American Reform and Culture Press

1790-1860
RELIGIOUS AWAKENING HELPS FOSTER REFORM
By Charles Finney
Concurrent with an increasing international exchange of
goods and ideas, larger numbers of Americans began struggling with
how to match democratic political ideals to political institutions and
social realities. Liberal social ideas from abroad, and romantic beliefs
in human perfectibility fostered the rise of voluntary organizations to
promote religious and secular reforms.
Church attendance was still a regular ritual for about three-
fourths of the 23 million Americans in 1850. Religion of these years
was not the old-time religion of colonial days; rigid Calvinist rigor had
long been seeping out of the American churches.
Deism had arisen during the the Enlightenment. Deists denied METHODIST REVIVAL CAMP, 1839 Methodists and Baptists (of the rural
Christ's divinity, but believed in a supreme being who created a South and West) reaped the most abundant harvest of souls. Both sects
stressed personal conversion, a relatively democratic control of church affairs,
universe that ran like a clock. Deism helped to inspire an important and a rousing emotionalism. Peter Cartwright was the best known of the
spin-off from the rigid Puritanism of the past, the Unitarian faith, Methodist “circuit riders” or traveling frontier evangelists.
which began to gather momentum in New England at the end of the
eighteenth century. Unitarians believed that God existed in only one SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS IN UTOPIA FAIL
person, not in the Trinity. By Robert Owen
Around 1800, fear of the liberalism in religion led to a wave of Various reformers, ranging from high-minded to the “lunatic
roaring, enthusiastic, and emotional revivals, beginning on the fringe” established more than forty communities of a cooperative or
southern frontier but soon rolling even into the cities of the communistic nature. Robert Owen, seeking human betterment,
Northeast. This series of revivals came to be called the Second Great founded New Harmony in 1825.
Awakening. It rejected Deism and the rationalism of the Age of
Reason. Charles Finney became the greatest of the preachers. He held
crowds spellbound in New York in 1830-31.
Joseph Smith established the
Mormon Church, or Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints. Antagonism
toward Mormons emerged due to their
polygamy, drilling militia, and voting as
a unit. Smith was killed, but was
succeeded by Brigham Young, who led
followers to Utah. Brook Farm was organized in 1841 by about 20 individuals
The Second Great Awakening had a committed to the philosophy of transcendentalism. They did
number of significant consequences. The reasonably well until in 1846 when their venture in “plain living and
tidal wave of spiritual fervor left converted souls, many shattered high thinking collapsed in debt.
and reorganized churches, and numerous new sects. It also A more radical experiment was the founding in 1848 of the
encouraged a rich evangelicalism that bubbled up into innumerable Oneida Community in New York. They practiced free love and eugenic
areas of American life and led to numerous activist groups and selection of parents so as to produce superior offspring. It flourished
spontaneous and interconnected reform movements. The Second for more than thirty years mostly because of its artisans who built
Great Awakening widened the lines between classes and region just superior steel animal traps. The community’s legacy, ironically, is not
as the First Great Awakening did. its social experiment, but rather its manufacture of stainless steel
A key feature of the Second Great Awakening was the knives, forks, and spoons.
feminization of religion, both in terms of church membership and The shakers, one of the longest-lived communities, attained
theology. Evangelicals preached a gospel of female spiritual worth a membership of about six thousand in 1840, but since their monastic
and offered women an active role in bringing their husbands and customs prohibited both marriage and sexual relations, they were
families back to God. That accomplished, an increasing number of virtually extinct by 1940.
Americans worked primarily outside of government institutions to In competition with democratic free enterprise and free
advance their ideals. Many women turned to saving the rest of society land, each of the various communistic experiments eventually failed
through the many reforms reform efforts of the early 1800s. or changed their methods.
FREE SCHOOLS FOR FREE PEOPLE DOROTHEA
By Horace Mann DIX’S (1802-
1887)
Tax supported public education met stiff resistance in the DAMNING
early years of the new republic, but well-to-do conservative REPORTS ON
Americans gradually realized that if they didn’t pay to educate other INSANITY AND
people’s kids, then those brats could grow into a dangerous ignorant ASYLUMS
mob, armed with the vote. Taxation for education was an insurance
RESULTS IN
premium that wealthy could pay for stability and democracy.
IMPROVED
Tax-supported public education gained little support in the
