Reforming American Society

The Perfectibility

of Man

Second Great Awakening

• Calvinism & Predestination = obsolete

• New movement – “You can go to Heaven”

Charles Grandison Finney

Most Likely to Sell Religion

Class of 1794

African American Church

• Slaves heard of this democratic god

• In North camp meetings were open to all

Richard Allen

Bethel African Church

African Methodist Episcopal Church

Developed into community center

Transcendentalism

• Emphasis on living a simple life, celebrating truth found in nature & personal emotion and imagination

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau – Walden – Civil Disobedience

TranscendentalismPhilosophical and literary movement

Focus on:

Simple Life

Nature

Personal imagination

“Perfectibility of Man”

The rounded world is fair to see,Nine times folded in mystery:Though baffled seers cannot impartThe secret of its laboring heart,Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,And all is clear from east to west.Spirit that lurks each form withinBeckons to spirit of its kin;Self-kindled every atom glowsAnd hints the future which it owes.

I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and

unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was

Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and

wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till

forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world.

Unitarianism

• William Ellery Channing – “Christianity was the perfection of human nature”

• Focus on reason – not emotion like revivalists –support form educated & wealthy

Utopia!• George Ripley –

Brook FarmThis is Hyde Park, MA

Shakers

• Followers of Ann Lee • Shared goods• men & women

equal?!?• Refused to fight• Do not marry• No kids…

Prisons & the Mentally Ill

• Dorothea Dix• Focus on

rehabilitation• MA & 9 southern

states• Moved mentally

ill out of prison

Education

• Before: mostly private academies or private tutor

• Shift – Education is needed for democracy.

• Perfectibility of Man• Changing world needs smarter people

1821 – Emma Willard opens

Troy Female Seminary

“They will be educating cows next”

1831 – Prudence Crandall – opened a school & soon allowed black girls

1834 - Crandall was forced to close down

1837 – Mary Lyon – Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (Holyoke College)

1837 – Oberlin College (Ohio) became coedFranklin High School

Girls Basketball Team

1834-35

Horace Mann

• What do you know?

Ohio gave him a statue…..

We gave him Shaw’s !

Abolition• 1820’s – Recolonization – good idea?

over 100 antislavery societies

Most Northern states had abolished slavery

William Lloyd Garrison

• 1831 – The Liberator – Newspaper (MA)

immediate emancipation

no $$ for slave owners

I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . . I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I

will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD."

David Walker

• Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World• Advised blacks to fight for their freedom

Frederick Douglass

• Run away slave – became famous abolitionist – worked with Garrison

• North Star - Newspaper

      “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who

profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who

want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain

without thunder and lightning.”

Nat Turner

• 1831 – Led slave revolt

• Eclipse?• 60 whites

killed• 200 blacks

killed• Good or

bad? Perspe

ctive?

Women in ReformEarly 1800’s – cult of domesticity

Abolition

• Angelina GrimkeAn Appeal to the Christian

Women of the South

1836      “The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human

power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have

no place among Republicans and Christians.”

Education

• Sarah Grimke

1838 – Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women

I ask no favors for my sex, I surrender not our claim to equality.  All I ask of our brethren is

that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the ground

which God has designed us to occupy.

Temperance

Movement

New use of the Cult of Domesticity?

Effective?

Labor Movement

• 1834 – Lowell Mills – 15% wage cut– 800 women went on

strike“Union is power!”

Results?• Newspapers & local

churches supported…

The Mills

Why? What do you think happened?