.