Was a product of the American and Market Revolutions.
Focused on self-improvement and self-reliance.
Featured fluidity of people and areas, with a lack of control.
Was a spiritual resurgence.
Sinners grappled with their unworthy nature before concluding they were born again (individualism).
Emphasized personal salvation and rejected predestination.
Embodied Jacksonian individualism.
Church membership doubled between 1800 and 1835.
At the time of the Revolution, the largest denominations were Congregationalists (Puritan), Episcopalian (Anglican), Lutheran, and Quakers.
Evangelical Methodism and Baptists soon outgrew them.
In the 1820s, an intense wave of revivals ignited religious fervor in communities along the Erie Canal, and this region became known as the "burned-over district."
As devout farmers moved west, they established new Protestant churches throughout the Upper South and Midwest.
Student revivals at Yale College and Andover Seminary around 1800 led to the expansion of Protestant missions in the West and also in Africa, India, and Hawaii. Societies supporting the missions combined into the American Home Missionary Society in 1826.
The Second Great Awakening started in the 1790s as Baptists, Methodists, and a new sect called Universalists proselytized in New England. After 1800 the Awakening continued in Kentucky in camp meetings of pioneer farmers, who carried evangelical religion back to their communities.
Origins of the 2nd Great Awakening
Late 1700s, church attendance dropped.
Reasons for the drop:
Focus on economic profit.
Decline in traditional authority.
Movement of people.
Focus on “good works” not attendance.
Led to an attempt to revive religion.
First tent revivals on the frontier: Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s among Baptists, Methodists.
Population growth, expansion, and “mass democracy” had created an uprooted people.
In the face of change, people looked for a more egalitarian, emotional, and individualistic religion.
Spread back East from there.
Led to many envisioning a better world, and that they were able to shape it.
People desired stability and individual control in the rapidly changing nation.
Many adopted millennialism: the belief that the Kingdom of God would be established on Earth and that God would reign on earth for a thousand years.
Democratization and Religious Practices
Camp Meetings/Organization/Beliefs:
Enthusiastic gatherings where all could speak.
Individual piety was the focus, not top-down rule.
Itinerant (mobile) preachers could reach more people due to transportation.
Lay people took on administrative roles in congregations.
Belief in free will: not all are damned, and individuals have the ability to change their situation.
Worship occurred side by side among rich/poor, women/men, sometimes black/white.
Pluralism: Religious Free Market
1780: 2,000 Christian Ministers.
1845: 40,000 Christian Ministers.
People can think for themselves; respect for tradition declined.
Preachers/information/people are more mobile.
Individualism replacing common good: ability to shape one’s future/destiny.
Most skilled workers wanted higher wages, not religion; working-class people ignored Finney’s sermons.
Irish immigrants remained faithful to Catholicism and saw Protestants as heretics and oppressors.
Widespread Impacts of the 2nd Great Awakening
Missionaries and circuit riders spread messages throughout the US.
Some slaveholders exposed slaves to Christianity (previously limited, as they thought Christianity would encourage resistance).
This was used to make slaves more obedient.
Eased consciences of slaveholders, who argued slavery was divinely ordained (paternalism).
Led to African American forms of worship/churches.
African Methodist Episcopal Church, first independent black Protestant church in the US.
Started in the 1790s by Richard Allen, gave blacks a chance to practice separately from whites.
Presbyterian minister Charles Grandison Finney rose to influence in the Northeast.
Was a lawyer in western NY but experienced a conversion experience in 1821.
Led revival meetings in NY and PA; he accepted a ministry in Rochester, New York, in 1830.
"Burnt Over District,” rapidly changing due to the Erie Canal, religious fervor swept through there.
New middle and working classes gravitated to messages of shaping/controlling their own destiny.
Benevolent Empire
A network of organizations built by evangelical Protestant men and women influenced by the Second Great Awakening, led by the middle class.
Aimed to make the world more humane and just.
Aimed at regulating working-class behavior that they believed caused poverty.
Fought against alcoholism, sex work, and crime.
Formed organizations to reform society.
Hoped to control the lives of workers by “persuasion if possible, by law if necessary.”
