Ch 11 and 12 - Slavery and Reforms

Plain Folk

most common southerners, who were modest yeoman farmers. They owned few slaves or none at all. They either farmed for subsistence farming or grew cotton or other crops. These people were not part of the planter class and likely would never become part of it.

Peculiar Institution

a term for the southern system slavery that described its uniqueness in the fact that southern viewed it as special. In some ways, blacks had their own culture within slavery, and on the other, there was a unique bond between the enslaved blacks and white ‘masters’.

Slave Codes

special laws in southern states designed to control enslaved peoples, limit their ability to congregate, move, and restricted most freedoms.

Paternalism

the idea that slave owners acted in a fatherly or motherly role to enslaved people. In another sense, it was a view that African Americans were a lesser class than whites in the south.

Underground Railroad

system where many enslaved people escaped for freedom to the north. Conductors on this system, took enslaved persons from safe house to safe house on the long journey to freedom in the north or Canada.

Harriet Tubman

Escaped slave and leader on the Underground Railroad who helped dozens of people to their freedom.

Hudson River School

group of painters who incorporated nationalism and influence of European romanticism into their paintings, showing the beauty of American nature in landscapes.

Transcendentalism

movement of New England writers and philosophers who embraced a theory of the individual that rested on peoples’ reason, or ability to grasp beauty and truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

a transcendentalist leader in Massachusetts who left being a minister to devote his life to transcendentalism. He became a lecturer. He wrote his “Nature” essay and later “Self-Reliance”.

Henry David Thoreau

a transcendentalist who wrote about resisting conforming to societal norms. He lived alone near Walden Pond and wrote his book Walden. He later believed in civil disobedience, or protesting unjust laws by breaking them.

Mormons/Brigham Young

religious group or the leader who brought them West. They believed Adam Smith was spoken to by God. This group was run out of New York and later the Midwest because of their views that men could have multiple wives.

Temperance

antebellum reform movement focused on abstaining from alcohol. It was influence by the Second Great Awakening and the Market Revolution, where it was feared men would leave their wives and children in need as they drank life away.

Horace Mann

school reformer and educational leader in Massachusetts who pushed for public education, the education of teachers, lengthened the school year, and helped organize curriculum. 

Normal Schools

a precursor to teaching schools, these were two years schools to prepare teachers to teach.

Dorothea Dix

reformer who began a national movement to change the treatment of the mentally ill.

Seneca Falls Convention

1848 New York meeting of women and men to organize and push for women’s rights in the United States. It was the first meeting of its kind.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Lucretia Mott/Susan B. Anthony

Leaders at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and early women’s rights and suffrage leaders.

Declaration of Sentiments

introductory speech at Seneca Falls Convention which laid out grievances against men and the government. It’s structure was much like the Declaration of Independence.

American Colonization Society

early abolitionist group which sought to buy enslaved peoples’ freedom and send them to the colony of Liberia in Western Africa.

William Lloyd Garrison

ardent and fiery abolitionist who started the newspaper The Liberator. He was more extreme and impatient. than prior abolitionists

Abolition

belief that slavery should be outlawed.

Frederick Douglass

escaped slave and abolitionist whose written and spoken words inspired abolitionists in the US and in Europe. He is very well known for his speech “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”

Free-Soil/Free-Soilers

political organizers or belief that any new territories should be settled as non-slave areas in the US. This group largely was before the Republican party.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

1852 novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe which showed more of a human side to slavery and rallied many who were previously indifferent to slavery, against it.