1. 13 Meeting the Challenges of the New Age
Immigration, Urbanization, Social Reform
1820s-1850s

2. Meeting the Challenges of the New Age Immigration, Urbanization, Social Reform 1820s-1850s
Immigration and the City
Urban Problems
Social Reform Movements
Antislavery and Abolitionism
The Women’s Rights Movement
Conclusion
Meeting the Challenges of the New Age Immigration, Urbanization, Social Reform 1820s-1850s

3. Chapter Focus Questions
What caused the immigration of the 1840s and 1850s, and what were responses to it?
Why were cities so unable to cope with rapid urbanization?
What motivated reform movements?
What were the origins and political effects of the abolitionist movement?

4. Chapter Focus Questions (cont’d)
How were women involved in reform efforts?

5. North America and Seneca Falls

6. Women Reformers of Seneca Falls Respond to the Market Revolution
1848: 300 reformers at Seneca Falls women’s rights convention
Resolutions calling for a wide range of rights for women, including the right to vote
Just one of many reform movements of the time
Many issues of the time raised but few problems solved

7. Immigration and the City

8. The Bay and Harbor of New York
Samuel Waugh’s The Bay and Harbor of New York, painted in 1855, Castle Garden, New York’s first official center for immigrants, receiving a boatload of newcomers from Ireland and perhaps from Germany. Note the anti-Irish caricatures, including the trunk on the right labeled “Pat Murfy for Ameriky.” A Chinese junk rides at anchor in the harbor, a reminder that not all immigration in this period was from Europe.

9. FIGURE 13.1 Urban Growth, 1820–60 FIGURE 13.1 Urban Growth, 1820–60
SOURCE: From Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 by Robert Ernst. Copyright 1994 by Syracuse University Press. Reprinted by permission.

10. The Growth of Cities
The market revolution dramatically increased the size of the cities.
“Instant” cities sprung up around critical points in the transportation network.
Chicago, San Francisco and St. Louis grew from towns of 5,000 to cities of 100,000.
By 1860, 20% of Americans lived in cities.

11. MAP 13.1 Distribution of Foreign-Born Residents of the United States in 1860
The ethnic composition of the American population was increased by Irish and German immigration in the 1840s and 1850s, Chinese immigration to the California gold rush, Mormon recruitment of Scottish and English followers to Utah, and the reclassification of Mexicans after the Mexican-American War as foreigners in what had been their own lands.

12. Patterns of Immigration
Immigration was a key part of urban growth.
Beginning in 1830 immigration soared, particularly in the North.
Immigrants came largely from Ireland and Germany.

13. Patterns of Immigration (cont'd)
Life for immigrants was seldom easy, as cities were unprepared for rapid growth and social challenges of immigrant populations.

14. 1858 engraving of an Irish bar in the Five Points area
By 1855, half the voters in New York City were foreign-born. This 1858 engraving of an Irish bar in the Five Points area appeared in the influential Harper’s Weekly. I expressed the temperance reformers’ dislike of immigrants and their drinking habits and the dismay of political reformers that immigrant saloons and taverns were such effective organizing centers for urban political machines.

15. Irish Immigration First major immigrant wave to American cities
: Potato Famine
poor Irish to America
Most lived in cities under miserable conditions

16. Irish Immigration (cont'd)
Most to New York, but Boston, being smaller in size and more homogenous, was overwhelmed by the influx
Catholic Irish faced major religious persecution.

17. Cartoon encounter between a newly arrived Irishman and an African American
This cartoon encounter between a newly arrived Irishman and an African American expresses the fear of many immigrants that they would be treated like blacks and denied the privileges of whiteness.

18. German Immigration
William Penn in the late 18th century invited German immigration
impressed by German industriousness
19th century started German influx, by 1854 Germans surpassed Irish immigration
Not as poor as Irish and more likely to become farmers

19. German Immigration (cont'd)
Dispersed settlements (except northeastern cities and the South)
One Southern exception was Texas, where 1830s Mexican land grants attracted Germans.

20. The Chinese in California
The Gold Rush and railroad construction brought Chinese immigrants to California.
San Francisco’s Chinatown is the oldest Chinese ethnic enclave in America and a center of community life.

21. Ethnic Neighborhoods
Almost all new immigrants lived in urban ethnic enclaves.
Ethnic communities provided support for new immigrants as they learned how to survive in new surroundings.
While ethnic communities preserved immigrants’ culture, native-born Americans often viewed ethnic communities with suspicion.

22. P.T. Barnum’s Famous “Curiosity:” General Tom Thumb

23. Urban Problems
Urban Problems

24. The Five Points neighborhood in lower Manhattan
The Five Points neighborhood in lower Manhattan illustrates the segregated housing patterns that emerged as New York City experienced rapid growth. Immigrants, free African Americans, the poor, and criminals were crowded together in New York’s most notorious slum, while wealthier people moved to more prosperous neighborhoods.

