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We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to

Man .... As the friend of the Negro assumes that one man cannot
by right hold another in bondage, so should the friend of Woman assume
that Man cannot by right lay even well-meant restrictions on Woman.
Margaret Fuller, 1845

Several historic reform movements began during the Jacksonian era and
in the following decades. This period before the Civil War started in 1861 is
known as the antebellum period. During this time, a diverse mix of reformers
dedicated themselves to such causes as establishing free (tax-supported) public
schools, improving the treatment of the mentally ill, controlling or abolishing
the sale of alcohol, winning equal rights for women, and abolishing slavery.
The enthusiasm for reform had many historic sources: the Puritan sense of mis
sion, the Enlightenment belief in human goodness, the politics of Jacksonian
democracy, and changing relationships among men and women, among social
classes, and among ethnic groups. The most important source may have been
religious beliefs.

Religion: The Second Great Awakening

Religious revivals swept through the United States during the early decades
of the 19th century. They were partly a reaction against the rationalism (belief
in human reason) that had been the fashion during the Enlightenment and the
American Revolution. Calvinist (Puritan) teachings of original sin and predes
tination had been rejected by believers in more liberal and forgiving doctrines,
such as those of the Unitarian Church.
Calvinism began a counterattack against these liberal views in the 1790s.
The Second Great Awakening began among educated people such as Reverend
Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College in Connecticut. Dwight's campus
revivals motivated a generation of young men to become evangelical preachers.
In the revivals of the early 1800s, successful preachers were audience-centered
and easily understood by the uneducated; they spoke about the opportunity for
salvation to all. These populist movements seemed attuned to the democratiza
tion of American society.
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Revivalism in New York In 1823, Presbyterian mm1ster Charles G.
Finney started a series of revivals in upstate New York, where many New Eng
landers had settled. Instead of delivering sermons based on rational argument,
Finney appealed to people's emotions and fear of damnation. He prompted
thousands to publicly declare their revived faith. He preached that every
individual could be saved through faith and hard work-ideas that strongly
appealed to the rising middle class. Because of Finney's influence, western
New York became known as the "burned-over district" for its frequent "hell
and-brimstone" revivals.
Baptists and Methodists In the South and on the advancing western fron
tier, Baptist and Methodist circuit preachers, such as Peter Cartwright, would
travel from one location to another and attract thousands to hear their dramatic
preaching at outdoor revivals, or camp meetings. These preachers activated
the faith of many people who had never belonged to a church. By 1850, the
Baptists and the Methodists were the largest Protestant denominations in the
country.
Millennialism Much of the religious enthusiasm of the time was based on
the widespread belief that the world was about to end with the second coming
of Jesus. One preacher, William Miller, gained tens of thousands of follow
ers by predicting a specific date (October 21, 1844) for the second coming.
Nothing happened on the appointed day, but the Millerites continued as a new
Christian denomination, the Seventh-Day Adventists.
Mormons Another religious group, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter
Day Saints, or Mormons, was founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. Smith based
his religious thinking on a book of Scripture-the Book of Mormon-which
traced a connection between the American Indians and the lost tribes of Israel.
Smith gathered a following in New York and moved to Ohio, then Missouri,
and finally, Illinois. There, the Mormon founder was murdered by a local mob.
To escape persecution, the Mormons under the leadership of Brigham Young
migrated to the far western frontier, where they established the New Zion (as
they called their religious community) on the banks of the Great Salt Lake in
Utah. Their cooperative social organization helped the Mormons to prosper in
the wilderness. Their practice of polygamy (allowing a man to have more than
one wife), however, aroused the hostility of the U.S. government.
The Second Great Awakening, like the first, caused new divisions in
society between the newer, evangelical sects and the older Protestant churches.
It affected all sections of the country. But in the northern states from Mas
sachusetts to Ohio the Great Awakening also touched off social reform.
Activist religious groups provided both the leadership and the well-organized
voluntary societies that drove the reform movements of the antebellum era.

Culture: Ideas, the Arts, and Literature

In Europe, during the early years of the 19th century, artists and writers shifted
away from the Enlightenment emphasis on balance, order, and reason and
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toward intuition, feelings, individual acts of heroism, and the study of nature.
This new movement, known as romanticism, was expressed in the United
States by the transcendentalists, a small group of New England thinkers.

