The Second Great Awakening

The second great awakening placed emphasis on: 1. spirituality and religion, 2. the ability of individuals to amend their lives. This led to a wide array of reform movements aimed at redressing injustice and alleviating suffering. It served as an "organizing process" that created "a religious and educational infrastructure" across the western frontier.

Society

Formation of Ideal communities. (Utopian communities)

New Harmony, Indiana Brook Farm, Boston

Transcendantalism

Led by: Ralph Emerson

A philosophical and literary movement that emphasized living a simple life, and celebrating the truth found in nature and in personal emotion and imagination

Civil Disobedience.

Peacefully refusing to obey laws one does not agree with. Supported by Henry Thoreau, a friend of Ermerson

Society

Unitarism

They emphasized reason and appeal to the conscience as the paths to perfection. (unlike transcendentalists Agreed with revivalists that individual and social reforms were possible, and important.

Emphasis on the ability of people to change themselves and the community helped create a stronger democracy. The second great awakening could also be said to be a direct cause of the Temperance movement.

Schools

Before mid- 1800s no uniform educational policy existed in the USA

Class rooms in early schools were not divided by grade

Massachusetts and Vermont were the only states before the civil war to pass a compulsory school attendance law.

In 1830s Americans began to demand tax-supported public schools.

Tax-supported public schools met opposition from the better-off and those afraid of losing their culture when Pennsylvania established such a school system.

Horace Mann, a leader in the public school reform declared:

If we do not prepare our children to become good citizens, if we do not enrich minds with knowledge then our republic must go down to destruction, as others have gone before it.

By the 1850s every state was state had provided some form of publicly funded elementary schools

Prisons

Penitentiary System

Upon visiting US penitentiaries,French writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed that prisoners were physically punished or isolated for extended periods of time. He described the system as a spectacle of the most complete depotism [rigid and severe control].

Chains used in a Durham prison in the 19th century

Reformers quickly took up the case

Dorothy Dix on visiting the Massachusetts house of correction was horrified to find that the mentally ill were often housed in jails. She sent a report of her findings to the Massachusetts legislature, who then passed a law aimed at improving conditions. Between 1845 and 1852 she managed to persuade nine southern states to set up public hospitals for the mentally ill.

Slavery
Brought Christianity on a widescale to African-Americans. The new Baptist or Methodist churches were open to both blacks and whites.

Inspired the north to stand up against slavery in the south.