INSPIRATIONS

Second Great Awakening (1790-1850)

• Revivalist preachers said that God created man as a "free moral agent" -- sinners could not only reform themselves but could also remake the world.

• Charles Grandison Finney

• Minister who advocated Christian Perfectionism

• Promoted social reform such as abolition, equal education for women and African Americans

• Taught at Oberlin College of Ohio

• Appealed to women

• Sparked a wave of social activism.

Unitarians

• Denied the trinity (Father/Son/Holy Spirit) - instead, Jesus was a man

• Didn't follow emotionalism of revivals

• Interpreted the Bible broadly, not literally.

• Reform

• Like evangelicals, they were committed to bettering the world

• Famous Unitarians

• Presidents: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, JQ Adams

• Reformers: Dorothea Dix, Horace Mann

• Transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson (former Unitarian priest) George Ripley

Romanticism

• Began in Europe as reaction against Enlightenment (in U.S. 1820-1860)

• Emphasized emotion and intuition as sources of truth.

• Glorified unlimited potential of the individual

• Reform:

• Glorified humanitarianism

• And sympathized with the oppressed.

PERFECTIONISM

• Belief that both individuals and society are capable of improvement.

AREAS OF REFORM

• Abolition (slavery)

• Temperance/Prohibition (alcohol)

• Prison Reform

• School reform

• Prostitution

• Women's rights

REFORMERS

• Most were middle-class, Christian, white women

• Respectable women didn't work

ABOLITION (see entry on slavery)

• American Colonization Society

• Called for abolition with the "colonization" of freed slaves to Africa

• Liberia (capital Monrovia) was founded in 1822 in west Africa as a place for resettlement of free blacks.

• Supported by Henry Clay, John Marshall, Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson.

• Not supported by most black people in America nor by Garrison

• William Lloyd Garrison - militant abolitionist

• In Jan. 1831 Garrison published The Liberator.

• He was against gradual emancipation and colonization of free Blacks to Africa

• Instead wanted immediate emancipation without compensation to owners.

• Theodore Dwight Weld

• Co-wrote American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses in 1839 with Angelina and Sarah Grimke

• The book recorded violence against slaves

• Harriet Beecher Stowe

• Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 (partially based on Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses)

• Frederick Douglass

• Wrote autobiographies about his life as a slave.

• Including: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave in 1845

TEMPERANCE/PROHIBITION

• Lyman Beecher

• Father of Harriet Beecher Stowe

• Co-founded American Temperance Society in 1826

• Different Reformers

• Temperance

• Believed drunkenness was evil, not alcohol itself.

• Encouraged people to "temper" consumption of alcohol/moderation

• Teetolars/Prohibition

• Believed alcohol itself was dangerous.

• Necessary to swear off alcohol tee-totally

• "Moral suasionists"

• Said abstinence was individual responsibility

• "Legal suasionists"

• Wanted prohibition of manufacture and sale of liquor

• 'Demon Rum"

• Per capita consumption peaked in 1820s - more than 7.5 gallons per person each year.

• Mostly rum and whiskey.

• Dr. Benjamin Rush

• Describe physically destructive effects of excessive drinking

• Statistics showed crimes committed

• Connections between poverty and alcohol

• Critics: Irish and German immigrants were hostile to temperance

• Successes and Failures

• Between 1830 and 1840 consumption of alcohol per person fell by half.

• "Dry" states and "wet" states

• 1845 New York enacted anti-liquor law

• Authorizing local governments to forbid the sale of alcohol within their jurisdictions

• "Fifteen Gallon Law"

• Massachusetts, 1838

• To reduce alcohol consumption among poor, prohibited sale of rum or whiskey in quantities smaller than 15 gallons (ended after 2 years)

• Maine Law, 1846

• Led by Neal Dow

• Adopted first statewide prohibition law.

• By 1860, 13 states had followed.

INSANE ASYLUMS

• Before reform

• The severely insane were housed in prisons.

• Dorothea Dix

• Massachusetts school teacher

• In 1841 she visited prison and saw helpless insane in cages, chained, naked, beaten.

• She persuaded Congress to establish a hospital for the insane in Washington and 15 states to build humane asylums.

PRISONS

• Evangelicals introduced idea

• that prisons could be place for moral and social rehabilitation, not just punishment

• Believed people were curable

• Pennsylvania System

• ​Every prisoner would be in solitary confinement day and night except when minister came.

• Belief that time to reflect on sinfulness would lead to reform.

• but expensive and caused mental breakdowns.

• Auburn System (NY)

• ​Prisoners marched to workrooms and dining hall several times a day

• Conversation forbidden

EDUCATIONAL REFORM

• Horace Mann

• Massachusetts lawyer and Whig polititian

• Served as director of Massachusetts board of education.

• Wanted universal public education so society wasn't so fractured.

• Supported tax-supported state system of "common schools" open to all children.

• rather than just local schools, private academies, charity schools.

• Supporters

• Labor organizations, factory owners, middle-class reformers.

• North and South

• North: By 1860 every northern state had established tax-supported school system.

• South: Lagged behind North

• Literate blacks (like Nat Turner) were seen as dangerous to social order

• Wealthy white planters didn't want to pay for the poor.

• Schools provided job opportunities for women who became teachers.

• Thomas Gallaudet

• Co-founded 1st institution for the education of the deaf in North America.

• Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons opened in 1817.

• Oberlin College, Ohio

• Est. 1833. Open to all genders and races

WOMEN'S RIGHTS

• Background

• Women greatly involved in Second Great Awakening

• Women considered morally and religiously superior to men, but expected not to stay at home (except teachers)

• In 1839 some women organized the American Female Moral Reform Society

• 1840 several women went with their husbands to an antislavery conference in London - they were denied admission because of their gender.

• Seneca Falls, NY 1848

• Small group of men and women

• Wrote "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions"

• Used wording from Declaration of Independence

• "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary..."

• Injustices listed:

• Women couldn't vote

• Women had to give up their property when they married

• Husbands had considerable authority over wives

• Exclusion of women from professions.

• Declaration signed by 68 women and 32 men

• Attendees

• Most were already active in reform

• Many were Quakers or evangelicals.

• Lucretia Mott

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• Susan B. Anthony (Quaker schoolteacher)

• Amelia Jenks Bloomer (advocate of the "bloomer" pants for women)