4.11 An Age of Reform

antebellum period

Jacksonian era and following decades before Civil War (1861)

temperance

movement against alcohol consumption blaming alcohol for crime, poverty, abuse of women, “social ills”

• American Temperance Society - Protestant ministers tried to persuade drinkers to pledge abstinence

• Washingtonians - recovering alcoholics group, saw alcoholism as a disease that needs treatment

• opposed by German and Irish immigrants, supported by factory owners

• overshadowed by slavery, gained strength in 1870s with support of Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

movement for public asylums/asylum movement

belief that structure and discipline could lead to moral reform

• Dorothea Dix - publicized treatment of mentally ill leading to reform of mental hospitals

• Thomas Gallaudet - opened a school for the deaf

• Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe - started school for the blind

• penitentiaries replaced crude jails

  • New York Auburn system - rigid rules of discipline, moral instruction, and work programs

common (public) school movement

led by Horace Mann, worked for compulsory attendance, longer school year, increased teacher preparation

• McGuffey readers - moral education by William Holmes McGuffey, taught virtues of an industrialist society: hard work, punctuality, sobriety

changes in women’s roles

• birth control led to more free time

• cult of domesticity - industrialization led to women being moral leaders of the house

• women’s rights movement

women’s rights movements

• women reformers relegated to secondary votes in movements

• Sarah Grimké

  • spoke out against discrimination in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Women (1838)

  • led slavery opposition with sister Angelina Grimké and others

• Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton - campaigned for women’s rights after being barred from speaking at antislavery conventions

• Seneca Falls Convention (1848) - meeting of leading feminists, first women’s rights conference in U.S. history

  • Declaration of Sentiments - feminist Declaration of Independence

• campaign for equal voting, legal, and property rights led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, overshadowed in 1850s by slavery

antislavery movement

• American Colonization Society - transporting freed slaves to Africa

• American Antislavery Society (1833) - founded by William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists calling for immediate abolition of slavery

• Liberty Party advocated political and legal action over moral crusade, split from American Antislavery Society (1840)

• Black abolitionists

  • Frederick Douglass - abolitionist who advocated both political and direct action, former slave, author of Antislavery journal The North Star

  • Harriet Tubman, David Ruggles, Sojourner Truth, William Still

• violent abolitionism advocated by some

  • Nat Turner - enslaved Virginian who led revolt, South retaliated by ending antislavery talk and murdering African Americans

American Peace Society

advocated abolishing war, protested war with Mexico