Reform Movements: Primary SourcesName:Hour:
Read the following documents. Identify which Reform Movement we discussed in class each document supports. Give evidence from each document which supports your hypothesis.What is the writer’s intent/bias, and what action they are calling for.
1.We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…While evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
Reform Movement: ______
What is the evidence that helped you make that decision? ______Author’s intent and call for action:______
2.The scheme of Universal Equal Education at the expense, is virtually "Agrarianism." It would be a compulsory application of the means of the richer, for the direct use of the poorer classes; and so far an arbitrary division of property among them....One of the chief excitements to industry...is the hope of earning the means of educating their children respectably ...that incentive would be removed, and the scheme of state and equal education [would] be a premium for comparative idleness, to be taken out of the pockets of the laborious and conscientious.Philadelphia National Gazette, 1830
Reform Movement: ______
What is the evidence that helped you make that decision? ______Author’s intent and call for action: ______
3.I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience....
I have seen many who, part of the year, are chained or caged. The use of cages all but universal....I encountered during the last three months many poor creatures wandering reckless and unprotected through the country.
Reform Movement: ______
What is the evidence that helped you make that decision? ______Author’s intent and call for action: ______
4.Parents into whose hands this my dying declaration may fall will perceive that I date the commencement of my departure from the paths of rectitude and virtue, from the moment when I become addicted to the habitual use of ardent spirits—and it is my sincere prayer that if they value the happiness of their children—if they desire their welfare here, and their eternal well being hereafter, that they early teach them the fatal consequences of Intemperance!
Reform Movement: ______
What is the evidence that helped you make that decision? ______Author’s intent and call for action: ______
5.It is not by argument that the abolitionists have produced the present unhappy excitement. Argument has not been the characteristic of their publications. Denunciations of slaveholding as man-stealing, robbery, piracy, and worse than murder; subsequent vituperation of slaveholders as knowingly guilty of the worst of crimes; passionate appeals to the feelings of the inhabitants of the northern States; gross exaggeration of the moral and physical condition of the slaves, have formed the staple of their addresses to the public....There is in this conduct such a strange want of adaptation of the means to the end which they profess to have in view, as to stagger the faith of most persons in the sincerity of their professions, who do not consider the extreme to which even good men may be carried, when they allow one subject to take exclusive possession of their minds.
Reform Movement: ______
What is the evidence that helped you make that decision? ______Author’s intent and call for action: ______
2 anti versions of things Charles Hodge
Philadelphia Gazette
If man is intrinsically good and only accidentally corrupt, then culture and reform are all the agencies that need to be evoked in his behalf. Liberate him from his evil conditions and he will work out a happy destiny. Give education, power, privilege, franchise, rights into his hands, and he will complete his redemption. Teach him his dignity, his divinity, and he will fall into the order of his duties. Le his reason have free play, untrammeled by tradition or ecclesiastical precepts, or secular force, and he will rise to a consummate manhood.