Temperance Movement
Temperance: the belief that drunkenness was the biggest problem in the US.
Drunkenness was seen as corrupting democracy, morality, and Christianity.
Early temperance societies called on individuals to avoid sin, including overindulging in alcohol (New England).
In 1826, the American Temperance Society was formed, and by the early 1830s, thousands of similar societies had sprouted across the country.
By 1836, began to call for complete abstinence.
By the 1850s, local laws were passed in New England, New York, and the Midwest prohibiting alcohol; culminated in the 1920s.
The Drunkard's Progress depicted the downfall from the first glass to death by suicide.
Age of Reform Overview
The desire to perfect society resulted from economic change, the 2nd Great Awakening, and population movement.
Tried to perfect the national destiny and redeem the souls of Americans.
Various causes and efforts.
Some targeted materialistic market culture; some advocated self-reliance.
Some separated themselves from society; others tried to reform society.
Some targeted slavery, while others looked at gender inequality and alcohol.
Transcendentalism
Developed in Northeast/New England in the 1820s.
Criticized material culture and the tyranny of the majority of Jacksonian politics.
Believed people have knowledge that "transcends" their senses, which comes through intuition/imagination.
Argued for individualism, not conformity; people could trust themselves to be right.
Influenced by European romanticism: emphasizing subjectivity and the individual, a backlash against the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment/Scientific Revolution.
Emphasized nature as the gateway to individualism.
The Transcendental Club began meeting in 1836 and lasted until 1860.
Included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau.
Able to spread ideas through extensive writing (magazines, journals).
Invoked criticism for the destructive consequences of self-interested behavior. Example: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a self-destructive voyage to kill a whale.
Emerson Quote: “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”
Whitman Quote: “Resist much, obey little.”
Thoreau Quote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Joseph Smith and the Mormons
The Smith family came from Vermont to New York in search of economic opportunity.
In 1823, Smith claimed he was visited by the angel Moroni, who gave him the location of a trove of golden plates or tablets.
During the late 1820s, Smith translated them, and in 1830, published The Book of Mormon and established what would be known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
As a prophet, he hoped to reclaim the purity of the Church that had been lost.
Focused on the importance of families being led by fathers.
Resonated with men and women who had not thrived during the market revolution.
Smith’s new church placed great stress on work and discipline.
Aimed to create a New Jerusalem where the church exercised oversight of its members.
In 1841, Smith began revealing the doctrine of plural marriage to a few of his closest male associates (in Nauvoo).
Troubles and Movement of the Mormons
Beliefs angered neighbors, and Mormons moved to Kirtland in 1831.
With the Panic of 1837, the community struggled economically.
Moved to Independence; neighbors saw them as fanatics.
Placed power in the hands of a single man, not individuals.
Fighting erupted in 1838, and about 10,000 Mormons moved to Nauvoo, IL (the governor had ordered them expelled).
By the 1840s, Nauvoo had a large population, likely 12k to 16k.
Mormons had autonomy in Nauvoo and the largest armed force in Illinois.
But Mormons’ autonomy, convictions, and practices generated opposition.
Smith was arrested for treason (helped destroy the printing press of a newspaper that criticized Mormonism; led by former Mormons).
While in prison, a mob stormed into his cell and killed him.
Brigham Young became leader and would lead followers to Utah.
Abolition Origins
The slavery question was kept out of politics after the Revolution.
Colonization, the earliest form of slavery reform, happened pre-1830s.
Northerners saw it as the only way to rid the nation of slavery and racism.
Southerners wanted to get rid of free blacks.
1816: American Colonization Society was formed and endorsed by Jefferson.
Jefferson did not believe that blacks and whites could live as equals, so he advocated that the 200,000 free blacks in the US relocate to Africa.
1819: Given 100,000 by the federal government.
Thousands did emigrate to Liberia.
Women’s Rights
Women took part in antebellum reforms, from transcendentalism to temperance to abolition.
But most often in a “female,” moral guardian, motherly role.
Work in antislavery efforts served as a springboard for women to take action against gender inequality.
