Unit 4
An Era of Expansion
Chapter 15: Early 19th Century Reformers
I. The Reforming Spirit
A. Political Origins
1. Ideals of liberty and equality in the Declaration of Independence inspired people to improve society.
2. The spread of democracy- more people were voting than ever before.
3. Some people began to feel that slavery and other injustices violated their democratic ideals.
a) social reform- an organized attempt to improve what is unjust or imperfect in society.
B. Religious Reform –During the colonial period, many Americans believed in predestination, the belief that God decided in advance which people would attain salvation after death.
1. Second Great Awakening – religious movement in the early 1800s that stressed free will rather than predestination.
a) Religious revivals, or large outdoor meetings, encouraged people to reform their lives.
b) Charles Grandison Finney teaches that individual salvation is the first step to the reform of a society.
C. Hospital and Prison Reform
1. Dorothea Dix visited jails in Boston and found that people who were mentally ill were held as prisoners even though they did not commit a crime.
a) She continued to visit jails in several states and wrote reports about the horrible conditions.
b) Her reports led state legislatures to fund the building of mental hospitals were the mentally ill would be treated as patients, not criminals.
2. Prison Reform – a movement to improve conditions in prisons.
a) Men, women, and children were held together in cold damp quarters often going without food.
b) Five out of six people in northern jails were debtors, or people who could not pay money they owed. Since they couldn’t make money behind bars, many remained in jail for years.
c) Dix and others called for prison reforms. As a result, new prisons were built, cruel punishments were banned, and people accused of minor crimes served shorter sentences.
d) Slowly, states stopped treating debtors as criminals.
D. Temperance Movement- a movement to limit, and later ban alcohol consumption.
1. Alcohol Abuse was widespread in the early 1800s. Women knew that alcoholism could lead to wife beating, child abuse, and the break up of families.
a) In 1851, Maine banned the sale of alcohol. Eight other states followed, but most would later repeal the laws.
b) The Temperance Movement would gain new strength in the late 1800s.
E. Education- In 1800, few American children went to school. Teachers were poorly trained, worked for low pay, and students of all ages would be in one room.
1. In 1814, New York State passed a law requiring local governments to set up tax supported public schools.
2. Horace Mann pushed for changes in Massachusetts.
a) New schools were built and the school year was extended.
b) Teacher’s pay was raised and three colleges were set up for change.
c) Schools in the South improved more slowly
II. Opposing Slavery
A. Roots of the Antislavery Movement
1. Religious beliefs led some of the Americans to oppose slavery.
a) Quakers - Everyone is equal in God’s eyes.
b) Second Great Awakening
2. Political belief that “all men are created equal.”
a) The American Colonization Society – proposed to end slavery by setting up the independent colony of Liberia in West Africa for freed slaves. Some African Americans favored it but most did not want to go because they and been born in the United States.
B. The Abolitionist Movement Grows
1. A growing number or reformers, known as abolitionists, wanted to end slavery completely in the United States.
a) Some favored the gradual end to slavery.
b) Others demanded that it end at once.
2. Freed African Americans published newspapers and gave speeches call for the abolition of slavery.
a) Fredrick Douglass – Best known African abolitionist. He was an escaped slave who published an abolitionist newspaper called the North Star.
3. The Most outspoken white abolitionist was William Lloyd Garrison.
a) Garrison launched The Liberator, the most influential antislavery newspaper.
b) He founded the New England Antislavery Society.
4. Two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, moved from a South Carolina plantation owned by their family to the North for the sole purpose of fighting against slavery.
a) They gave lectures that drew large crowds.
C. The Underground Railroad –network of escape routes, “stations”, and “conductors” that slaves took to freedom.
a) Harriet Tubman – The most famous conductor, she escaped slavery herself. Nicknamed “Black Moses”, she returned to the South 19 times leading more than 300 slaves to freedom.
D. Opposition to Abolition
1. The North – Northern Mill owners, bankers, and merchants depended on cotton from the South.
a) If slaves were freed it would ruin their businesses.
b) Some factory workers feared freed slaves would come North and take their jobs away because they would work for lower pay.
c) Mobs broke up antislavery meetings.
d)William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets in Boston.
3. The South-relied on slavery for their economy
a) They accused abolitionist of preaching violence and blamed them for Nat Turner’s rebellion.
b) Slave owners said slaves were treated better than northern factory workers.
c) Non-slave owning southerners felt slavery was essential to the southern economy.
III. A Call for Women’s Rights
A. Seeking Equal Rights
1. In the mid-1800s women had little political or legal rights. In fact, when married, her husband had complete control of her.
a) Her husband could control her property.
b) A woman’s wage must be below her husband if she worked outside the home.
c) Husbands could hit their wives as long as he didn’t cause serious injury.
