Module 10
Society, Culture, and Reform, 1820 - 1860 Lecture Notes
Rise of Evangelicalism
The Second Great Awakening of the 1830s-50s marked the spread of evangelical enthusiasm.
In 1800, one in fifteen Americans belonged to a religious organization; by 1850, one in seven did.
The Second Great Awakening affected all parts of society: rural and urban, middle and working class, black and white.
Departing from the Calvinist belief in predestination and original sin, the Awakening propounded the belief that men were free moral agents.
The Second Great Awakening was a communal response to a rapidly changing world that celebrated the culture of individualism.
Some historians have argued that revivalism only reinforced the tendencies of the age. Movement virtues such as sobriety, punctuality, and self-discipline were all congruent with the idea of capitalist relations.
The Second Great Awakening: The Southern Frontier Phase
Camp meetings not only provided emotional religion for the frontier, but also one of the few opportunities for social life for rural people whose everyday lives were often tedious and lonely. Camp meeting revivals (in the south), however, did not usually lead to organized social reform because the thrust of the religious message was so intensely personal.
The Second Great Awakening in the North
Upstate New York, an area of transplanted New Englanders, became known as the “Burned Over District” due to the religious fervor that swept the region like a wild fire. There, the greatest revivalist was Charles G. Finney, who paid no attention to theology and preached an unqualified doctrine of free will. Finney successfully experimented with revival techniques, such as the “anxious bench,” and his revivals often led to the organization of more churches.
From Revivalism to Reform
The northern revivals stimulated reform movements by appealing to middle-class citizens who had been socially active before their conversions and who now found a way to preserve traditional values in a rapidly changing world. The various evangelical reform movements actually did alter American life. The temperance movement, for example, enlisted over a
million members, mostly women, who successfully persuaded Americans to cut their consumption of alcohol by more than 50%.
Domesticity and Changes in the American Family
Marriage and Sex Roles
By the 19th century, marriage had changed profoundly. Mutual love became the only acceptable reason for marriage, and couples were expected to remain in love after marriage.
This development gave women much more social influence despite their continual legal inequality.
“The Cult of Domesticity” placed women in the home, but the home was glorified as the center of all efforts to civilize and Christianize society.
Most women who were married to farmers or laborers still contributed to family income, but more and more middle- and upper-class women could afford to dedicate themselves to the home, making it a sanctuary from the outside world.
Many women who found themselves liberated from the drudgery of farm chores used their leisure to improve themselves, to get to know other women, and to lead crusades against vice; above all, however, they attempted to become ideal mothers.
The Discovery of Childhood
In the 19th century, the child was placed at the center of family life.
Each child was looked upon as unique and irreplaceable. No longer would parents name a child after a deceased sibling.
Ideal parents no longer “broke” a child’s will; they formed his character with affection. Also, the practice of shipping a child off to relatives or neighbors to learn a trade was no longer practiced with regularity.
Parental discipline was meant to instill guilt rather than fear so that the child would eventually learn self-discipline.
Institutional Reform
Reformers hoped that public institutions such as schools would continue what the family had begun, or that institutions such as asylums and prisons would mend what the family had failed to do.
The Extension of Education
Between 1820 and 1850, public school systems expanded rapidly, especially in the North.
Originally demanded by the working class as a means for advancement, the public schools were seized by middle-class reformers, who saw them as the ideal instrument for inculcating values of hard work and responsibility.
Horace Mann, a leading proponent of tax supported public schools, overcame the objections of taxpayers who resented having to subsidize the education of the poor by pointing out that
public schools would save children of the poor and immigrants from becoming like their parents, “vile and troublesome”, and a public expense.
Many parents, especially Catholics, resented public schools, believing they alienated children from their parents. Therefore, they developed an extensive parochial schools system.
Discovering the Asylum
For those who lacked self-discipline, the poor, the criminal and the insane; reformers hoped harsh measures would lead to rehabilitation.