slavery-cursed South, but between 1825 and 1850, hard-working CONDITIONS.
laborers had gained white manhood suffrage during the age of
Jackson, and in the North, they began to demand public education for
their kids. REFORM CAMPAIGNS FLOURISH
By Dorothea Dix
Thomas Jefferson himself declared, “A civilized nation The dawn of the industrial age created unprecedented
that was both ignorant and free, never was and problems, and the optimistic promises of the Second Great Awakening
never will be!” inspired countless people to fight against the evils of society. Women
played a dominant role, especially in their own struggle for suffrage.
The one-room school house became the foundation for For many middle-class women, the reform campaigns offered an
American democracy, though it was imperfect at best. It only stayed opportunity to escape the confines of the home.
open a few months out of the year, and too often, the schoolteachers Debtors prisons continued to be a nightmare, but the newly
were ill-trained, ill-tempered, and ill-paid. They also many times enfranchised laborer once again asserted himself and pressured state
placed more emphasis on correcting with the hickory stick than on legislators to abolish the debtors’ prisons. Capital punishment and
learning. brutal punishments were slowly being reduced, and the idea of
Into this environment slipped Horace Mann, who rehabilitation and reform was entering the conversation on criminal
campaigned for more and better schoolhouses, longer school terms, codes.
higher pay for teachers, and expanded curriculum. Improved Mentally ill people were still treated with cruelty, as many
textbooks helped to aid educational advances. Noah Webster’s still believed the medieval ideas that the deranged were cursed with
“reading lessons” helped foster patriotism, and his dictionary helped unclean spirits. Many were chained up in jails and poor houses.
standardize the American language. McGuffey’s Readers promoted Dorothea Dix’s damning reports on this treatment resulted in
lessons in morality, patriotism, and idealism. improved conditions.
Improvements were impressive, but as late as 1860, the
U.S. counted only about a hundred public secondary schools and still
nearly a million illiterate adults. Slaves of the South were forbidden
TEMPERANCE GAINS SUPPORT
By Neal S. Dow of Maine
to receive instruction and even free blacks of the North, as well as in
the South, were excluded from the schools. Americans formed new voluntary organizations that aimed
The Second Great Awakening also stimulated the planting of to change individual behaviors and improve society. Excessive
many small denominational colleges. The first state-supported drinking of hard liquor created problems that attracted reformers.
universities sprang up in the South. Heavy drinking undermined the family and decreased the efficiency of
Women’s higher education was frowned upon in the early labor. The American
decades of the 1800s. She was expected to remain in the home, Temperance Society was
training in needlepoint, not algebra. Too much learning, it was formed in Boston in 1826,
believed, might injure her brain and render her unfit for marriage! and within a few years,
Secondary education attained some respectability in the 1820s, and some one thousand local
traditionalists were shocked when Oberlin College opened its doors to groups sprang into
women, two years following its admittance of black students. existence. Reformers
Magazines flourished in the pre-Civil War years, though stressed “temperance” in
most of them short-lived, increasingly tax-supported libraries opened, drink.
and traveling lecturers brought learning to the masses. A play, “The Drunkard" was created and was very popular
among the people
CONT’D ON NEXT PAGE . . .
when it came out.
 Seneca Falls Convention in
“TEMPERANCE GAINS SUPPORT” CONT’D 1848 where defiant Elizabeth
It was a drama that featured a man whose life was falling apart due Cady Stanton read a
to his alcoholic tendencies. Once he declares himself free from “Declaration of Sentiments,”
drinking for good, his life begins to prosper once again. Ten Nights in which declared that “all men
a Barroom and What I Saw There by T.S. Arthur described a once- and women are created
happy village that was ruined by Sam Slade’s tavern. Its sales were equal.”
second only to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Seneca Falls
Some believed that laws should be passed to uphold launched the modern women’s
temperance, and about a dozen states followed Maine’s example in rights movement. It paralleled
banning the manufacture and sale of liquor, but these laws were the abolitionist movement and
short-lived. However, there was much less drinking among women was eventually eclipsed by the
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
than earlier in the century and probably much less per capita campaign to end slavery in the Susan B. Anthony were the two
consumption of hard liquor. decade before the Civil War. most persistent battlers for
The Grimke sisters championed women’s rights.
antislavery.

