Final Chapter 12

Final Chapter 12

An Age of Reform 1820-1840

Focus Questions

• What were the major movements and goals of antebellum reform?

• What were the different varieties of abolitionism?

• How did abolitionism challenge barriers to racial equality and free speech?

• What were the diverse sources of the antebellum women's rights movement and its significance?

Abby Kelley

• Born in Massachusetts in 1811, educated at a Quaker boarding school.

• Joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Lynn, Massachusetts.

• Began public speeches about slavery in 1838.

• Spoke almost daily in churches, public halls, and antislavery homes on "the holy cause of human rights."

• Active in pacifist organizations.

• Pioneer in the early struggle for women's rights.

• Challenged the assumption that a woman's "place" was in the home.

• Married Stephen S. Foster, an abolitionist.

Chronology

• 1787: First Shaker community established in upstate New York.

• 1816: American Colonization Society founded.

• 1817: Black convention opposes colonization.

• 1825: Owenite community established at New Harmony, Indiana.

• 1826: American Temperance Society founded.

• 1827: First U.S. Black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, established.

• 1829: David Walker's An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.

• 1833: American Anti-Slavery Society founded.

• 1834: Female Moral Reform Society organized.

• 1836: Congress adopts the "gag rule."

• 1837: Elijah Lovejoy killed.

• 1845: Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

• 1848: John Humphrey Noyes founds Oneida, New York; Seneca Falls Convention held.

• 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; Frederick Douglass's speech, "What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?"

• 1860: Tax-supported school systems established in all northern states.

The Reform Impulse

• Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841 noted the hope in reform.

• Alexis de Tocqueville observed Americans organizing through voluntary associations.

• Reformers worked to:

  • Prevent liquor manufacture and sale.

  • End public entertainments and mail delivery on Sundays.

  • Improve prisons.

  • Expand public education.

  • Uplift wage laborers.

  • Reorganize society based on cooperation.

• Reformers used speakers, petitions, and pamphlets to convert public opinion.

• Some reform movements were weak or nonexistent in the South due to association with antislavery sentiment.

• Reform was an international movement.

• Tactics varied: moral suasion, government power, and cooperative settlements.

• Reformers never amounted to a majority but had a profound impact.

Utopian Communities

• About 100 reform communities before the Civil War.

• Called "utopian" after Thomas More's novel.

• Differed in structure and motivation (religious, secular).

• Aimed to reorganize society on a cooperative basis.

• "Socialism" and "communism" entered the language.

• Experimented with gender relations and marriage patterns.

• Insisted on ending men's "property" in women.

The Shakers

• Sought retreat from sin.

• Most successful religious community.

• Founded in the late eighteenth century by Mother Ann Lee.

• First community in upstate New York in 1787.

• Believed in God's "dual" personality (male and female).

• Practiced "virgin purity" and abandoned traditional family life.

• Grew by attracting converts and adopting children.

• Known for frenzied dancing.

• Successful economically, marketed seeds, medicines, and furniture.

Oneida

• Founded in 1848 in upstate New York by John Humphrey Noyes.

• Noyes preached achieving a state of complete "purity of heart."

• Did away with private property and traditional marriage.

• Practiced "complex marriage," where any man could propose sexual relations to any woman.

• The community was dictatorial, with members observing and criticizing each other.

• Practiced eugenics to improve the human race by regulating reproduction.

Worldly Communities

• Spiritually oriented communities had longevity due to selfless devotion.

• Worldly communities were prone to internal divisions.

Brook Farm

• Established in 1841 by New England transcendentalists.

• Modeled on Charles Fourier's ideas.

• Attracted writers, teachers, and ministers.

• Disbanded after a few years.

• Nathaniel Hawthorne offered a skeptical view in The Blithedale Romance.

The Owenites

• Robert Owen, a British factory owner, created a model factory village at New Lanark, Scotland.

• Combined strict rules with comfortable housing and free education.

• Promoted equality among people.

The Temperance Movement

• Sought to reduce the consumption of alcohol.

The Crusade Against Slavery

• Before the 1830s, challenge to slavery mainly from Quakers, slaves, and free Blacks.

• Slavery question faded after the Revolution, with occasional controversies like the Missouri controversy of 1819-1821.

Colonization

• Coupled calls for abolition with deporting freed slaves to Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America.

• American Colonization Society founded in 1816.

• Established Liberia on the coast of West Africa.

• Many observers found colonization impractical.

• Supported by prominent political leaders like Henry Clay, John Marshall, and Jackson.

• Colonization rested on the premise that America is fundamentally a white society.

Blacks and Colonization

• Several thousand Black Americans emigrated to Liberia.

• Most African Americans opposed colonization.

• Formation of the American Colonization Society galvanized free Blacks to claim their rights as Americans.

• Black convention in Philadelphia in 1817 insisted Blacks were Americans.

