Chapter 12 (1820-1840)

The Foundations of the Reform Impulse ($1820s$–$1840s$)

• The Big Question: Why did Americans in the $1820s$–$40s$ embark on the most ambitious effort in their history to reform society, covering abolitionism, women's rights, temperance, public schools, asylums, and utopian communities?

• The Core Answer (Eric Foner): The Second Great Awakening's faith in human perfectibility met the disruptions of the market revolution. This produced reformers convinced that both individuals and society could be remade.

• Transformation of Freedom: The crusade pushed the meaning of American freedom beyond white men to include the enslaved, women, and the dispossessed.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson ($1841$): Stated, 'In the history of the world, the doctrine of reform has never had such hope as at the present hour.'

• Alexis de Tocqueville's Observation: Noted the American tendency to organize through voluntary associations, including churches, fraternal orders, and political clubs.

• Targets of Reform: Reformers attacked drinking, sabbath-breaking, prison conditions, lack of public education, treatment of the insane, prostitution, slavery, women's subordination, and capitalism itself.

• Evangelical Roots: Most reformers were evangelical Protestants shaped by the Second Great Awakening.

• Multifaceted Reformers: Many, like Abby Kelley, worked across multiple causes including abolition, women's rights, and pacifism.

• International Movement: Reform was a transatlantic movement; leaders in abolition, temperance, and women's rights moved frequently between the U.S. and Europe.

• Regional Divide: Reform movements were weak or nonexistent in the South, where they were often associated with antislavery sentiment.

• Religious Perfectionism:     * Definition: The doctrine that both individuals and society could achieve indefinite improvement.     * The 'Free Moral Agent': If God created man as a free moral agent, sinners could reform themselves and remake the world.     * Radicalization of Causes:         * Temperance shifted from moderation to total abstinence.         * Criticism of war became pacifism.         * Gradual emancipation became immediate abolition.

Utopian Communities and the Communitarian Impulse

• The Communitarian Impulse:     * Approximately $100$ reform communities were founded before the Civil War.     * Term Origin: 'Utopian' comes from Thomas More's $1516$ novel Utopia.     * Goals: Aimed to reorganize society on a cooperative basis and reduce the gap between rich and poor.     * Vocabulary: Through these efforts, the words 'socialism' and 'communism' entered the political vocabulary.     * Social Experimentation: Most experimented with new gender relations and marriage patterns.

• The Shakers:     * Founder: Mother Ann Lee, an English blacksmith's daughter, founded the group in the late $18 ext{th}$ century.     * Establishment: The first Shaker community was established in upstate New York in $1787$.     * Peak: In the $1840s$, they had over $6,000$ members ranging from Maine to Kentucky.     * Beliefs: Believed God had a 'dual' personality (male and female); the sexes were spiritually equal.     * 'Virgin Purity': Practiced celibacy; men and women lived separately in dormitories. The community grew through converts and adopted orphans rather than births.     * Rituals: Known for distinctive dancing rituals which gave them their name.     * Economy: Successful in marketing seeds, herbal medicines, breeding cattle, and producing high-quality furniture.

• Oneida ($1848$):     * Founder: John Humphrey Noyes, a Vermont-born preacher who took perfectionism to extremes.     * Doctrine: Believed the community had achieved 'sinlessness' or 'purity of heart.'     * Location: Oneida, New York.     * 'Complex Marriage': Any community member could propose sexual relations to any other; these were recorded in a public book. Exclusive affections were banned as destructive to social harmony.     * Eugenics: By the $1860s$, a committee determined which couples were allowed to have children.     * Legacy: Survived until $1881$ then transformed into a successful silverware company.

• Brook Farm ($1841$):     * Founders: Transcendentalists near Boston.     * Model: Partially based on Charles Fourier's 'phalanxes'.     * Philosophy: Mixed manual and intellectual labor.     * Members: Attracted writers, teachers, and ministers, though many disliked actual farm work.     * Literary Connection: Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there and later wrote The Blithedale Romance ($1852$) as a satire of the community.

• Owenites and New Harmony:     * Robert Owen: A British factory owner and leading secular communitarian.     * New Lanark: Created a model factory village in Scotland.     * New Harmony ($1825$): Purchased Harmony, Indiana from a German religious group.     * Values: Promoted women's rights (education and divorce) and communal education of children away from parental authority.     * Outcome: Lasted only a few years due to internal disputes but influenced the labor movement and educational reform.

