Unit 4.11 - The Age of Reform

key terms/events and significance

Antebellum

• Several historic reforms began during Jacksonian era & the following decades

• Period before the Civil War in 1861

• Dedicated to causes such as free school (tax supported), treatment for mental illness, equality for women, and slavery abolition

Temperance

• Examples:

  • Moral exhortation: Protestant ministers & people concerned with it → formed American Temperance Society

  • Washingtonians: group of recovering alcoholics

  • Maine prohibited liquor manufacture

• Significance:

  • Cause of crimes, poverty, domestic abuse, & other social ills

  • Persuade drinkers of total abstinence

  • Argued it is a disease that needed treatment

  • Overshadowed by slavery issue but brought back again by Women’s Christian Temperance Union

Women’s Rights

• Examples:

  • Sarah Grimké spoke against this discrimination in Letter on the Equality of the Sexes & the Condition of Women

  • Lucretia Mott & Elizabeth Cady Stanton campaigned for women’s rights after being barred from antislavery discussions

• Significance:

  • Women reformers resented the way men relegated them to secondary roles, like being prevented from participating in policy discussions

  • Leading feminists met at Seneca, NY (1848), issued a document listing their grievances against laws & discrimination against women

  • Stanton & Susan B. Anthony campaigned for equal voting, legal property rights for women → overshadowed by slavery

Anti-Slavery

• Examples:

  • American Colonization Society transported people freed from slavery back to the African continent

  • The Liberator: abolitionist newspaper / no compensation

  • Liberty Party: North / practical than moral crusade

  • The North Star: Frederick Douglass / antislavery journal

  • Violent abolitionism: David Walker & Henry Highland Garnet

• Significance:

  • 2nd Great Awakening → viewed slavery as a sin

  • Appealed to White settlers who wanted to remove all freed Africans / but some did not want to come back

  • Beginning of the radical abolitionist movement → America Antislavery Society

  • Some African leaders assist fugitive slaves to places that prohibit it

  • Advocated the most radical solution / revolt against their owners

  • Nat Turner led a revolt that killed 55 Whites / was retaliated against by killing hundreds of African Americans brutally