The Transcendentalists
Writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau questioned
the doctrines of established churches and the business practices of the merchant
class. They argued for a mystical and intuitive way of thinking as a means
for discovering one's inner self and looking for the essence of God in nature.
Their views challenged the materialism of American society by suggesting that
artistic expression was more important than the pursuit of wealth. Although
the transcendentalists valued individualism highly and viewed organized insti
tutions as unimportant, they supported a variety of reforms, especially the
antislavery movement.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) The best-known transcendentalist,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a very popular American speaker. His essays and
lectures expressed the individualistic and nationalistic spirit of Americans by
urging them not to imitate European culture but to create a distinctive Ameri
can culture. He argued for self-reliance, independent thinking, and the primacy
of spiritual matters over material ones. A northerner who lived in Concord,
Massachusetts, Emerson became a leading critic of slavery in the 1850s and
then an ardent supporter of the Union during the Civil War.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Also living in Concord and a close
friend of Emerson was Henry David Thoreau. To test his transcendentalist
philosophy, Thoreau conducted a two-year experiment of living simply in a
cabin in the woods outside town. He used observations of nature to discover
essential truths about life and the universe. Thoreau's writings from these
years were published in the book for which he is best known, Walden (1854).
Because of this book, Thoreau is remembered today as a pioneer ecologist and
conservationist.
Through his essay "On Civil Disobedience," Thoreau established himself
as an early advocate of nonviolent protest. The essay presented Thoreau's argu
ment for disobeying unjust laws and accepting the penalty. The philosopher's
own act of civil disobedience was to refuse to pay a tax that would support an
action he considered immoral-the U.S. war with Mexico (1846-1848). For
breaking the tax law, Thoreau spent one night in the Concord jail. In the next
century, Thoreau's essay and actions would inspire the nonviolent movements
of both Mohandas Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United
States.
Brook Farm Could a community of people live out the transcendentalist
ideal? In 1841, George Ripley, a Protestant minister, launched a communal
experiment at Brook Farm in Massachusetts. His goal was to achieve "a more
natural union between intellectual and manual labor." Living at Brook Farm at
times were some of the leading intellectuals of the period. Emerson went, as

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did Margaret Fuller, a feminist (advocate of women's rights) writer and editor;
Theodore Parker, a theologian and radical reformer; and Nathaniel Hawthorne,
a novelist. A bad fire and heavy debts forced the end of the experiment in 1849.
But Brook Farm was remembered for its atmosphere of artistic creativity, its
innovative school, and its appeal to New England's intellectual elite and their
children.

Communal Experiments
The idea of withdrawing from conventional society to create an ideal community,
or utopia, in a fresh setting was not a new idea. But never before were social
experiments so numerous as during the antebellum years. The open lands of
the United States proved fertile ground for more than a hundred experimental
communities. The early Mormons were an example of a religious communal
effort and Brook Farm was an example of a humanistic or secular experiment.
Although many of the communities were short-lived, these "backwoods uto
pias" reflect the diversity of the reform ideas of the time.
Shakers One of the earliest religious communal movements, the Shak
ers had about 6,000 members in various communities by the 1840s. Shakers
held property in common and kept women and men strictly separate (for
bidding marriage and sexual relations). For lack of new recruits, the Shaker
communities virtually died out by the mid-1900s.
The Amana Colonies The settlers of the Amana colonies in Iowa were
Germans who belonged to the religious reform movement known as Pietism.
Like the Shakers, they emphasized simple, communal living. However, they
allowed for marriage, and their communities continue to prosper, although they
no longer practice their communal ways of living.
New Harmony The secular (nonreligious) experiment in New Harmony,
Indiana, was the work of the Welsh industrialist and reformer Robert Owen.
Owen hoped his utopian socialist community would provide an answer to the
problems of inequity and alienation caused by the Industrial Revolution. The
experiment failed, however, as a result of both financial problems and disagree
ments among members of the community.
Oneida Community After undergoing a religious conversion, John Hum
phrey Noyes in 1848 started a cooperative community in Oneida, New York.
Dedicated to an ideal of perfect social and economic equality, community
members shared property and, later, marriage partners. Critics attacked the
Oneida system of planned reproduction and communal child-rearing as a sinful
experiment in "free love." Despite the controversy, the community managed to
prosper economically by producing and selling silverware of excellent quality.
Fourier Phalanxes In the 1840s, the theories of the French socialist
Charles Fourier attracted the interest of many Americans. In response to the
problems of a fiercely competitive society, Fourier advocated that people share
work and housing in communities known as Fourier Phalanxes. This movement
died out quickly as Americans proved too individualistic to live communally.
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Arts and literature
The democratic and reforming impulses of the Age of Jackson expressed them
selves in painting, architecture, and literature.
Painting Genre painting-portraying the everyday life of ordinary peo
ple such as riding riverboats and voting on election day-became the vogue
of artists in the 1830s. For example, George Caleb Bingham depicted common
people in various settings and carrying out domestic chores. William S. Mount
won popularity for his lively rural compositions. Thomas Cole and Frederick
Church emphasized the heroic beauty of American landscapes, especially in
dramatic scenes along the Hudson River in New York State and the western
frontier wilderness. The Hudson River school, as it was called, expressed the
romantic age's fascination with the natural world.
Architecture Inspired by the democracy of classical Athens, American
architects adapted Greek styles to glorify the democratic spirit of the republic.
Columned facades like those of ancient Greek temples graced the entryways to
public buildings, banks, hotels, and even some private homes.
Literature In addition to the transcendentalist authors (notably Emerson
and Thoreau), other writers helped to create a literature that was distinctively
American. Partly as a result of the War of 1812, the American people became
more nationalistic and eager to read the works of American writers about Ameri
can themes. Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, for example, wrote
fiction using American settings. Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales were a series
of novels written from 1824 to 1841 that glorified the frontiersman as nature's
nobleman. The Scarlet Letter (1850) and other novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne
questioned the intolerance and conformity in American life. Herman Melville's
innovative novel Moby-Dick (1855) reflected the theological and cultural con
flicts of the era as it told the story of Captain Ahab's pursuit of a white whale.