WOMEN DEMAND RIGHTS

By Susan B. Anthony

In the early 1800s,

women, like black slaves, could
not vote, she could be legally
beaten by her husband, and she
lost her property titles when she
married.
Gender and family
roles changed in response to the
market revolution, particularly
with the growth of definitions of domestic ideals that emphasized the
separation of public and private spheres. A woman’s place was in the
home, the centerpiece of her “cult of domesticity. Even reformers such
as Catharine Beecher, who urged women to seek employment as
teachers, celebrated this role of women.
Following the Revolution, the ideal of “Republican
Motherhood” claimed that women were the keepers of society’s
conscience with the special responsibility of raising the young to be
good productive citizens. Men were always in danger of slipping into
their savage ways; they needed to be guided by their gentle ladies.
Some women wanted to break free of the confines of their
prescribed role. In contrast to colonial times, many women avoided
marriage altogether; about 10 percent of adult women remained
“spinsters” by mid-century. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell became the first
female graduate of a medical college and entered the previously
forbidden medical profession. Amelia Bloomer revolted against
societal norms when she donned a short skirt with Turkish trousers,
called “bloomers” after that.
Most female reformers were white and well-to-do, and the
women’s rights movement began to gain momentum by mid century.
Lucretia Mott, a Quaker, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton went as far as to
demand suffrage. Susan B. Anthony, also a Quaker, was a militant
lecturer for women’s rights. Lucy Stoner kept her maiden name after
marriage; others who followed her lead would be mocked as “Lucy
Stoners.”
Reformers sought to create greater equality and
opportunities for women and their ideals were expressed at the
DRESS REFORM EMERGES Medical professionals of the 1840s argued that corsets
constricting vital organs restricted women’s mobility, prevented them from bearing
healthy children, and even caused serious sickness and death. Regardless, critics of
the bloomer-wearers claimed that women blurred gender distinctions by adopting
“male” attire. This behavior, they argued, endangered the family and even
American culture. Political cartoons of the 1800s and the first half of the twentieth
century suggest that her asking for rights somehow compromised her femininity, as
if she couldn’t have both.
THE DAWN OF SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT
By Thomas Jefferson
Early Americans were more
interested in practical gadgets to help them
with their pioneering problems than they
were in pure science. The practice of medicine
was still primitive and bleeding remained a
common cure . . . and curse. Smallpox plagues
were still dreaded. Life expectancy was still
short – about forty years for a white person
born in 1850 and less for African Americans.
Self-prescribed patent medicines were
common for people and horses, fad diets proved popular, and one home remedy
was rubbing tumors with dead toads. Regular doctoring was often harmful. Victims
of surgical operations were usually tied down, and then after a stiff drink of
whiskey, had their limbs sawed off. In the early 1840s, the innovation of laughing
gas and ether as anesthetics benefitted the medical field.
AMERICAN ART, ARCHITECTURE, AND LITERATURE
By Washington Irving
Architecturally, Americans contributed little of note in the
first half of the nineteenth century. Public buildings were built in the
Neoclassical style in the Greek and Roman tradition. Thomas Jefferson
was probably the ablest architect of his time. He built his Virginia
home, Monticello, in the classical style.
Lack of leisure time in the pioneering days of the U.S. gave
way by the 1820s to time. Liberal social ideas from Europe, the effects
of the Second Great Awakening, a new Romantic belief in human
imperfectability influenced literature and art. Following the War of
1812, the nationalist upsurge challenged the Age of Reason
(Enlightenment) with a new Romanticism in American art and
literature.
