Antebellum Reform

Religious Reform

  • Second Great Awakening fundamentally changed the U.S. by initiating numerous reform movements

  • Utopian communities

    • Brook Farm: Transcendentalist group of writers and intellectuals

    • New Harmony: Society of scientists, scholars, and educators

    • Oneida Community: Complex marriage and parental selection for “superior offspring” (eugenics)

Temperance Movement

  • Reformers sought to improve the body and fight against the prevalence and effect of alcohol

  • Ministers like Lyman Beecher and Charles Finney preached against the use of alcohol

  • American Temperance Society was formed in the 1820s to limit alcohol [

Women’s Christian Temperance Union

  • Middle class women were most active in the movement

    • Alcohol hurt many families leading to poverty and abuse from drunk husbands

  • Temperance Movement shifted to political arena as state leaders realized curbing alcohol abuse → greater productivity

  • Eventually resulted in 18th Amendment (Prohibition) ~1919

Prison & Asylum

  • Dorothea Dix worked to improve institutions for the mentally ill first in Massachusetts and then throughout the U.S.

  • Petitioned the state to move mentally ill patients from poor, inhumane conditions in prisons to better treatment facilities

  • Change in the penal system from punishment to rehabilitation

    • Prisoners were taught job skills and religion to further self-improvement

    • Goal was to reduce recidivism prisoners

Education Reform

  • Horace Mann helped establish state-sponsored public schools through taxes

  • Professional training for teachers (normal schools)

  • Public schools taught “American” values

    • Values show up in textbooks like Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller and McGuffey’s Readers

  • Prepared students to work in the industrial economy by teaching discipline

  • Public high schools and state colleges (tax-supported) became more common

Abolitionism

  • Second Great Awakening led many to question the morality of slavery

  • Some African Americans achieved gradual emancipation in the North

    • Some states made it difficult for them to buy land, restricted their voting rights, and discriminated in employment

  • Ideas of liberty began to take hold and some enslaved people filed petitions for emancipation in their state legislatures

Abolitionists

  • Hundreds of anti-slavery societies worked towards abolition

  • Black and white women became more active in the movement

    • Sojourner Truth and Harriet Beecher Stowe

  • British Empire outlawed slavery ~ 1833

  • William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator, an anti-slavery newspaper

  • Frederick Douglass believed in working within the political system to end slavery

The Underground Railroad

  • Secret routes with a series of safe hiding places used by those escaping slavery to free northern states and Canada

  • William Still and many Quakers were active in helping fugitive in Pennsylvania

  • Harriet Tubman was a major conductor, returning to the south more than 15 times to bring people to freedom

Slavery in the South

  • 3.5 million enslaved persons

  • Cotton was king (plantations)

    • Fields: Task and Gang System

      • Everyone assigned a task for the day

      • Enslaved people were organized into gangs based on physical ability

    • Hiring out slaves (sent to other farms or plantations for a time