Source: Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, by George

Caleb Bingham, 1845. Wikimedia Commons/The Yorck Project/
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
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Reforming Society

Reform movements evolved during the antebellum era. At first, the leaders of
reform hoped to improve people's behavior through moral persuasion. How
ever, after they tried sermons and pamphlets, reformers often moved on to
political action and to ideas for creating new institutions to replace the old.

Temperance
The high rate of alcohol consumption (five gallons of hard liquor per person
in 1820) prompted reformers to target alcohol as the cause of social ills, and
explains why temperance became the most popular of the reform movements.
The temperance movement began by using moral exhortation. In 1826,
Protestant ministers and others concerned with drinking and its effects founded
the American Temperance Society. The society tried to persuade drinkers to
take a pledge of total abstinence. In 1840, a group of recovering alcoholics
formed the Washingtonians and argued that alcoholism was a disease that
needed practical, helpful treatment. By the 1840s, various temperance societ
ies together had more than a million members.
German and Irish immigrants were largely opposed to the temperance
campaign. But they lacked the political power to prevent state and city gov
ernments from passing reforms. Factory owners and politicians joined with
the reformers when it became clear that temperance measures could reduce
crime and poverty and increase workers' output on the job. In 1851, the state of
Maine went beyond simply placing taxes on the sale of liquor and became the
first state to prohibit the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors. Twelve
states followed before the Civil War. In the 1850s, the issue of slavery came to
overshadow the temperance movement. However, the movement would gain
strength again in the late 1870s (with strong support from the Women's Chris
tian Temperance Union) and achieve national success with the passage of the
18th Amendment in 1919.
Movement for Public Asylums
Humanitarian reformers of the 1820s and 1830s called attention to the in
creasing numbers of criminals, emotionally disturbed persons, and paupers.
Often these people were forced to live in wretched conditions and were regu
larly either abused or neglected by their caretakers. To alleviate the suffering
of these individuals, reformers proposed setting up new public institutions
state-supported prisons, mental hospitals, and poorhouses. Reformers hoped
that inmates would be cured as a result of being withdrawn from squalid sur
roundings and treated to a disciplined pattern of life in some rural setting.
Mental Hospitals Dorothea Dix, a former schoolteacher from Massa
chusetts, was horrified to find mentally ill persons locked up with convicted
criminals in unsanitary cells. She launched a cross-country crusade, publiciz
ing the awful treatment she had witnessed. In the 1840s one state legislature
after another built new mental hospitals or improved existing institutions and
mental patients began receiving professional treatment.
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Schools for Blind and Deaf Persons Two other reformers founded spe
cial institutions to help people with physical disabilities. Thomas Gallaudet
opened a school for the deaf, and Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe started a school
for the blind. By the 1850s, special schools modeled after the work of these
reformers had been established in many states of the Union.
Prisons Pennsylvania took the lead in prison reform, building new prisons
called penitentiaries to take the place of crude jails. Reformers placed prison
ers in solitary confinement to force them to reflect on their sins and repent. The
experiment was dropped because of the high rate of prisoner suicides. These
prison reforms reflected a major doctrine of the asylum movement: structure
and discipline would bring about moral reform. A similar penal experiment,
the Auburn system in New York, enforced rigid rules of discipline while also
providing moral instruction and work programs.

