reforming american society 1830s
TRANSCRIPT
Reforming American Society
The Perfectibility
of Man
Second Great Awakening
• Calvinism & Predestination = obsolete
• New movement – “You can go to Heaven”
Charles Grandison Finney
Most Likely to Sell Religion
Class of 1794
African American Church
• Slaves heard of this democratic god
• In North camp meetings were open to all
Richard Allen
Bethel African Church
African Methodist Episcopal Church
Developed into community center
Transcendentalism
• Emphasis on living a simple life, celebrating truth found in nature & personal emotion and imagination
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau – Walden – Civil Disobedience
TranscendentalismPhilosophical and literary movement
Focus on:
Simple Life
Nature
Personal imagination
“Perfectibility of Man”
The rounded world is fair to see,Nine times folded in mystery:Though baffled seers cannot impartThe secret of its laboring heart,Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,And all is clear from east to west.Spirit that lurks each form withinBeckons to spirit of its kin;Self-kindled every atom glowsAnd hints the future which it owes.
I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and
unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was
Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and
wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till
forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world.
Unitarianism
• William Ellery Channing – “Christianity was the perfection of human nature”
• Focus on reason – not emotion like revivalists –support form educated & wealthy
Utopia!• George Ripley –
Brook FarmThis is Hyde Park, MA
Shakers
• Followers of Ann Lee • Shared goods• men & women
equal?!?• Refused to fight• Do not marry• No kids…
Prisons & the Mentally Ill
• Dorothea Dix• Focus on
rehabilitation• MA & 9 southern
states• Moved mentally
ill out of prison
Education
• Before: mostly private academies or private tutor
• Shift – Education is needed for democracy.
• Perfectibility of Man• Changing world needs smarter people
1821 – Emma Willard opens
Troy Female Seminary
“They will be educating cows next”
1831 – Prudence Crandall – opened a school & soon allowed black girls
1834 - Crandall was forced to close down
1837 – Mary Lyon – Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (Holyoke College)
1837 – Oberlin College (Ohio) became coedFranklin High School
Girls Basketball Team
1834-35
Horace Mann
• What do you know?
Ohio gave him a statue…..
We gave him Shaw’s !
Abolition• 1820’s – Recolonization – good idea?
over 100 antislavery societies
Most Northern states had abolished slavery
William Lloyd Garrison
• 1831 – The Liberator – Newspaper (MA)
immediate emancipation
no $$ for slave owners
I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . . I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I
will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD."
David Walker
• Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World• Advised blacks to fight for their freedom
Frederick Douglass
• Run away slave – became famous abolitionist – worked with Garrison
• North Star - Newspaper
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who
profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who
want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain
without thunder and lightning.”
Nat Turner
• 1831 – Led slave revolt
• Eclipse?• 60 whites
killed• 200 blacks
killed• Good or
bad? Perspe
ctive?
Women in ReformEarly 1800’s – cult of domesticity
Abolition
• Angelina GrimkeAn Appeal to the Christian
Women of the South
1836 “The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human
power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have
no place among Republicans and Christians.”
Education
• Sarah Grimke
1838 – Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women
I ask no favors for my sex, I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is
that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the ground
which God has designed us to occupy.
Temperance
Movement
New use of the Cult of Domesticity?
Effective?
Labor Movement
• 1834 – Lowell Mills – 15% wage cut– 800 women went on
strike“Union is power!”
Results?• Newspapers & local
churches supported…
The Mills
Why? What do you think happened?