Temperance and Reform Institutions

• The Temperance Movement:     * American Temperance Society ($1826$): Targeted both habitual drunkards and occasional drinkers.     * Impact: By $1845$, alcohol consumption fell to less than half the level of a decade earlier.     * Statistics: Alcohol consumption peaked at $7$ gallons per person per year in $1830$.     * Washingtonian Society ($1840s$): Held 'experience meetings' for reformed drinkers.     * Hostility: Faced opposition from Catholics and those who frequented taverns as workingmen's meeting places.     * Dual Nature of Freedom: Reform was seen as liberating (freedom from 'slavery to drink') and controlling (enforcing self-discipline).

• The Invention of the Asylum:     * Colonial Model: Crime was punished by whipping, fines, or banishment; the poor and mentally ill were handled by families.     * Institutionalization ($1820s$–$1840s$): A program of building jails, poorhouses, asylums, and orphanages.     * Dorothea Dix: A Massachusetts schoolteacher who advocated for the humane treatment of the mentally ill. She successfully campaigned for separate mental hospitals, leading to the construction of mental hospitals in $28$ states before the Civil War.

• The Common School Movement:     * Horace Mann: A Massachusetts politician who led the movement for tax-supported public schools.     * Purpose: Aimed to equip citizens with the tools to participate in democracy.     * Northern Progress: By $1860$, all northern states had established tax-supported school systems.     * Southern Absence: The South lacked this public education infrastructure.

The Crusade Against Slavery: Colonization and Resistance

• Colonization Early Efforts:     * Before the $1830s$, white critics usually paired abolition with colonization (Black emigration to Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America).     * American Colonization Society ($1816$): Supported by Henry Clay, John Marshall, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson.     * Liberia: Established on the West African coast; the capital, Monrovia, was named after President James Monroe.

• Black Opposition:     * $1817$ Philadelphia Convention: $3,000$ free Blacks at Bethel Church rejected colonization.     * Resolutions: Insisted they were entitled to the soil their ancestors' 'blood and sweat manured' and refused to separate from 'our brethren' in slavery.     * Identity: Many organizations removed 'African' from their names to prevent pretexts for deportation.     * Ideological Base: Like Indian Removal, colonization rested on the premise that America was fundamentally a white society.

Militant Abolitionism

• David Walker's Appeal ($1829$):     * Author: A free Black man born in North Carolina who ran a clothing store in Boston.     * Content: Published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, indicting slavery and racial prejudice.     * Warning: Predicted divine punishment for the U.S. if it did not reform.     * Outcome: Southern states put a price on his head; he died mysteriously in $1830$.

• William Lloyd Garrison and The Liberator ($1831$):     * Editorial Stance: 'I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice… I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.'     * Demands: Immediate, uncompensated abolition and integration of Blacks as equal members of the republic.     * Radical Position: Suggested the North should abrogate the Constitution and dissolve the Union to end complicity with slavery.     * Criticism of Colonization: Published Thoughts on African Colonization in $1832$, convincing many that the movement was racist.

• The American Anti-Slavery Society ($1833$):     * Membership: Reached approximately $250,000$ members by the end of the decade, mostly ordinary citizens.     * Theodore Weld: A revival-style orator who trained under Charles G. Finney. He wrote American Slavery As It Is ($1839$), using southern sources to document abuse.     * Methods of Outreach: Used the steam-powered printing press to produce millions of pamphlets and broadsides.     * Antislavery Fairs: Organized by women like Maria Weston Chapman to raise thousands of dollars; these fairs helped establish the pre-Christmas shopping season.     * Uncle Tom's Cabin ($1852$): Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sold $1.5 imes 10^6$ copies ($1,500,000$). It depicted slave families torn apart and was credited by Lincoln (apocryphally) as starting the Civil War.

• Strategy of Moral Suasion:     * Most abolitionists were pacifists ('non-resistants') who rejected violence.     * Definition: Goal was to peacefully convert slaveholders and northerners to Christian values by awakening public opinion to the moral evil of slavery.

Abolitionism and Race

• Integration: Abolitionism was the first racially integrated social movement in American history.

• Key Black Leaders:     * James Forten: A wealthy Black sailmaker who financed The Liberator.     * Frederick Douglass: The most famous fugitive-slave abolitionist; published autobiographies and lectured widely.     * Henry Highland Garnet: Called for slave rebellion in $1843$; a position considered too radical for published proceedings at the time.     * Sojourner Truth: Enslaved in NY, became a preacher and lecturer.     * Mary Ann Shadd Carey: First Black woman newspaper editor (the Provincial Freeman in Canada).

