Expansion, Reform, and Identity in the Early Republic (1800–1848)

Second Great Awakening

A widespread Protestant revival movement in the U.S. (late 1790s–1830s) emphasizing personal conversion, emotional preaching, and active steps toward salvation.

Free will

The belief (often stressed by Second Great Awakening revivalists) that individuals can choose salvation and are responsible for their moral choices.

Predestination

A Calvinist/Puritan idea that God has already determined who will be saved; contrasted with the Second Great Awakening’s emphasis on free will.

Camp meetings

Large, often days-long frontier revival gatherings featuring intense sermons, hymns, and public conversions, especially common in the South and West.

Burned-Over District

Nickname for upstate New York, meaning it was “scorched” by especially intense waves of revivalism and religious enthusiasm.

Charles Grandison Finney

Influential revivalist in the Burned-Over District who promoted organized revivals and emphasized individual responsibility and immediate conversion.

New measures

Finney’s revival techniques, including direct persuasive preaching aimed at an immediate decision and highly organized revival campaigns.

Voluntary societies

Private, nongovernmental organizations that sought to solve public problems (e.g., temperance, education, abolition), central to the Age of Reform.

Moral suasion

A reform strategy emphasizing persuasion and appeals to conscience—arguing people must change their hearts and behaviors.

Abolitionism

A movement seeking the immediate end of slavery; grew more visible and divisive in the 1830s through newspapers, petitions, and national organizations.

William Lloyd Garrison

Radical abolitionist who published The Liberator and promoted immediate emancipation and moral condemnation of slavery.

Frederick Douglass

Former enslaved abolitionist who used powerful firsthand testimony and speeches/writings to expose slavery’s brutality.

Gag rule

1830s House rules that tabled antislavery petitions, showing how abolitionist activism collided with national politics.

Seneca Falls Convention (1848)

Early women’s rights convention led by reform activists (including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott) that helped launch an organized women’s rights movement.

Declaration of Sentiments

Document from Seneca Falls that echoed the Declaration of Independence to argue that women were denied equal rights.

Cult of domesticity

The belief that women’s proper sphere was the home; reform participation sometimes challenged it and sometimes reinforced it, depending on context.

Transcendentalism

New England intellectual movement (Emerson, Thoreau) emphasizing nature’s spiritual importance, self-reliance, and individual conscience over rigid institutions.

Print culture

The expanding world of cheaper printing, newspapers, and widely circulated texts that helped spread revival and reform ideas across communities.

Manifest Destiny

The belief (popularized by John L. O’Sullivan in 1845) that the U.S. was destined to expand across North America, often used to justify conquest and displacement.

Indian Removal Act (1830)

Law authorizing federal negotiation (often coercive) to relocate Native peoples west of the Mississippi, clearing land for white settlement and cotton expansion.

Trail of Tears

The forced removal of the Cherokee in the late 1830s, an infamous outcome of Indian removal policies.

Annexation of Texas (1845)

U.S. incorporation of Texas that heightened tensions with Mexico and intensified domestic conflict over slavery’s expansion.

Mexican-American War (1846–1848)

War sparked by disputes after Texas annexation; controversial and tied to debates over whether expansion was aimed at extending slavery.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)

Treaty ending the Mexican-American War in which Mexico ceded vast territory to the U.S., reopening fierce disputes over slavery in the new lands.

Wilmot Proviso (1846)

Proposal to ban slavery in territory taken from Mexico; it failed, but revealed deep sectional mistrust over slavery’s expansion.