25. New Living Patterns in the Cities
Pre-industrial cities—small, compact “walking cities”
Immigration transformed urban life
The gap increased between rich and poor in cities
Cities struggled
services such as water, sewerage, garbage collection

26. New Living Patterns in the Cities (cont'd)
Residential segregation—ethnic neighborhoods and middle class suburbs—increasingly marked cities.

27. FIGURE 13.2 Participation of Irish and German Immigrants in the New York City Workforce for Selected Occupations, 1855
FIGURE 13.2 Participation of Irish and German Immigrants in the New York City Workforce for Selected Occupations, 1855
This chart shows the impact of the new immigrants on the New York’s workforce, and the dramatic difference between groups. German workers predominate in the skilled trades, while the Irish are clustered in low-skilled, low paying occupations.
SOURCE: From The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, by W. J. Rorabaugh, copyright © 1979 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

28. Ethnicity in Urban Popular Culture
Irish immigrants faced both job discrimination and cultural denigration.
Gang warfare and urban riots reinforced middle class attitudes toward the Irish.
Minstrel shows and racist characters like Jim Crow reinforced native white prejudices.

29. The Labor Movement and Urban Politics
Worker associations became increasingly angry regarding their declining social and economic status.
Workers’ associations became increasingly class-conscious turning to fellow laborers for support, forming trades unions and workers’ associations.

30. The Labor Movement and Urban Politics (cont'd)
Initially, urban worker protest against change focused on party politics, including the short-lived Workingmen’s Party.
Both major parties tried to woo the votes of organized workers.
By the 1850s, New York City’s Tammany Democratic organization controlled city politics with immigrant support.

31. Civic Order
The popular press and writers like Whitman and Poe responded to new urban communities with penny papers, poetry and murder mystery tales.
Cities began to organize police forces to deal with urban crime.

32. Civic Order (cont'd)
Urban riots in Boston, Philadelphia and New York in the 1840s and 1850s showed that immigrants assimilated slowly and faced nativist resentment.

33. Free African Americans in the Cities
More than half of the nation’s free African Americans lived in the North, mainly in cities, where they encountered:
residential segregation
job discrimination
segregated public schools
limits on their civil rights

34. Free African Americans in the Cities (cont.)
Free African Americans formed community support networks, newspapers, and churches.
The economic prospects of African-American men deteriorated.
Free African Americans engaged in antislavery activities, but were frequent targets of urban violence.

35. The Bone Player
This appealing portrait of a musician, The Bone Player, evokes the prevalent stereotype of African Americans as innately musical, but it also clearly portrays a man who is proud of his talent.
SOURCE: William Sidney Morris (American, 1807–1868), The Bone Player, Oil on canvas, ✕ cm (361⁄8 ✕ 291⁄8 in.). Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings Reproduced with permission. Photograph © 2006 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All Rights Reserved.

36. Social Reform Movements

37. The Country School (1871)
Winslow Homer’s famous painting, The Country School (1871), illustrates the central role of young women in education. Homer’s painting is both affectionate and realistic, showing the idealism of the young teacher at the same time showing the barefoot condition of many of her pupils.

38. Religion, Reform and Social Control
Middle-class Americans responded to the dislocations of the market revolution by promoting various reform campaigns.
Evangelical religion drove the reform spirit forward.
Reformers recognized that:
traditional small-scale methods of reform no longer worked
the need was for larger-scale institutions

39. Religion, Reform and Social Control (cont’d)
The doctrine of perfectionism combined with a basic belief in the goodness of people and moralistic dogmatism characterized reform.
Regional and national reform organizations emerged from local projects to deal with various social problems.

40. Religion, Reform and Social Control (cont’d)
Reformers mixed political and social activities and tended to seek to use the power of the state to promote their ends.

41. Education and Women Teachers
Educational reformers changed the traditional ways of educating children by:
children no longer sinners with wills to be broken
innocents needing gentle nurturing
The work of Horace Mann and others led to tax-supported compulsory public schools.

42. Education and Women Teachers (cont'd)
Women were seen as more nurturing and were encouraged to become teachers, creating the first real career opportunity for women.

43. The Drunkard’s Progress
This Currier and Ives lithograph, The Drunkard’s Progress, dramatically conveys the message that the first glass leads the drinker inevitably to alcoholism and finally to the grave, while his wife and child (shown under the arch) suffer.

44. Temperance
Middle-class reformers sought to change Americans’ drinking of alcohol habits.
Temperance was seen as a panacea for all social problems.
Prompted by the Panic of 1837, the working class joined the temperance crusade.
By the mid-1840s alcohol consumption had been cut in half.

