Chapter 12: An Age of Reform 1820-1840

History 17

Utopian Communities

Ideal communities that offered innovative social and economic relationships to those who were interested in achieving salvation.

Shakers

Religious sect founded by Mother Ann Lee in England; the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing settled in Watervliet, New York, in 1774, and subsequently established eighteen additional communes in the Northeast, Indiana, and Kentucky.

Oneida

Utopian community founded in 1848; the Perfectionist religious group practiced "complex marriage" under leader John Humphrey Noyes.

Brook Farm

Transcendentalist commune in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, populated from 1841 to 1847 principally by writers (Nathaniel Hawthorne, for one) and other intellectuals.

Communitarianism

Social reform movement of the nineteenth century driven by the belief that by establishing small communities based on common ownership of property, a less competitive and less individualistic society could be developed.

New Harmony

Community founded in Indiana by British industrialist Robert Owen in 1825; the short-lived New Harmony Community of Equality was one of the few nineteenth-century communal experiments not based on religious ideology.

Perfectionism

The idea that social ills once considered incurable could in fact be eliminated, popularized by the religious revivalism of the nineteenth century.

Temperance Movement

A widespread reform movement, led by militant Christians, focused on reducing the use of alcoholic beverages.

Common School

Tax-supported state schools of the early nineteenth century open to all children.

Americanism Colonization Society

Organized in 1816 to encourage emigration of free Blacks to Africa; West African nation of Liberia founded in 1822 to serve as a homeland for them.

American Anti-Slavery Society

Founded in 1833, the organization that sought an immediate end to slavery and the establishment of equality for Black Americans. It split in 1840 after disputes about the role of women within the organization and other issues.

Moral Suasion

The abolitionist strategy that sought to end slavery by persuading both slaveowners and complicit northerners that the institution was evil.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 antislavery novel that popularized the abolitionist position.

“Gentleman of Property & Standing”

Well-to-do merchants who often had commercial ties to the South and resisted abolitionism, occasionally inciting violence against its adherents.

Gag Rule

Rule adopted by the House of Representatives in 1836 prohibiting consideration of abolitionist petitions; opposition, led by former president John Quincy Adams, succeeded in having it repealed in 1844.

Dorthea Dix

An important figure in increasing the public's awareness of the plight of the mentally ill. After a two-year investigation of the treatment of the mentally ill in Massachusetts, she presented her findings and won the support of leading reformers. She eventually convinced twenty states to reform their treatment of the mentally ill.

Woman Suffrage

Movement to give women the right to vote through a constitutional amendment, spearheaded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's National Woman Suffrage Association.

Feminism

Term that entered the lexicon in the early twentieth century to describe the movement for full equality for women, in political, social, and personal life.

Liberty Party

Abolitionist political party that nominated James G. Birney for president in 1840 and 1844; merged with the Free Soil Party in 1848.