2. Women realized their full social and political rights by joining the abolitionist movement.
3. Sojourner Truth
a) Was born to slavery in New York.
b) When she gained her freedom she believed that God wanted her to fight slavery.
c) She took the name Sojourner Truth because she vowed to sojourn, travel, across the land speaking the truth.
d) She spoke across the country speaking about the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. She would ridicule the idea that women were inferior to men by nature.
4. Mott and Stanton
a) Lucretia Mott was a quiet speaker of 5 children; she gained respect of many listeners with her persuasive logic and good organization skills
b) Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an excellent student and athlete. However her father never fully appreciated her because she wasn’t a boy.
c) Both Stanton and Mott went to an antislavery convention in London and were forced to sit away from view and couldn’t take an active part in the proceedings. This led them to take a move active part in women’s rights
B. Seneca Falls Convention (1848) – a meeting at which leaders of the women’s rights movement called for equal rights for women
1. “Women are Created Equal”
a) Stanton gave her speech on the Declaration of Sentiments, which would be approved by the delegates (200 women/ 40 men). The speech proclaimed, “…that all men and women are created equal.”
b) The delegates approved resolutions such as equality of women at work, at school, and at church. However, when it came to women being allowed to vote, many hesitated but the resolution would be narrowly approved.
2. A Long Struggle
a) The Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of the Women’s Rights Movement, the organized campaign to win property, education, and other rights for women.
b) Soon news leaders would lead the struggle, such as Susan B. Anthony, who traveled across the country and gave speeches.
c) Women would gain some legal rights in certain states. In New Work women could keep their own property and wages.
d) However, many men and women opposed the women’s rights movement
C. New Opportunities in Education
1. Many felt that education for women was useless because women were expected to care for their families.
2. Schools for Women
a) Emma Willard opens the first high school for women in Troy, New York where women could study “men’s” subjects such as math and physics.
b) Mary Lyon opened Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts, which was the first female college in the United States but she didn’t call it a college because many thought it was wrong for women to attend college.
3. New Careers
a) As women education began to improve many women entered teaching professions especially in grade schools.
b) Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to attend medical school, who was top of her graduating class, and first women to earn a medical degree in the United States.
c) Others would attain careers in astronomy, writing, ministry, etc.
IV. American Art and Literature
A. American Storytellers- 1820s
1. Washington Irving- One of the most popular American writers of the early 1800s.
a) Wrote “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
b) The first American writer to enjoy fame in Europe.
2. James Fenimore Cooper – another New Yorker, also published novels set in the past including “The Deerslayer” and “The Last of the Mohicans.”
3. Later writers
a) Nathaniel Hawthorne- drew on the history of Puritan New England to create his novels and short stories. He wrote “The Scarlett Letter.”
b) Herman Melville – (1851) he published “Moby Dick.” It is ranked among the finest American novels ever written.
c) William Wells Brown – (1853) published “Clotel,” a novel about slave life.
He was the nation’s first published African American.
4. Women writers –By the mid-1800s, many of the best selling novels were written by women.
a) Margaret Fuller wrote “Women in the Nineteenth Century.” This book had important influence on the movement for civil rights.
b) Catherine Sedgwick and Fanny Fern earned far more than Hawthorne and Melville.
5. Poetic Voices
a) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – wrote “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Song of Hiawatha.”
b) Walt Whitman – published only one book of poems, Leaves of Grass. His poetry celebrated democracy and the diverse people that made the nation great.
c) Emily Dickenson – Wrote some of the best poems of the period. She called her poetry “my letter to the world that never wrote to me.”
B. The “Inner Light” – In New England, a small but influential group of writers and thinkers emerged. They called themselves transcendentalists because they believed that the most important truths in life transcended, or went beyond, human reason.
1. The American writer who probably had the greatest influence in the mid 1800s was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
a) He stressed the importance of the individual.
b) Each person had an “inner light.”
2. Henry David Thoreau – Emerson’s friend and neighbor, he believed that the growth of cities and the rise of industry were ruining the nation.
a) His best known work is Walden. In it, he tells of a year spent alone in a cabin on Walden Pond in Massachusetts.
C. American Landscapes
1. Before the 1800’s, American painters traveled to Europe to study art.
a) Charles Wilson Peale, Gilbert Stuart , and John Singleton Copely, were among the best American portrait painters of their time.
2. In the mid-1800s, American artists began to develop their own style.
a) The first group to do so became known as the Hudson River School, because they painted landscapes of New York’s Hudson River.
b) Two of the best known were Thomas Cole, and Asher B. Durand.
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