SOCIETY, CULTURE
AND REFORM
Unit 4 Ch.11 1820-1860
Antebellum period
THE SECOND GREAT
AWAKENING
• Revivalism in New York
• 1823-Charles G. Finney appealed to emotions and fear of
damnation
• All can be saved through faith and hard work
• Baptists and Methodists
• South-preachers would travel from town to town and hold
outdoor revival meetings
• By 1850; largest Protestant denominations in U.S.
THE SECOND GREAT
AWAKENING
• Millennialism
• Belief that world was about to end
• William Miller set the date as Oct. 21,1844
• Millerites would continue as Seventh-Day Adventist
• Mormons
• Founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith
• Persecution forced them to flee west
• When Smith was murdered, Brigham Young led the group to Utah
TRANSCENDENTALISTS
• Beliefs
• Questioned church doctrine, capitalism, materialism, and the
general pursuit of wealth
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• urged self-reliance, independent thinking, primacy of the spiritual
over the material; anti-slavery
• Henry David Thoreau
• Advocate of non-violent protest
• Walden- book about observing nature to discover truths about life
and the universe.
• Brook Farm
• 1841- George Ripley created the farm as an experiment in
transcendental living
• It attracted many of New England’s elite
COMMUNAL
EXPERIMENTS
• Shakers
• Common property; forbid marriage and sexual relations
• New Harmony
• Secular experiment of Robert Owen
• Hoped to create a utopia to solve the problems of industrial
society
• Oneida Community
• John Humphrey Noyes; dedicated to perfect social and
economic equality
• Fourier Phalanxes
• French socialist Charles Fourier advocated that people share
work and living arrangements
ARTS AND LITERATURE
• Painting
• Portrayed the lives of everyday people
• The Hudson River school emphasized nature
• Architecture
• Neoclassical: reflected ancient Greece with columned facades
• Literature
• Nationalistic though questioned intolerance and conformity; glorified
frontier life
• James Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Herman Melville
BOATMEN ON
THE
MISSOURI
George Caleb Bingham
EVENING IN
ARCADIA
Thomas Cole
THE HORSE
DEALERS
William S. Mount
SUNSET
Frederick Church
TEMPERANCE
• American Temperance Society (1826)
• Founded by Protestant ministers and other concerned with
high rates of alcohol consumption
• Washingtonians (1840)
• Argued that alcoholism was a disease
• German and Irish immigrants opposed temperance
• Factory owners and politicians supported temperance
because it could reduce crime and make workers more
productive
PUBLIC ASYLUMS
• 1820s and 1830s saw an increasing number of criminals,
emotionally disturbed persons, and paupers
• Mental hospitals
• Dorthea Dix
• Mentally ill began receiving professional treatment
• Schools for blind and deaf
• Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe
• Thomas Gallaudet
• Prisons
• Experimented with solitary confinement to reflect on sins
• Structure and discipline to bring about moral reform
PUBLIC EDUCATION
• Free common schools
• Motivated by fears of uneducated poor
• Horace Mann worked for improved schools, compulsory attendance,
a longer school year, and increased teacher preparation
• Moral education
• William Holmes McGuffrey created elementary textbooks that
extolled the virtues of hard work, punctuality, and sobriety
• Catholic schools founded in response to the “Protestant” education
• Higher education
• Small Protestant colleges were founded and some began to admit
women
CHANGING FAMILY
• City life changed the roles of men and women, especially
among the middle class
• Cult of domesticity
• Idealized view of women as moral leaders in the home and
educators of children
WOMEN’S RIGHTS
• Origins of movement
• Relegated to secondary roles in abolition movement and prohibited
from speaking at public conventions
• Seneca Falls Convention
• New York 1848
• Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Declaration of Sentiments about laws and customs that discriminate
against women
• Stanton and Susan B. Anthony campaign for equal voting, legal, and
property rights
ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT
• American Colonization Society (1817)
• Established a colony in Monrovia, Liberia for resettlement of former slaves
• American Antislavery Society (1831)
• William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator-advocated abolition by whatever
means
• Liberty party
• Political party created to end slavery through political and legal means
• James Birney ran as presidential candidate in 1840 &1844
• Black abolitionists
• Frederick Douglass,;freedom through non-violence; The North Star
• Violent abolition
• Virgina slave Nat Turner led a rebellion of 50 men against 4 plantations
• 60 whites were killed- Turner was captured and killed
OTHER REFORMS
• American Peace Society
• Dietary reforms
• Clothing reforms
• Pseudoscience- phrenology
SOUTHERN REACTION TO
REFORM
• Viewed reform as a conspiracy to destroy the Southern way of
life