Painters turned increasingly from painting portraits to
capturing the American landscape on canvas. Charles Wilson Peale
had painted some 60 portraits of George Washington, but the Hudson
River school was soon excelling at the new landscape paintings. The
invention of the first crude photograph also gave portrait painters
competition.
Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851 German American artist
Emanuel Gottlieb captured the romantic spirit of liberty and independence.
Uniquely American minstrel shows, featuring white actors
with blackened faces, were a hit. One famous minstrel actor, whose
character was named Jim Crow, became the synonym for segregation
in the South following the Civil War.
“Who reads an American book?” sneered a British critic in
1820. The political pamphlet and essay had defined the writings of the
Revolutionary and New Republic periods. These writings included
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and The Federalist papers of
Hamilton, Jay, and Madison.
American literature received a boost with the wave of
nationalism that followed the War of 1812. The Knickerbocker Group
of New York enabled the U.S. to boast of a literature equal to its
magnificent landscapes. Washington Irving used English as well as
American themes in such writings as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
James Fennimore Cooper was the first American novelist. In
The Leatherstocking Tales, which includes The Last of the Mohicans,
Cooper was exploring the viability and destiny of the American
republican experiment.
Transcendentalists rejected Locke’s theory that all
knowledge comes to the mind through the senses. They thought that
truth “transcends” the senses, that everyone possesses an inner light
that can illuminate the highest truth and put him or her in direct touch
with God. They were committed to self-reliance, self-culture, and self-
discipline, traits that naturally bred hostility to authority and formal
institutions. They celebrated the dignity of the individual, both white
and black.
The Return
of Rip Van
Winkle,
1829 John
Quidor
captures the
American
frontier
theme.
Ralf Waldo Emerson was the best known of the
Transcendentalists. He urged American writers to throw off the
influence of European traditions and delve into the riches of their own
American back yards. He was a sharp critic of slavery and a loyal
supporter of the Union cause in the Civil War.
Henry David Thoreau believed he should reduce his bodily
wants so as to gain time for the pursuit of truth. Walden and his essay
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience furthered idealistic thought and
would later influence the nonviolence philosophies of Mahatma
Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) was highly romantic,
emotional, and unconventional. His words captured the American
spirit:
All the Past we leave behind;
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world,
varied world;
Fresh and strong the world we seize—world
of labor and the march—
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
Though not actively associated with the transcendentalist
movement, many authors were not immune to its influences. Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow was very knowledgeable of European
literature, but one of his most popular poems, “The Song of
Hiawatha,” was distinctively American. John Wittier, a Quaker, helped
arouse Americans on the slavery issue.
Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women (1868), and Emily
Dickenson’s nearly two thousand poems, were unpublished before
she died. A distinguished group of American historians emerged in the
early 1800s. George Bancroft became the “Father of American
History.”
Not all writers of this time believed so absolutely in human
goodness. Edgar Allen Poe was fascinated with the ghostly and
ghastly, as in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
Puritan background inspired him to write his masterpiece, The Scarlet
Letter (1850), which describes the Puritan practice of forcing an
adulteres to wear a scarlet “A” on her clothing. Herman Melville’s
Moby Dick (1851) is an allegory of good and evil.
VanDusen Name __________________________________________
AP US History

