Antebellum Culture & Reform Mr. Owens

Essential Qestions What were the causes and effects of the Second Great Awakening? What were the key voluntary organizations and individuals that contributed to reform movement like Temperance during the Antebellum Period? What were the goals and accomplishments of the Abolition movement and the push for rights for African Americans in the North and the South? What were the goals and accomplishments of the Women’s Rights Movement including the Seneca Falls Convention?

2 nd Great Awakening Revivalism: salvation for all through faith, repentance, & “good works” Charles G. Finney in 1823 series of revivals in upstate NY “burned-over district” – emotional “hell-&-brimstone” Baptists & Methodists – camp meetings spread through South & West – 2 largest sects by 1850 Millennialism – world to end w/ Christ’s 2 nd coming, led by William Miller “Millerites” Oct 21, 1844 (7 th Day Adventists) Mormons: founded by Joseph Smith in 1830, Book of Mormon, after Smith’s murder in 1844 Brigham Young led Mormons to “New Zion” (Salt Lake City, Utah) in 1847

Transcendentalists Inspired by Romanticism focused on individual discovering inner self by trusting intuition & finding God in nature Centered in Concord, MA Challenged materialism, conformity to church & society Inspired reforms especially antislavery movement Ralph Waldo Emerson – speaker & essayist urged creating a distinctive American culture, self-reliance, independent thinking & spiritual over the material. Abolitionist. Henry David Thoreau – Walden (1854) & “On Civil Disobedience” inspires Gandhi & MLK Jr. Brook Farm – 1841 movement inspired failed communal experiment in Brook Farm, MA headed by George Ripley included Margaret Fuller & Nathaniel Hawthorne

Utopias & Communal Experiments Shakers: founded by Mother Ann Lee, practiced celibacy & common property – equality, peaked at 6,000 in 1840s in New England, chairs Amana Colonies: Germans in Iowa followed “Pietism” focused & communal living individual moral behavior Oneida Community: Founded by John Humphrey Noyes focused on communal property & marriage, criticized as “free love”, silverware New Harmony: Indiana, founded by Welsh industrialist Robert Owen “Utopian Socialism” Fourier Phalanxes: followers of French socialist Charles Fourier – shared work and housing communities

Art & Literature Hudson River School of art: NY Thomas Cole & Frederick Church – landscapes & romanticism of nature Genre painting of everyday life – George Caleb Bingham Literature: James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales ( ) frontier, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1855) Architecture: Greek columns – classical Athens

Reforming Society Inspired by 2 nd Great Awakening, Transcendentalism & “perfectionism” Temperance: “Demon Rum!” – High rate of alcoholism(5 gallons per person in 1820) – American Temperance Society (1826) pledge of sobriety – 1840 movement to treat alcoholism as a disease – Opposed by Irish & German immigrant groups – 12 states passed prohibition laws between Asylum Movement: public institutions – Mental Hospitals: Dorothea Dix in 1840s insane asylums – Schools for the blind (Dr. Samuel Howe) & deaf (Thomas Gallaudet) – Prisons: PA, penitentiaries – use of rehabilitation & solitary confinement, strict rules of discipline & reform – mixed results Public Education – Free Common Schools – headed by MA reformer Horace Mann – Moral Education – McGuffey Reader, protestant lessons – Higher Education – expansion of small private colleges & including Mount Holyoke & Oberlin College admitted women

Women’s Rights Causes: drop in # of children, more leisure time to devote to religious & moral causes, & education “Cult of Domesticity”: emphasized women’s moral role in home, idealized 4 “virtues” piety, purity, domesticity, & submissiveness Women’s Rights: many inspired by other causes especially antislavery – Sarah & Angelina Grimke – Letter on the Condition of Women and the Equality of the Sexes (1837) – Lucretia Mott & Elizabeth Cady Stanton - began campaign for women’s rights Seneca Falls Convention – NY 1848, 1st in American history – issue “Declaration of Sentiments” Stanton & Susan B. Anthony led campaign for equal voting, legal, and property rights for women. “Bloomers” feminism in fashion

Abolition Movement American Colonization Society (ACS) 1817 attempted to “re- colonize” freed blacks to Africa – founded Monrovia, Liberia in 1822 but only 12,000 left by 1860 American Antislavery Society (1833) founded by William Lloyd Garrison who began publication of The Liberator in 1831 – “immediatist” – later burned Constitution as a “pact with the devil” (moderates were “gradualists) Liberty Party – goal to end slavery by political & legal means ran James Birney for president in 1840 & 1844 Black Abolitionists: – Frederick Douglass – The North Star, Sojourner Truth – Harriet Tubman (Underground Railroad) – David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens” advocated immediate rejection of slavery including using violence if necessary (blamed by some for inspiring Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831