1821 – 1855

 Challenges to traditional values & institutions  Social injustice & instability  The emergence of mvmts. to “reform” the nation  Women’s rights, school reform, abolition  Optimistic faith in human nature

 Decay of piety  Deism – “rational” religious doctrines  Universalism & Unitarianism – salvation was available to all

 Decline in commitment to organized churches & denominations  Most Ams. continued to hold strong religious beliefs  Second Great Awakening (~1801)

 Efforts to fight spread of religious rationalism  Methodism founded by John Wesley  Revivals – religious gatherings designed to awaken religious faith

 Combined a more active piety w/a belief in a God whose grace could be attained through faith & good works  Individual & social reform were possible  Influential leaders – Charles Finney & Lyman Beecher

 Female converts outnumbered male  Enslaved blacks interpreted the Christian message as a promise of freedom  In the East, many free African Americans worshipped in separate churches

John Lewis Krimmel, Black People's Prayer Meeting, watercolor, ca. 1811, depicting a Methodist service in Philadelphia

 Gabriel Prosser’s plan for slave rebellion (1800)  Captured & hanged  Spirit of revivalism was also strong among Nat. Ams. – Handsome Lake

 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- Day Saints (Mormon)

 Romanticism  Am. artistic mvmt.  Valued strong feeling & mystical intuition over calm rationality  Appealed to feelings & intuitions of ordinary people  Innate love of goodness, truth, & beauty

 Washington Irving  James Fennimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans)  Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

 Herman Melville (Moby Dick)  Nathaniel Hawthorne (Scarlet Letter)  Edgar Allen Poe

 Philosophical & literary mvmt.  Emphasized living a simple life  Celebrated truth found in nature & in personal emotion & imagination  Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Nature” & “Self-Reliance)  Henry David Thoreau (Walden)

 Experimental groups who lived together & tried to create a perfect place  Brook Farm in West Roxbury, MA  Nathaniel Hawthorne  Robert Owen & New Harmony (IN) 1825  Individual freedom vs. demands of communal society

 Oneida community in upstate NY rejected traditional notions of family & marriage, founded by John Humphrey Noyes  Shakers commitment to complete celibacy, founded in late 1774 by Mother Ann Lee in England

 Reform mvmts. were mostly led by women  Temperance  Education  Care of the poor, the handicapped, & the mentally ill  Treatment of criminals  Rights of women

 Protestant revivalism – crusade against personal immorality  Temperance – crusade against drunkenness  Am. Temperance Society (1826) became a major national mvmt.

 Education  Effort to produce a system of universal public education  Horace Mann – education was a way to protect democracy

 Principle of tax- supported elementary schools est. in every st. by 1850s  Quality of public ed. varied widely  Institutions to help disabled

 Rehabilitation  Prison & hospital reform  Mental health reform  Dorthea Dix

 Early opposition to slavery  Colonization – effort to resettle African Ams. in Africa or Caribbean  American Colonization Society (1817)  Liberia est. 1821

 The Liberator (1831)  Opponents of slavery should talk about its damage  Demand immediate, unconditional, universal abolition of slavery  Extension of all the rights of Am. citizenship

 American Antislavery Society (1833)  Frederick Douglass founded North Star  Abolitionism divided, growing radicalism of Garrison  Division w/in Am. Antislavery Society (1840)

 Underground railroad  Personal liberty laws (TBJ vs. FSL)  SCOTUS (1842)  Liberty Party (1840) stood for “free soil”

 1 st Am. feminist mvmt.  Lucretia Mott  Elizabeth Cady Stanton  Dorothea Dix  Harriet Beecher Stowe  Drawing parallels between plight of women & slaves

 Seneca Falls Convention (NY, 1848)  Adopted “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions”  Sojourner Truth

 Family as an institution, inspired new conceptions of its role in Am. Society  Traditional inequalities remained  Oberlin College (OH, 1837)  Mt. Holyoke College (MA, 1837)

 “Cult of domesticity” – new domestic ideology  Women as guardians of “domestic virtues”  Custodians of morality  Detached from public world  Had real meaning for relatively affluent women