• Frederick Douglass's Rochester Speech ($1852$):     * Title: 'What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?'     * Argument: Charged that the holiday exposed the hypocrisy of a nation proclaiming liberty while permitting slavery. However, he argued the Declaration of Independence's principles must eventually apply to all.

• Alternative Calendar: Black abolitionists celebrated 'freedom' on January $1$ (slave-trade ban of $1808$) and August $1$ (West Indian emancipation in $1834$) rather than July $4$.

• Economic Critique: Charles L. Reason argued that antislavery must include abolishing the dependence and pauperism that doomed oppressed people, pioneering ideas of systemic poverty.

Slavery, Civil Liberties, and Northern Reaction

• Anti-abolitionist Violence:     * Led by 'gentlemen of property and standing' (merchants with southern ties).     * $1835$: Garrison was led through Boston with a rope around his neck.     * $1836$: Mob in Cincinnati destroyed James G. Birney’s press.     * $1837$: Elijah P. Lovejoy was killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois, becoming the movement’s first martyr.     * $1838$: Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hall was burned down.

• The Gag Rule and Postal Crisis:     * $1835$: Postmaster general allowed southern crowds to burn abolitionist mail.     * The Gag Rule ($1836$–$1844$): The House of Representatives prohibited the consideration of antislavery petitions.     * John Quincy Adams: The former president fought the gag rule for years until its repeal in $1844$.

• Free Speech Argument: Violence and the gag rule convinced many northerners that slavery threatened the liberties of white Americans (free speech, free press, right of petition).

The Origins of Feminism

• The Public Woman: Women participated in circulating petitions, mass meetings, and parades.

• Female Moral Reform Society ($1834$): NYC middle-class women sought to redeem prostitutes and published lists of men who frequented brothels.

• Catharine Beecher: Led the movement against Indian removal, which served as political training for women.

• The Grimké Sisters (Angelina and Sarah):     * Daughters of a South Carolina slaveholder who converted to Quakerism.     * Delivered lectures against slavery, drawing criticism from clergymen for being 'un-modest.'     * Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes ($1838$) called for equal rights and 'equal pay for equal work.'

• Early Lecturers:     * Frances Wright: Scottish-born Owenite lectured in the late $1820s$.     * Maria Stewart: In $1832$, the first American woman to lecture to mixed-sex audiences.     * Jarena Lee: A traveling Black minister.

• Seneca Falls Convention ($1848$):     * Organizers: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, who met after being excluded from the $1840$ World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.     * Declaration of Sentiments: Modeled on the Declaration of Independence; 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.'     * Grievances: Lack of voting rights, denied education/employment, husbands’ control over wages/property (coverture).     * Suffrage: The most controversial demand; Stanton argued only the vote would make woman 'free as man is free.'

• Sojourner Truth ($1851$): At the Akron, Ohio convention, she supposedly gave the 'Ain't I a Woman?' speech, emphasizing the plight of working-class and Black women.

Feminism, Marriage, and 'Social Freedom'

• 'Slavery of Sex': Feminists used slavery as an analogy to critique male authority in marriage.

• Ernestine Rose: 'Woman is a slave, from the cradle to the grave.'

• Married Women's Property Laws:     * Mississippi ($1839$): First state to enact property laws for women (originally to protect assets from creditors after the Panic of $1837$).     * New York ($1860$): More far-reaching law allowing women to sign contracts and keep wages.

• Concept of 'Social Freedom': Advocates like Susan B. Anthony argued for self-ownership, including the right to regulate sexual activity and protection from domestic violence.

• Demographic Shift: The birthrate dropped from $7$ children per woman in $1800$ to $4$ children per woman in $1900$, suggesting increased personal autonomy.

• Margaret Fuller: Transcendentalist editor of the New York Tribune. Her work Woman in the Nineteenth Century ($1845$) applied ideas of self-realization to women.

Foner's Final Takeaway

• Impact of Reform: Reformers attacked various 'slaveries' (drinking, ignorance, poverty) and transformed moral responsibility.

• Abolitionist Legacy: Pioneered the idea that freedom includes economic security, full citizenship, and equal rights.

• Feminist Legacy: Used the abolitionist framework to challenge gender subordination.

• Conclusion: Both movements recast 'freedom' as expansive, moving beyond the white-male democracy of the Age of Jackson and laying foundations for Reconstruction and the $19 ext{th}$ Amendment ($1920$).