Chapter 8, Section 1 Religion Sparks Reform How did religion shape social and political reforms in the years ?

REFORMS 2 nd Great Awakening Prison Reforms Abolition Care of Mentally Ill Women’s Rights Workers’ Rights Temperance Movement Utopias Transcend- entalism

REFORM MOVEMENTS OF THE EARLY TO MID-1800’s REFORMS 2 nd Great Awakening Prison Reforms Abolition Care of Mentally Ill Women’s Rights Workers’ Rights Temperance Movement Utopias Transcend- entalism

SECTION 1: Identify the causes, characteristics, principal actors and effects of the second Great Awakening. SECTION 2: Describe the chief proponents of abolition and list their contributions. SECTION 3: Identify what events and which people were central to the early women’s rights movement. SECTION 4: Describe what problems were created by industrialization in 19 th century America.

CHAPTER 8, SECTION 1 The spirit of optimism and reform affected nearly all areas of American life and culture, including education, the role of women and the family, and literature and the arts.

Second Great Awakening ’s Impact of the American Revolution on Religion Rejected: Predetermination of Calvinists and Puritans Embraced: Democratic and Individualistic Ideals of the Revolution. RESULT: Individuals may reform themselves to achieve salvation and may reform society.

Second Great Awakening Revivals were the means by which the Second Great Awakening Spread. Revivals were the site of impassioned preaching, usually in tents or halls, to awaken faith and spark conversion.

Revivalism and Class Revivals are: An emotional meeting designed to awaken religious faith through impassioned preaching and prayer May last 4-5 days More common on frontier, South and West Less common among elites Creates more democratic churches, i.e. Methodists, Baptists, Adventists, etc. “Canary” for societal attitudes toward slavery Churches Split  Parties Split  Union Splits

Charles G. Finney Most famous preacher of the period. Urged “Christian perfectionism” Worked in Rochester, NY , AKA “burned over district” When he preached his listeners shrieked, moaned and fainted. Converted at the age of 29

Counter-Reaction to the 2 nd Great Awakening Unitarianism: Emphasizes use of reason and conscience, not emotion, as means to reform and conversion. Urges members to reform society. Leader: William Ellison Channing

Transcendentalists (1830’s) TRUTH IS NOT OBJECTIVE ALONE – DISCOVERED BY “INNER LIGHT” Individualism, Self-reliance, Self-Discipline Nathaniel Hawthorne: Scarlet Letter Washington Irving: Legend of Sleepy Hollow Noah Webster: American Dictionary Edgar Allen Poe: The Raven James Fennimore Cooper: Last of the Mohicans

Transcendentalism A Philosophical and Literary Movement Emphasizes: simple life, truth found in nature, imagination and art Ideals: individualism, freedom, self-reliance Ralph Waldo Emerson: founder and leader Henry David Thoreau: Reformer Wrote Walden and Civil Disobedience, Later inspires Ghandi, Martin Luther King, others

Religious and Utopian Communities, Brook Farm – Founded 1841 to “prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons.” Destroyed by fire in Religious motives dominated the founding of Shaker and Mormon communities. Ideas of Robert Owen & Frenchman Charles Fourier, who sought to cure the evils of competitive society by establishing a harmonious world, influenced communities like Modern Times on Long Island and the North American Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey. Noyes's Oneida mingled religious and secular motives in ways hard to disentangle

Unitarians Emphasized reason and appeals to conscience as the paths to perfection Wealthy and educated following Believed conversion was a gradual process. Purpose of Christianity was “the perfection of human nature” utopian communities – or perfect place.

Utopian Communities Another reform movement of this era was the utopian movement. Some reformers believed in creating new communities that would be free of social ills. Shaker Societies: Shared, believed men and women were equal, refused to fight for any reason

Civil Disobedience Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her--the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

Civil Disobedience A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

African American Churches Bethel African Church founded by Richard Allen in Philadelphia. Evolves into the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). Site for education, community, and political organization. Calls for reform and abolition.

School and Prison Reform Jacksonian Democracy and Growth on Frontier spurs expansion of public schools. Horace Mann – establishes and reforms public schools system in Massachusetts. Model for most of US. Dorothea Dix – Reforms prisons & asylums Reformed care of mentally ill in South Alexis De Tocqueville -1831, criticizes US prisons, spurs reforms. Goal of prison changes: Reform, not Punish.

Map: Religious and Utopian Communities, Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

The Shakers What is evidence of Shaker spirituality do you see in the pictures here?

J H Noyes and the Oneida Community