Public Education
Another reform movement started in the Jacksonian era focused on the need
for establishing free public schools for children of all classes. Middle-class
reformers were motivated in part by their fears for the future of the repub
lic posed by growing numbers of the uneducated poor-both immigrant and
native-born. Workers' groups in the cities generally supported the reformers'
campaign for free (tax-supported) schools.
Free Common Schools Horace Mann was the leading advocate of the
common (public) school movement. As secretary of the newly founded Massa
chusetts Board of Education, Mann worked for compulsory attendance for all
children, a longer school year, and increased teacher preparation. In the 1840s,
the movement for public schools spread rapidly to other states.
Moral Education Mann and other educational reformers wanted children
to learn not only basic literacy, but also moral principles. Toward this end,
William Holmes McGuffey, a Pennsylvania teacher, created a series of elemen
tary textbooks that became widely used to teach reading and morality. The
McGuffey readers extolled the virtues of hard work, punctuality, and sobri
ety-the kind of behaviors needed in an emerging industrial society.
Objecting to the Protestant tone of the public schools, Roman Catholics
founded private schools for the instruction of Catholic children.
Higher Education The religious enthusiasm of the Second Great Awak
ening helped fuel the growth of private colleges. Beginning in the 1830s,
various Protestant denominations founded small denominational colleges,
especially in the newer western states (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa). At
the same time, several new colleges, including Mount Holyoke College in
Massachusetts (founded by Mary Lyon in 1837) and Oberlin College in Ohio,
began to admit women. Adult education was furthered by lyceum lecture soci
eties, which brought speakers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson to small-town
audiences.

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Changes in Families and Roles for Women
American society was still overwhelmingly rural in the mid-19th century.
But in the growing cities, the impact of the Industrial Revolution was redefin
ing the family. Industrialization reduced the economic value of children. In
middle-class families, birth control was used to reduce average family size,
which declined from 7.04 family members in 1800 to 5.42 in 1830. More afflu
ent women now had the leisure time to devote to religious and moral uplift
organizations. The New York Female Moral Reform Society, for example,
worked to prevent impoverished young women from being forced into lives of
prostitution.
Cult of Domesticity Industrialization also changed roles within families.
In traditional farm families, men were the moral leaders. However, when men
took jobs outside the home to work for salaries or wages in an office or a
factory, they were absent most of the time. As a result, the women in these
households who remained at home took charge of the household and children.
The idealized view of women as moral leaders in the home is called the cult of
domesticity.
Women's Rights Women reformers, especially those involved in the anti
slavery movement, resented the way men relegated them to secondary roles in
the movement and prevented them from taking part fully in policy discussions.
Two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grirnke, objected to male opposition to their
antislavery activities. In protest, Sarah Grirnke wrote her Letter on the Condi
tion of Women and the Equality of the Sexes (1837). Another pair of reformers,
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, began campaigning for women's
rights after they had been barred from speaking at an antislavery convention.
Seneca Falls Convention (1848) The leading feminists met at Seneca
Falls, New York, in 1848. At the conclusion of their convention-the first
women's rights convention in American history-they issued a document
closely modeled after the Declaration of Independence. Their "Declaration of
Sentiments" declared that "all men and women are created equal" and listed
women's grievances against laws and customs that discriminated against them.
Following the Seneca Falls Convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan
B. Anthony led the campaign for equal voting, legal, and property rights for
women. In the 1850s, however, the issue of women's rights was overshadowed
by the crisis over slavery.
Antislavery Movement
Opponents of slavery ranged from moderates who proposed gradual abolition
to radicals who demanded immediate abolition without compensating their
owners. The Second Great Awakening led many Christians to view slavery as
a sin. This moral view made compromise with defenders of slavery difficult.