45. FIGURE 13.3 Per Capita Consumption of Alcohol, 1800–60
The underlying cause of the dramatic fall in alcohol consumption during the 1830s was the changing nature of work brought about by the market revolution. Contributing factors were the shock of the Panic of 1837 and the untiring efforts of temperance reformers.
SOURCE: W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

46. Moral Reform, Asylums, and Prisons
Reformers also attacked prostitution by organizing charity for poor women and through tougher criminal penalties but had little success.
Another dramatic example of reform was the asylum movement spearheaded by Dorothea Dix.

47. Moral Reform, Asylums, and Prisons (cont'd)
Model penitentiaries such as Sing Sing (Ossining, New York) aimed at reform rather than punishment with limited success.

48. MAP 13.2 Reform Movements in the Burned-Over District
The so-called Burned-Over District, the region of New York State most changed by the opening of the Erie Canal, was a seedbed of religious and reform movements. The Mormon Church originated there and utopian groups and sects like the Millerites and the Fourierists thrived. Charles G. Finney held some of his most successful evangelical revivals in the district. Antislavery feeling was common in the region, and the women’s rights movement began at Seneca Falls.
SOURCE: Reprinted from Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850. Copyright © 1950 by Cornell University. Used with permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

49. Utopianism and Mormonism
The region of New York most changed by the Erie Canal was a fertile ground for religious and reform movements, earning the name Burned-Over District.

50. Utopianism
Religious utopians like the Millerites and Shakers saw an apocalyptic end of history. The Shakers also practiced celibacy amid a fellowship of equality.
Conversely, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community practiced “complex marriage.”

51. Utopianism (cont’d)
New Harmony and the various Fourier-inspired communities unsuccessfully attempted a kind of socialism.

52. Mormonism
Founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 after receiving revelations from God.
Close cooperation and hard work made the Mormon community the most successful communitarian movement.
They migrated to Utah in 1846 under the leadership of Brigham Young due to much harassment over their practice of polygamy.

53. Antislavery and Abolitionism

54. Two widely used antislavery images
The different dates of these two widely used antislavery images are important. The title page of Thomas Branagan’s 1807 book includes an already commonly used image at the time of a male slave. The engraving of a chained female slave was made by Patrick Reason, a black artist, in The accompanying message saying “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” spoke particularly to white female abolitionists in the North, who were just becoming active in antislavery movements in the 1830s.

55. African Americans Against Slavery
By 1830, free blacks in the North had organized more than fifty anti-slavery societies.
David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World attacked slavery and called for slave resistance.
Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 both frightened Southern whites and inspired Northern free blacks and their allies.

56. The American Colonization Society
Various antislavery steps had been taken prior to the 1820s, but had not addressed the continuing reality of southern slavery.
The American Colonization Society was formed in 1817 with support from border state slave owners including Henry Clay.
The ineffective ACS resettled a only a small number of free African Americans in Africa where they founded Liberia.

57. White Abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison
denounced all compromise (including political action and the Constitution) and called for immediate emancipation on moral grounds
The American Anti-Slavery Society
drew on the style of religious revivalists
Mailed over a million pieces of propaganda that led to a crackdown by southern states and a stifling of dissent.

58. White Abolitionists (cont'd)
Several abolitionists were violently attacked and one was killed.

59. Abolitionism and Politics
National political issue
Abolitionists inundated Congress with petitions calling for abolition in the District of Columbia.
Congressional “gag rule”
tabled all such petitions, but repealed in 1844.
John Quincy Adams’s defense of Amistad slaves

60. Abolitionism and Politics (cont'd)
Abolitionist unity splintered along racial and political lines.
White abolitionists (other than Garrisonians) founded the Liberty Party.

61. The Women’s Rights Movement

62. Meeting of strikers in Lynn in 1860
Women’s gatherings, like the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848, and this meeting of strikers in Lynn in 1860, were indicators of widespread female activism.

63. The Grimke Sisters
Sarah and Angelina Grimke left their South Carolina home and traveled north to denounce slavery, becoming the first female public speakers in American history.
While men accorded women a secondary role in the anti-slavery movement, women were a majority of the members.

64. Women’s Rights
Two decades of activity culminated with the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in 1848 and the beginnings of the women’s rights movement.
Historians have only recently acknowledged the central role women played in the various reform movements of this era.

65. Conclusion
Conclusion

66. Market Revolution
The Market Revolution and immigration transformed American urban life.
New associations sprang up to confront rapid social change.
Many group leaders were uncompromising, and issues such as slavery and abolition became polarizing political problems.

67. Chronology
Chronology