Chapter 10: Religion and Reform

Revival and Religious Change

• In the early nineteenth century, a succession of religious revivals collectively known as the Second Great Awakening remade the nation’s religious landscape
  • The Second Great Awakening emerged in response to powerful intellectual and social currents
  • The market revolution, western expansion, and European immigration all challenged traditional bonds of authority, and evangelicalism promised equal measures of excitement and order
• Many revivalists abandoned the comparatively formal style of worship observed in the well-established Congregationalist and Episcopalian churches and instead embraced more impassioned forms of worship that included the spontaneous jumping, shouting, and gesturing found in new and alternative denominations

Atlantic Origins of Reform

• The reform movements that emerged in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century were not American inventions but were instead rooted in a transatlantic world where both sides of the ocean faced similar problems and together collaborated to find similar solutions (many of factors that affected America also affected Europe and vice versa)
  • Improvements in transportation, including the introduction of the steamboat, canals, and railroads, connected people not just across the United States, but also with other like-minded reformers in Europe
  • The reduction of publication costs created by new printing technologies in the 1830s allowed reformers to reach new audiences across the world

The Benevolent Empire

• After religious disestablishment, citizens of the United States faced a dilemma: how to cultivate a moral and virtuous public without aid from state-sponsored religion
  • Most Americans agreed that a good and moral citizenry was essential for the national project to succeed, but many shared the perception that society’s moral foundation was weakening
• The benevolent empire departed from revivalism’s early populism, as middle-class ministers dominated the leadership of antebellum reform societies
• Among all the social reform movements associated with the benevolent empire, the temperance crusade was the most successful
  • The temperance crusade’s effort to curb the consumption of alcohol got widespread support among the middle class
  • Alcohol consumption became a significant social issue after the American Revolution, and many Temperance reformers saw a direct correlation between alcohol and other forms of vice
• Difficulties arose, however, when the benevolent empire attempted to take up more explicitly political issues
  • The movement against Indian removal was the first major example of this
  • The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was met with fierce opposition from within the affected Native American communities as well as from the benevolent empire

Antislavery and Abolitionism

• The revivalist doctrines of salvation, perfectionism, and disinterested benevolence led many evangelical reformers to believe that slavery was the most God-defying of all sins and the most terrible blight on the moral virtue of the United States
  • While white interest in and commitment to abolition had existed for several decades, organized antislavery advocacy had been largely restricted to models of gradual emancipation (seen in several northern states following the American Revolution) and conditional emancipation (seen in colonization efforts to remove Black Americans to settlements in Africa)
• By the 1830s, however, a rising tide of anticolonization sentiment among northern free Black Americans and middle-class evangelicals’ flourishing commitment to social reform radicalized the movement
• However, such efforts encountered fierce opposition, as most Americans did not share abolitionists’ particular brand of nationalism
  • Immediatists were attacked as the harbingers of disunion and rabble-rousers who would stir up sectional tensions
  • Violent harassment threatened abolitionists’ personal safety
• Abolitionists in the 1840s increasingly moved from agendas based on reform to agendas based on resistance
  • Moral situationists continued to appeal to hearts and minds, and political abolitionists launched sustained campaigns to bring abolitionist agendas to the ballot box
• The model of resistance to the slave power only became more pronounced after 1850, when a long-standing Fugitive Slave Act was given new teeth
  • The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 upped the ante by harshly penalizing officials who failed to arrest runaways and private citizens who tried to help them
  • Culminating in John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, the violence of the 1850s convinced many Americans that the issue of slavery was pushing the nation to the brink of sectional cataclysm

Women’s Rights in Antebellum America

• In the era of revivalism and reform, Americans understood the family and home as the hearthstones of civic virtue and moral influence

  • This increasingly confined middle-class white women to the domestic sphere, where they were responsible for educating children and maintaining household virtue
  • Women were expected to be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic, and to pass these virtues on to their children
  • These expectations are known as the “Cult of Domesticity,” or the “Cult of True Womanhood”

  Female education provides an example of the great strides made by and for women during the antebellum period

• As part of a larger education reform movement in the early republic, several female reformers worked tirelessly to increase women’s access to education, arguing that if women were to take charge of the education of their children, they needed to be well educated themselves

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