The Second Great Awakening and the Age of Reform

1. Around 1800, a wave of roaring, enthusiastic, and emotional religious
revivals, characterized by a growth in evangelism, began on the southern frontier and even rolled into the cities of the Northeast.

2. This religion had arisen during the Enlightenment, or Age of Reason.

Followers denied Christ's divinity, but believed in a supreme being who created a universe that ran like a clock.

3. Rejecting Deism and the rationalism of the Age of Reason, aa other

evangelicals did, he became the greatest of the preachers, holding crowds spellbound in New York in 1830-31.

4. He established the Mormon Church, or Church of Jesus Christ of

Latter Day Saints, and he and his followers faced antagonism due to their polygamy, drilling militia, and voting as a unit.
When he was killed, he was succeeded by Brigham Young, who led followers to Utah.

5. A key feature of the Second Great Awakening was the of religion, both in terms
of church membership and theology. Evangelicals preached a gospel of female spiritual worth and offered women an active
role in bringing their husbands and families back to God.

6. They played a key role in the abolitionist and women’s rights

movements, reform efforts in education and in debtors’ prisons, and temperance efforts.

7. Which religions attracted the most followers, stressing personal

conversions, relatively democratic control of church affairs, and rousing emotionalism.

8. He was the best known of the Methodist “circuit riders,” or traveling

frontier evangelists.

9. More than forty of these cooperative or communistic social experiments

sprang up in the early 1800s. Each eventually failed or changed their methods. (Highlight the key aspects of each of these
social experiments in your newsletter.)

10. This gained little support in the slavery-cursed South, but between 1825
and 1850, hard-working laborers had gained white manhood suffrage during the age of Jackson, and in the North, they
began to demand this for their kids.

11. He campaigned for more and better schoolhouses, longer school terms,
higher pay for teachers, and expanded curriculum.

12. His “reading lessons” helped foster patriotism, and his dictionary
helped standardize the American language. The new McGuffey’s Readers promoted lessons in morality, patriotism, and
idealism.

13. Women’s higher education was frowned upon in the early decades of
the nineteenth century, but secondary education attained some respectability in the 1820s, and traditionalists were shocked
when which college opened its doors to women, two years following its admittance of black students.

14. The social group pressured state legislators to abolish the debtors’
prisons.

15. Capital punishment and brutal punishments were slowly being reduced,
and this idea was entering the conversation on criminal codes.

16. Mentally ill people were still treated with cruelty, many still being
chained up in jails and poor houses. But her damning reports on this treatment resulted in improved conditions.
 17. Many believed that heavy drinking undermined the family and
decreased the efficiency of labor. This organization was formed in Boston in 1826, and within a few years, some one thousand
local groups sprang into existence

18. In the early 1800s, this social group, similarly to black slaves, could not
vote, could be legally beaten by their husbands, and lost their property titles with marriage.

19. In response to this, gender and family roles changed, particularly with
the growth of definitions of domestic ideals that emphasized the separation of public and private spheres. A woman’s place was
in the home, the centerpiece of her “cult of domesticity.

20. Following the Revolution, this ideal claimed that women were the
keeps of society’s conscience with the special responsibility of raising the young to be good productive citizens.

21. She became the first female graduate of a medical college and entered
the previously forbidden medical profession.

22. She revolted against societal norms when she donned a short skirt with
Turkish trousers, called “bloomers” after that.

23. A militant lecturer for women’s rights, she went as far as to demand
suffrage, and at the Seneca Falls Convention read “A Declaration of Sentiments,” which declared that “all men and
women are created equal.”

24. She kept her maiden name after marriage, and others who followed her
lead would be mocked as “Lucy Stoners.”

25. Reformers sought to create greater equality and opportunities for

women and their ideals at this event, which launched the modern women’s rights movement.

26. The early women’s rights movement paralleled this other movement
and was eventually eclipsed by this campaign to end slavery in the decade before the Civil War. The Grimke sisters
championed antislavery. Which two ladies were the two most prominent battlers for women’s rights during the early 1800s?

27. Political cartoons of the 1800s and the first half of the twentieth century
suggest that a woman’s asking for rights somehow compromised this characteristic, as if she couldn’t have both.

28. Following the War of 1812, this upsurge challenged the Age of Reason
(Enlightenment) with a new romanticism in American art and literature. Painters turned increasingly from painting portraits
to capturing the American landscape on canvas, as shown by the Hudson River school.

29. These uniquely American shows featured white actors with blackened
faces. One famous minstrel actor, whose character was named Jim Crow, became the synonym for segregation in the
South following the Civil War.

30. The political pamphlet and essay had defined the writings of the
Revolutionary and New Republic periods, but following the War of 1812, this received a boost with the ensuing wave of
nationalism. (Highlight the American authors and their writing styles in your newsletter.)