Many saw sexism within reform and saw themselves, like slaves, dominated and controlled.
Denied leadership positions in most groups and formed separate societies, such as the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.
Seneca Falls, 1848, NY:
300 male and female feminists gathered for a conference on women’s rights that was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Produced the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments”:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Wanted women to have rights to higher education, property rights, access to professions, divorce, a voice in elections, to end the coverture laws, and to end the sexual double standard.
Men and women have “separate spheres”
Men in politics, career, leadership; women at home
Middle class upheld domesticity
Education and reform work questioned women’s domesticity
Difficult for working-class women to obtain this ideal
Female Moral Reform Society in NYC led by Lydia Finney
Founded homes for sex workers and saw them as victims of male lust.
Denounced double standard for men.
Dorthea Dix founded charity schools for “miserable children,” advocate of prison improvement, and founded public asylums for the mentally ill.
Women and Abolition
Women led abolition movements
Grimke Sisters
Fled South Carolina plantations to the North
Told about whipping house used on the plantation
Law of Coverture:
A woman’s property, children, and body belonged to her husband
The Seneca Falls convention wanted to end this law
Property laws protecting women passed in some states 1839-1849
Abolition Movement
Influence of the 2nd Great Awakening/Reform + +.
David Walker, a free black man from NC, now in Boston in the 1820s:
Lectured on slavery and promoted the first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal.
Called for blacks to actively resist slavery and to use violence if needed.
Published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829:
Criticized colonization and urged blacks to fight for equality in the US.
Although he died at 33 in 1930 (suspicious), he was a symbol of hope to free people in the North and a symbol of the terrors of literate, educated blacks to slaveholders in the South.
1831: Nat Turner’s Rebellion in VA (saw himself as a Jesus-like figure).
Collectively seemed to launch…
1830s shift: more radical and aggressive.
Religious/perfectionist influences: ultimate sin and against US values
Moral arguments to end slavery, moral suasion.
Like many Americans, recognize the power of print
1833-1840: 100k Northerners join local groups:
Most ordinary citizens
Speakers spread throughout the North
Like itinerant preachers: Passionate meetings, dialogue and denounce sins
Most abolitionists rejected violence
Convince slaveholders of sin and North of its complicity in slavery.
Social criticism: Public opinion matters in mass democracy
Awakening nation to moral wrongs of slavery.
Used excitement and provocation
Slave Narratives and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) put a human face on slavery.
Anti-Slavery Efforts
Anti-Slavery Society.
Postal campaign: mailed anti-slavery literature in the South.
Underground Railroad helped with fugitive slave law.
Petition Campaign: bombards Congress with signatures from citizens who want to end slavery.
Formed Liberty Party.
William Lloyd Garrison and The Liberator
William Lloyd Garrison (MA) was one of the leaders of the movement.
Like many, became more vigorous in denouncing slavery and wanted it to end without compensation given to slaveholders.
Previously supported colonization but shifted to arguing that slavery was a sinful practice and colonization did not alter this.
He printed the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.
In 1831, started The Liberator, whose first edition declared: “I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.”
Garrisonian Societies
Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society (1831) and the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833).
By 1838, the AASS had 250,000 members.
Strategies:
Tried to morally persuade America using lecturing agents, petition drives, and printed materials.
Rejected both colonization and the use of violence to end slavery.
Used slave narratives to show the horrors of slavery and the destruction of families.
Advocated for an immediate end to slavery and equal rights for black Americans.
Sent petitions to Congress in the 1830s demanding an end to slavery. These petitions were reported in newspapers that covered Congress.
Garrisonians also championed universal reform, including temperance, pacifism, and the extension of women's rights.
By the late 1830s, the movement had split due to Garrison’s abandoned focusing on churches and focus on other reforms (listed above).
African American Abolitionists
Their stories, examples, and actions were crucial to the whole movement.
Narratives were immensely popular with the public.
Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass sold 30k copies between 1845 and 1860.
Solomon Northups' Twelve Years a Slave sold 27,000 copies during its first two years in print.
Douglass published his own abolitionist newspaper, North Star, in Rochester, NY.