Prisoners, for example, were put into solitary confinement (penitentiaries) and had to conform to a strict daily schedule at such “model” prisons as the one at Auburn, New York.
Rehabilitation, however, seemed not to work.
Public support was always skimpy, and most prisons, asylums, and poorhouses became warehouses for the unwanted, who lived in abysmal conditions despite the heroic efforts of Dorothea Dix, who worked tirelessly to shed light on these abuses and to bring some decency to these institutions.
Reform Turns Radical
Divisions
By the 1830s, radical perfectionists had become impatient with moderate reform and began to form their own societies.
The temperance movement split into moderate and radical wings, but the split among the opponents of slavery had more important consequences.
Moderate abolitionists hoped for a gradual end to slavery, which they saw as the only realistic possibility, and they even supported removal of blacks from the U.S. as a concession to white racism – American Colonization Society. (A few thousands were shipped to Liberia in West Africa.)
Radical abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison (publisher of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator), demanded immediate emancipation and formed the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.
The Abolitionist Enterprise
Abolitionists grew from the evangelical tradition and drew strength from it.
The abolitionists appealed mainly to ambitious and hard-working inhabitants of small towns, but often encountered opposition from the working class, who disliked blacks and feared their economic and social competition, and from solid citizens, who regarded abolitionists as anarchists.
Abolitionists tended to weaken their influence by perpetual in-fighting.
William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the The Liberator in 1831, rebuked fellow abolitionists who believed that slavery could be contained or starved out gradually.
In 1831, Garrison passed from favoring gradual emancipation to demanding immediate emancipation, with no compensation (monetary payment) to slaveholders.
Garrison not only called for the North to secede from the Union in order to reject
slavery, but called the Constitution “a covenant with hell” and publicly burned a copy of it because it upheld slavery.
Others believed that slavery should be fought within the political system, contrary to Garrison’s provocateur stance. This moderate wing gave birth to the Liberty Party in 1840, the remnants of which later formed part of the Republican Party.
From Abolitionism to Women’s Rights
The abolitionist movement gave many women an opportunity to engage in a public reform program. In advocating freedom for blacks, women began to realize their own inequality.
When they discovered that many male abolitionists refused to accept women as equal partners in protest, women, led by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who proclaimed that
history was the story of men’s tyranny over women), organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, which marks the beginning of the movement for female rights.
Radical Ideas and Experiments
In addition to the reform movements inspired by evangelicalism, other attempts were made to create perfect individuals or a perfect society.
For example, a number of utopian communities were established, such as Oneida Community or Brook Farm, but most were short-lived.
Intellectuals, repelled by the crudities of the revivalists, sought intense religious experience in a literary and philosophical movement called transcendentalism.
New England movement that preached:
solitary withdrawal as a means of communion with God
communal self-sufficiency
The leader of the Transcendentalist movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He was one of the most popular lecturers and essayists of the day.
Henry David Thoreau, a young disciple of Emerson’s, lived by himself in the woods along the shore of Walden Pond and carefully recorded his thoughts and impressions. In a sense, he pushed the ideal of self-culture to its logical outcome - a utopia of one. The resulting work, Walden (1854), is one of the greatest achievements in American literature.
A series of communal experiments swept the US in the 1830s and 1840s, offering alternatives to a conformist, materialistic society.
For some Americans, withdrawing from society was feasible only through a communal effort.
The Transcendentalist communal experiment of Brook Farm began in 1841. Intellectuals tried to become self-sufficient farmers, though most eventually refused to work.
Some communal enterprises were secular, others religious. The Phalanx communities, for example, practiced collective ownership of property and a socialist view of redistributing wealth and power. Over 100 communities were established on this model in the 1840s.
The Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848, advocated total
freedom from sin and “complex marriage,” or free love. Many communities, from the celibate Shakers to the polygamous Mormons, placed sexual conduct at the heart of their beliefs.
Perceptive critics, like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, regarded the nation’s pursuit of perfection with a skeptical eye, but the reform impulse, no matter how eccentric at times, opened the way to necessary changes in American life