Militant Abolitionism

• Arose in the 1830s, demanding immediate abolition.

• Rejected gradual emancipation.

• Insisted Blacks should be incorporated as equal members.

• Abolitionists insisted on economic, civil, and political rights regardless of race.

An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World

• Written in 1829 by David Walker, a free African American.

• Warned of divine punishment if the nation did not mend its ways.

• Called on Blacks to take pride and claim their rights.

The Emergence of Garrison

• William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator in 1831.

• Called for immediate abolition.

• His pamphlet Thoughts on African Colonization persuaded many that Blacks must be recognized as part of American society.

Spreading the Abolitionist Message

• Leaders took advantage of print technology and literacy.

• Between 1833 and the end of the decade, some 100,000 northerners joined local groups.

Activists

• Farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, laborers, and a few prominent businessmen.

Theodore Weld

• Helped to create its mass constituency.

• Trained a band of speakers.

• Message: Slavery is a sin.

• Also supervised the publication of abolitionist pamphlets, including his own Slavery As It Is (1839), a compilation of accounts of the maltreatment of slaves.

Abolitionist Fundraising

• Pioneered modern ways of raising funds especially: charity fairs or "bazaars,"

• Offered a foretaste of later consumer activism with Slogan: "Buy for the Sake of the Slave,"

Slavery and Moral Suasion

• Many southerners feared that abolitionists intended to spark a slave insurrection

• Many abolitionists rejected violence as a means of ending slavery.

• Strategy was moral suasion.

• Abolitionists adopted the role of radical social critics.

Abolitionists and the Idea of Freedom

• Abolitionist crusade both reinforced and challenged common understandings of freedom in Jacksonian America.

Birthright Citizenship

• The crusade against slavery gave birth to a new understanding of citizenship and the rights it entailed.

A New Vision of America

• In a society in which the rights of citizenship had become more and more closely associated with whiteness, the antislavery
  movement sought to reinvigorate the idea of freedom as a truly universal entitlement.

• Abolitionists also pioneered the modern idea that human rights took precedence over national sovereignty.

Black and White Abolitionism

Black Abolitionists

• Blacks played a leading role in the antislavery movement.

• Frederick Douglass was only one among many former slaves who published accounts of their lives in bondage.

Racism

• The first racially integrated social movement in American history and the first to give equal rights for Blacks a central place
  in its political agenda, abolitionism was nonetheless a product of its time and place.

• By the 1840s. Black abolitionists sought an independent role within the movement, regularly holding their own conventions.

• The Black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet, who as a child had escaped from slavery in Maryland with his father, proclaimed at one such gathering in 1843 that slaves should rise in
  rebellion to throw off their shackles.

Slavery and American Freedom

• At every opportunity, Black abolitionists rejected the nation's pretensions as a land of liberty.

• Black abolitionists also identified the widespread poverty of the free Black population as a product of slavery and
  insisted that freedom possessed an economic dimension.

• The greatest oration on American slavery and American freedom was delivered in Rochester in 1852 by Frederick Douglass.

Gentlemen of Property and Standing

• At first, abolitionism aroused violent hostility from northerners who feared that the movement threatened to disrupt the Union

• Led by "gentlemen of property and standing" (often merchants with close commercial ties to the South), mobs disrupted abolitionist meetings in northern cities.

• Antislavery editor Elijah P. Lovejoy became the movement's first martyr in 1837 when he was killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois, while defending his press.

Slavery and Civil Liberties

• Far from stemming the movement's growth, however, mob attacks and attempts to limit abolitionists' freedom of speech
  convinced many northerners that slavery was incompatible with the democratic liberties of white Americans.

• For many years, the American public sphere excluded discussion of slavery.

• The fight for the right to debate slavery openly and without reprisal led abolitionists to elevate "free opinion"-freedom of speech and of the press and the right of petition-to a central place in what Garrison
  called the "gospel of freedom."

The Origins of Feminism

The Rise of the Public Woman

• Frederick Douglass later recalled "women will occupy a
  large space in its pages."

• One such activist was Lucy Colman, She became an abolitionist lecturer, a teacher at a school for Blacks in upstate
  New York, an advocate of women's rights, and an opponent of capital punishment

• The public sphere was open to women in ways government and party politics were not.

Social and Political Activism

• Women organized a petition campaign against the policy of Indian removal.

• Dorothea Dix, a Massachusetts schoolteacher, was the leading advocate of more
  humane treatment of the insane

• In 1834, middle-class women in
  New York City organized the Female Moral Reform Society

Equality and Understanding

• All these activities enabled women
  to carve out a place in the public sphere

• The daughters of a prominent South Carolina slaveholder, Angelina and Sarah
  were converted first to Quakerism and then to abolitionism while visiting Philadelphia

The Grimké sisters

• First women to apply the abolitionist doctrine of universal freedom and equality to the status of women.