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American Colonization Society The idea of transporting freed slaves to
an African colony was first tried in 1817 with the founding of the American
Colonization Society. This appealed to moderate antislavery reformers and
politicians, in part because whites with racist attitudes hoped to remove free
blacks from U.S. society. In 1822, the American Colonization Society estab
lished an African-American settlement in Monrovia, Liberia. Colonization
never proved a practical course. Between 1820 and 1860, only about 12,000
African Americans were settled in Africa, while the slave population grew by
2.5 million.
American Antislavery Society In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began
publication of an abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, an event that marks
the beginning of the radical abolitionist movement. The uncompromising Gar
rison advocated immediate abolition of slavery in every state and territory
without compensating the slaveowners. In 1833, Garrison and other abolition
ists founded the American Antislavery Society. Garrison stepped up his attacks
by condemning and burning the Constitution as a proslavery document. He
argued for "no Union with slaveholders" until they repented for their sins by
freeing their slaves.
Liberty Party Garrison's radicalism soon led to a split in the abolitionist
movement. Believing that political action was a more practical route to reform
than Garrison's moral crusade, a group of northerners formed the Liberty party
in 1840. They ran James Birney as their candidate for president in 1840 and
1844. The party's one campaign pledge was to bring about the end of slavery
by political and legal means.
Black Abolitionists Escaped slaves and free African Americans were
among the most outspoken and convincing critics of slavery. A former slave
such as Frederick Douglass could speak about the brutality and degradation
of slavery from firsthand experience. An early follower of Garrison, Douglass
later advocated both political and direct action to end slavery and racial preju
dice. In 1847, he started the antislavery journal The North Star. Other African
American leaders, such as Harriet Tubman, David Ruggles, Sojourner Truth,
and William Still, helped organize the effort to assist fugitive slaves escape to
free territory in the North or to Canada, where slavery was prohibited.
Violent Abolitionism David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet were
two northern African Americans who advocated the most radical solution to
the slavery question. They argued that slaves should take action themselves
by rising up in revolt against their owners. In 1831, a Virginia slave named
Nat Turner led a revolt in which 55 whites were killed. In retaliation, whites
killed hundreds of African Americans in brutal fashion and put down the revolt.
Before this event, there had been some antislavery sentiment and discussion
in the South. After the revolt, fear of future uprisings as well as Garrison's
inflamed rhetoric put an end to antislavery talk in the South.

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Other Reforms
Efforts to reform individuals and society during the antebellum era also
included smaller movements such as:
• the American Peace Society, founded in 1828 with the objective of
abolishing war, which actively protested the war with Mexico in 1846
• laws to protect sailors from being flogged
• dietary reforms, such as eating whole wheat bread or Sylvester Graham's
crackers, to promote good digestion
• dress reform for women, particularly Amelia Bloomer's efforts to get
women to wear pantalettes instead of long skirts
• phrenology, a pseudoscience that studied the bumps on an individual's
skull to assess the person's character and ability

Southern Reaction to Reform

The antebellum reform movement was largely found in the northern and west
ern states, with little impact in the South. While "modernizers" worked to
perfect society in the North, southerners were more committed to tradition
and slow to support public education and humanitarian reforms. They were
alarmed to see northern reformers join forces to support the antislavery move
ment. Increasingly, they viewed social reform as a northern threat against the
southern way of life.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: WHAT MOTIVATED REFORMERS?
In her history of antebellum reform, Freedom's Ferment (1944), Alice
Tyler portrayed the reformers as idealistic humanitarians whose chief
goal was to create a just and equitable society for all. Other historians
generally accepted Tyler's interpretation.
However, in recent years, historians have questioned whether reform
ers were motivated by humanitarian concerns or by a desire of upper- and
middle-class citizens to control the masses. According to their argument,
the temperance movement was designed to control the drinking of the
poor and recent immigrants. The chief purpose of penitentiaries was
to control crime, of poorhouses to motivate the lower classes to pursue
work, and of public schools to "Americanize" the immigrant popula
tion. Schools were supported by the wealthy, because they would teach
the working class hard work, punctuality, and obedience. Revisionist
historians also have noted that most of the reformers were Whigs, not
Jacksonian Democrats.
Some historians have argued that the reformers had multiple moti
vations for their work. They point out that, although some reasons for
reform may have been self-serving and bigoted, most reformers sincerely

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