Lecturing: former slaves became anti-slavery lecturers and went on tour.
Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, William Wells Brown; Ellen and William Craft were a couple who had escaped together using ingenious disguises.
Importance:
Contradicted the slaveholders' favorable claims concerning slavery and refuted claims of inferiority.
Told of the horrors of family separation, the sexual abuse of black women, inhumane punishments, and the inhuman workload.
The narratives captivated readers, portraying the fugitives as sympathetic, fascinating characters.
The narratives also gave Northerners a glimpse into the life of slave communities: the love between family members, the respect for elders, and the bonds between friends. They described an enduring, truly African American culture expressed through music, folktales, and religion.
Religious Abolitionists
Non-Garrisonian formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1840.
They continued to lobby religious institutions and gained support from the well-organized Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian antislavery movements.
Their agitation helped bring about sectional schisms in the Methodist and Baptist churches in the mid-1840s and the New School Presbyterians in 1857 (i.e., Southern Baptists).
Even after this, abolitionists protested that the Northern church branches tolerated thousands of border state slave owners in their fellowship.
Southern church leaders began to develop a strong scriptural defense of slavery.
They attacked the northern abolitionists for their “rationalism and infidelity” and “meddling spirit.”
Helped further divisions between North and South.
Until the Civil War, abolitionists continued to lobby churches, missionary and religious publication societies.
When those bodies resisted, abolitionists created a parallel network of religious benevolent enterprises, such as the American Missionary Association.
Despite noteworthy gains during the 1850s, undiluted abolitionism remained a minority viewpoint in the Northern churches, and few blacks received equal treatment in Northern religious bodies.
Political Abolitionists
Other abolitionists believed mainstream politics could bring the end of slavery.
Beginning in the mid-1830s, they petitioned legislatures and candidates on slavery-related issues but it did not accomplish much.
Formed the Liberty Party in 1840 to pursue emancipation through partisan politics.
Called for the immediate abolition of slavery and the repeal of all racial discriminatory legislation on political and moral grounds.
The Liberty Party did not generate much support, and most Garrisonians condemned any political activity as an implied endorsement of the legality of slavery.
Many of its supporters turned to the Free-Soil Party in the aftermath of the Mexican Cession.
Abolitionist Backlash
Most northerners rejected abolition (obviously South too).
Saw abolitionists as a threat to the republic that might destroy all order by upending time-honored distinctions between blacks and whites, and between women and men.
Also, if slavery ended, the North would be flooded with blacks who would take jobs from whites.
Efforts to Silence Abolitionists:
Garrison nearly lost his life in 1835 when a Boston anti-abolitionist mob dragged him through the city.
Anti-abolitionists tried to pass federal laws that made the distribution of abolitionist literature illegal.
Led to Congress passing a “gag rule” that forbade the consideration of the many hundreds of petitions sent to Washington by abolitionists.
A mob in Illinois killed an abolitionist named Elijah Lovejoy in 1837.
In 1838, 10k protestors destroyed the abolitionists’ newly built Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia.
Impact of Abolition
Focused national attention on slavery and made it difficult to ignore.
Created the sense that slavery was under attack in the South (and hence nation).
Personalized the horrors of slavery.
Forced those neutral/on the fence about slavery off it.
Provided one of the bases (groups of supporters) for the future Republican party (Lincoln).
Transitioning to Political Anti-Slavery Sentiment
Events in the 1840s fostered the growth of Northern political antislavery sentiment.
Public controversy over such issues as the congressional "gag rule" against antislavery petitions, the annexation of Texas as a new slave state, and the disposition of territory won in the Mexican-American War made opposition to the "Slave Power" more respectable in Northern circles.
In 1848, a Liberty party faction led by Salmon P. Chase, Gamaliel Bailey, and Henry B. Stanton advocated cooperation with political groups that opposed the extension of slavery into western states.
In a complicated series of intraparty battles, the Liberty party merged with antiextensionist Whigs and Democrats to create the Free-Soil party.
The new party dropped the Liberty party's support for immediate abolition and black civil rights.
With this more moderate stance, it attracted far more voters than the Liberty party.