The Second Great Awakening

Second Great Awakening

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• American commitment to organized religion is weakend.

  • Preachers of this time rejected the Calvinistic belief the God predetrmined ones salvation or damnation (heaven vs. hell)
  • Emphasised individual responsibility for seeking salvation and that one could improve themselves and society

• Charles Grandison Finney- preacher

• Mainly Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterian

• People must readmit God and Christ into their daily lives; all people could attain grace through faith

• Revivalism- a tendency or desire to revive a former custom or practice (Religion in this case)

• 4-5 days studied the Bible and examined souls

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American Writers

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• Romanticism: feeling over reason, inner sipirtually over external rules, nature over environment created by humans

• Transcendentalism: overcome the limits of the mind and let their soul reach out to embrace the beauty of the universe

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, Self-Reliance (Transcendetalism)

• Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

• Nathaniel Hawthore: The Scarlet Letter

• Herman Melville: Moby Dick

• Emily Dickinson: American Poet

• Walt Whitman: O Captain, My Captain, Leaves of Grass

• James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans; First American novelist

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Reformers and their Reforms

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Lyman Beecher- Presbyterian Minister

• Temperance
  • Limit the amount of alcohol (moderation)
  • Alcohol can lead to the downfall of man

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Horace Mann

• Father of Education

• Public Education

• State board of education

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Utopia

• Perfect society

• Communist

  • Brook Farm- Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Blithedale Romance”
  • Oneida-upstate NY
  • “Comples Marrige”
  • Shakers- communal ownership of good
  • Strict separation of the sexes in both work and life

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Reformers: Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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• Advocated for women’s suffrage

• Seneca Falls Convention : wrote the Declaration of Sentiments; all men and women were equal

  • Launched the modern women’s rights movement

• Some changes did happen but overshadowed by slavery

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Dorothea Dix - Reformer

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• Social Reformer

• Concerned about the mentally ill in prisons

• Worked to get public hospitals set up for the mentally ill

• Focused on rehabilitation and treatment

• Began her work in Massachusetts

• Spread throughout the country

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