Chapter 14The Age of Reform

1820-1860

The Country School 1871Winslow Homer

1818 British critic Sydney Smith

“In the four corners of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?”

American VotersPrior to 1828, there was never more than a 27% turnout of eligible voters in a presidential election.In 1828, 58% of eligible voters turned out for the elections.By 1840, nearly 80% of eligible voters cast a ballot.In 1789, white adult males who owned property selected George Washington as president. The American voters of the early 1800s were usually white men who were wealthy or middle class, educated and owned property. As the 19th century progressed, many states changed their suffrage laws. There were many new American voters after the 1820s. This increase in the number of voters led to new political campaigning techniques and nominating procedures. By the 1840s, elections looked very different than they had when John Adams was elected to office without conducting an active campaign.

                                           Mitt Romney shared a link. 8 hours ago Thanks you guys for all the bday wishes - getting ready for a big day tomorrow. Apologies for the bad lighting and backdrop - life on the road isn't always glamorous http://www.tout.com/m/y086vx

By the 1820s America had developed a dynamic society based upon European models—especially England—but with distinctly different takes upon familiar themes and concepts.

In America the religious emphasis was evangelism (free will) rather than Calvinism (predestination) which stressed grace and man’s sinful nature. American evangelicals tended to stress man’s ability to turn away from sin and embrace moral actions.

Consequently, American society—at least in the North—was constantly in flux and inventing itself anew on a regular basis.

The ranges of tents, the fires, reflecting light…; the candles and lamps illuminating the encampment; hundreds moving to and fro…;the preaching, praying, singing, and shouting,… like the sound of many waters, was enough to swallow up all the powers of contemplation.

Charles G. Finney

(1792 – 1895)

Charles G. Finney

(1792 – 1895)

“soul-shaking” conversion

Burned-over district "term was coined by Charles Grandison Finney who in his 1876 book Autobiography of Charles G. Finney referred to a "burnt district" (p78)

to denote an area in central and western New York State during the Second Great Awakening. The name was inspired by the notion that the area had been so heavily evangelized as to have no "fuel" left over to "burn“ ordained a Presbyterian minister becomes

president of Oberlin College in 1851R1-2

Second Great AwakeningRevival Meeting

Second Great AwakeningRevival Meeting

The Second GreatAwakening

The Second GreatAwakening

“Spiritual Reform From Within!”

[Religious Revivalism]

Social Reforms Without! Which Redefine the Ideal of Equality

Temperance

Asylum &Penal

Reform

Education

Women’s Rights

Abolitionism

http://www.learn360.com/ShowVideo.aspx?ID=143599

The “Burned-Over” DistrictThe “Burned-Over” Districtin Upstate New Yorkin Upstate New York

The “Burned-Over” DistrictThe “Burned-Over” Districtin Upstate New Yorkin Upstate New York

no "fuel" (unconverted population) left over to "burn" (convert).

CHARLES FOURIER (1772-1837) most utopian of the Utopian Socialists. Fourier was a confused thinker. For instance, Fourier's passion for numbers led him to predict that the ideal world he was helping to create would last 80,000 years, 8,000 of them in an era of Perfect Harmony in which, among other things:

six moons would orbit the earth the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean the seas would lose their salt and become oceans of lemonade the world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 million mathematicians equal to Newton and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, although "these are approximate estimates"

William Miller. Miller, a farmer from New York, claimed to have discovered when Jesus

Christ would return to Earth as stated in the Bible. Miller predicted that Christ's second coming would occur in April 1843 and that all worthy people would ascend to heaven on October 23, 1844.

As October 23, 1844 approached, many Millerites sold all of their earthly possessions. Many sources claim that the Millerites, dressed in white robes, climbed the highest mountains and hills that they could find so that they would be closer to heaven.Miller claimed to have made an error and quickly issued a new date for the second coming, approximately six months later. Once again, this day came and went. In most cases, Miller's followers abandoned him. In 1845, some of Miller's followers joined the Adventist Church, which Miller helped establish.

Harold Camping, the 90-year-old Alameda preacher was incorrectly predicted the end of the world twice in recent months, is still trying to figure out what happened.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/I-Was-Wrong-Harold-Camping-142080703.html

"Events in the last year have proved that no man can be fully trusted," Harold

Camping wrote in a letter Thursday to listeners of his evangelical Family Radio program, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.

"Even the most zealous of us can be mistaken."Camping had last predicted the rapture would occur last May 21 and while non-believers would be elevated to heaven, the rest of the world would be left to deal with a forsaken world until Oct. 21.The preacher suffered a stroke about a month after his prediction proved to be wrong. He later updated his prediction to say the world would end and the rapture would

both occur on Oct. 21. Thursday he pronounced his own humanness and left the predicting to a higher being."God has humbled us through the events of May 21," Camping wrote. "We have learned the very painful lesson that all of creation is in God's hands and he will end time in his time, not ours! "We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing."

“The Benevolent Empire”:1825 - 1846

“The Benevolent Empire”:1825 - 1846

A complete structure of church and parachurch organizations made up what came to be called the Benevolent Empire. The Benevolent was merely an interlocking series of missionary and supporting organizations devoted to Christianizing America and the world. The Benevolent Empire grew out of early American revivalism. Revivalism stimulated church growth, particularly in America's mainline denominations and with this growth came two important concepts which in turn emphasized outreach.

