1. Reform & Culture in Ante-Bellum America
APUSH
Unit 4

2. Motive for Reform Movements
Time frame:
Had many roots:
Romantic Movement
Quaker Religion
Transcendentalists
Second Great Awakening
Time Frame: Reform Movements lasted from
Had many roots
The Romantic Movement
Stressed goodness of man kind
Quaker Religion
Stressed inconsistency between Declaration of Independence and actual US law
Transcendentalists
Questioned the value of industrialization if human problems were not being fixed.
The Second Great Awakening
Focus on second coming of Christ
Need to reform society to hasten his return

3. The Second Great Awakening
“Spiritual Reform From Within” [Religious Revivalism]
Social Reforms & Redefining the Ideal of Equality
Temperance:
Movement moved from moderation to abstinence
Led by women but supported by factory owners
Asylum & Penal reform:
Dorthea Dix reported and investigated treatment of the insane
Led to creation of humane institutions
Legal Code Reforms
Reduction in crimes punishable by death
Abolishment of public hangings in many states.
Abandoned flogging
Abolitionism:
American Colonization Society formed in 1816
Goal was to establish a colony in Liberia to send all the slaves. Was not successful – about 13,000 slaves were ultimately sent.
Abolitionism rose in the 1830s with an emphasis on racial equality
William Lloyd Garrison
Theodore Weld
Organized abolitionists smuggled 2,000 slaves a year out of the south to Canada.
Women’s Rights:
Women were considered inferior to men. Not allowed to:
obtain a higher education
Vote
control their own property
Grimke Sisters became leaders in the movement
Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments (1848)
Statement that women are mistreated by men
Improvements made possible by:
Democratic spirit of Jacksonian period
Industrial Revolution
Reform Movements (women crusading equally to men)
Education:
Argued for:
Compulsory education in every state by 1860
Leader = Horace Mann
Education being offered to some females
Growth in education reforms seen primarily in the north
Temperance
Education
Abolitionism
Asylum & Penal Reform
Women’s Rights

4. Artistic Achievements
Thomas Jefferson
Designed :
Gilbert Stuart ( )
Hudson River School of Art
Thomas Jefferson
Finest American architect of his generation
Designed Monticello
His home in Virginia
Designed the University of Virginia
Gilbert Stuart ( )
Best American painter of his era
Painted many portraits of Washington
Hudson River School of Art
Emphasized romantic mirroring of local landscapes.

5. Literature American Readers & Literature:
The Knickerbocker Group in NYC
American Readers and Literature:
Few Americans read “polite” literature in the early 19th c.
Much of their reading imported or plagiarized from England.
American literature received a strong boost from nationalist wave after War of 1812.
The Knickerbocker Group in NYC
Boasted some of America’s greatest early writers.
Washington Irving
1st American to win international recognition as a literary figure
James Fennimore Cooper
1st American novelist to gain world fame.

6. Transcendentalism Birth of Philosophy Role of Education Emerged:
Leaders:
Philosophy
Role of Education
Birth of:
Emerged in New England during the 2nd quarter of the 19th century.
Resulted in part from a liberalizing of the austere Puritan theology.
Owed much to foreign thinkers including German romantic philosophers
Transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller
Philosophy:
Truth “transcends” the senses: cannot be found my empiricism alone.
Proclaimed that God was in everyone, and that everyone had the ability of becoming “Christ like.”
A person could transcend [rise above] his human weakness and achieve perfection.
Role of Education:
Perfection achieved through education which would raise a person’s consciousness about society’s imperfections.
Believed once people were educated about society’s evils these problems would disappear.

7. Emerson and Thoreau Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau
Stressed Self-reliance, self confidence, self improvement, and self-discipline.
Henry David Thoreau
A poet, mystic, transcendentalist, and non-conformist.
Wrote essay on Civil Disobedience
Written as a result of his brief experience in jail when he refused to pay taxes to support the Mexican war effort.
Encouraged writings of Ghandi and MLK, Jr.

8. Individualists and Dissenters
Edgar Allen Poe
Gifted lyric poet
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Reflected Calvinist obsession w/ original sin and struggle of good v. evil
Herman Melville
Lashed out at the popular optimism of his day.
Nathaniel Hawthorne