Religious Pluralism. The United States Constitution guaranteed that the government would name no denomination the nation's state church. Therefore, no denomination could ever become a majority because of state support. In fact, statistics show that all denominations were minorities. 1830 statistics show the following

Roman Catholics..........500,000 Methodists...............500,000 Baptists.................350,000

Presbyterians............200,000 Congregational...........125,000

Lutheran.................100,000 Episcopalian............. 50,00

These figures show that in 1830 all churches combined had less than 2 million members in nation with a total population of 23 million. What you might miss, however, is the fact that Protestants far outnumbered Catholics. In 1740, Catholics made up only .6 percent of the population.

Northern Society Between 1820-1860OPEN, GROWING

SOCIETYPopulation in early

1860s was between 22 and 23 million

Between 1840-50, 1.5 million came to northern cities

Between 1850 and 1860 an additional 2 million came north.

Between 1830 & 1860 New York went from 200,000 to well over 1 million people

Social Pyramid of the North

Upper Class was a clearly defined 10% of the population that owned over 40% of the nations wealth

Comprised of bankers, shippers, merchants and industrialistsChildren went to college

Middle Class about 35% of the pop.

Comprised of lawyers, doctors, farmers who owned their own landChildren often went to college.

Lower Class over 50% of pop.Worked 12-16 hrs. a day for 25 cents to 1.25 an hr.

The Great Mass of the Population Amount of Wealth owned

Amount of Wealth

Number of Wealthy

A Dual Economy— small to no middle class

Great possibility for upward mobilityHoratio Alger Jr. (1832-1899) would later popularize this upward possibility in very popular dime store novels (1st 1867)

Antebellum (pre-Civil War) Social Order in the South

Large Slave Owning Plantations 50-100 Slaves. 1750-1900 total Plantation Owning Families

Small Plantations Owning

10-50 Slaves

¾ of Farmers (yeoman)

owned no slaves

Slaves

Social Order of Slave Society in the Antebellum South

House Hold NannyHousehold SlavesSkilled Workers—

mostly in cities

Field Hands75-80% of totalSlave pop. InSouth

The Southern “Belle”The Southern “Belle”The Southern “Belle”The Southern “Belle”Coincidentally, this is George Reeves, who would later play the role of Superman in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman. Here he plays Stuart Tarleton in the epic movie Gone With The Wind. His life mask is hanging at the front of the room.

The need for slave labor increased. The chart shows total numbers of free African Americans to slaves

Cotton is labor intensive—even with the cotton gin.As demand increased, labor had to increase to meet demand.The more cotton you could produce the more money you could make.0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5

4

1790 1810 1840 1860

FreeSlaveTotal

The United States really weren’t. The

U.S. was really two countries. However, only one of these two was working on societal improvement—the North.

Few, (except, abolitionism, which caused a violent reaction from the South) of the societal reform movements of the North had great impact in the South. The South was a closed society and liked it that way.

Chapter 14 The Age of ReformDid You Know? The Perkins Institute for the Blind taught several people who became famous, including Helen Keller, (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) who was blind and deaf. Inventor Alexander Graham Bell referred her to the school. The director of Perkins sent Anne Sullivan, a recent Perkins graduate, to become Keller's resident tutor, and together they became a famous teacher/student pairing because of Keller's great achievements in learning.

“People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.” "The world is moved not only by the mighty stories of heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker."

Helen Keller

Helen Keller - - No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an unchartered land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit

The Moral of this story is that one person really can make a difference!

Anne Sullivan was nearly blind.

Hippies, Transcendentalism, Reformers and changing society

“Since we are all products of our environment, one only need change the environment to change the man.” --Robert Owen

social reformer and one of the founders of socialism and the cooperative movement

On going debate about Nature vs. Nurture.

I. The Reforming Spirit (Pages 412-413)

Religious and social reform brought change to the American way of lifeIn 1825 Robert Owen established New Harmony, Indiana. Here the people were dedicated to cooperation rather than competition. New Harmony was Owen’s idea of a Utopia.The Mormons, Shakers, and other religious groups also built utopian communities. The Mormons were the only group that lasted. http://www.learn360.com/ShowVideo.aspx?ID=143557 2:18 min

(movie)

Owen's philosophy was based on three intellectual pillars:

First, no one was responsible for his [or her] will and his [or her] own actions because his whole character is formed independently of himself; people are products of their heredity and environment, hence his support for education and labour reform, rendering him a pioneer in human capital investment. Second, all religions are based on the same ridiculous imagination and ideas (though in his later years he embraced Spiritualism).Third, support for the putting-out system instead of the factory system

Original Plans for New Harmony, IN

Original Plans for New Harmony, IN

New Harmony in 1832

Robert Owen's ambition was to create a more perfect society through free education and the abolition of social classes and personal wealth. World-renowned scientists and educators settled in New Harmony. With the help of William Maclure, the Scottish geologist and

businessman, they introduced vocation education, kindergarten and other educational reforms.

Owen instituted a system of "time money" and "time stores". New Harmony currency was worth the amount of time that a worker had labored, and could be exchanged for commodities worth the equivalent amount of labor to contribute to the labor force of the community.,

Owen was missing the essential component that made other communities, like the Shakers, cohesive. Because Owen did not believe in God, their was no central covenant that committed the residents of New Harmony to their enterprise. Because they lacked the strong central belief which served to unite other utopian groups, the members of the community were lacking the commitment to carry out the mission that Owen envisioned. New Harmony dissolved in less than three years.

New Harmony, IN

New Harmony, IN

The Oneida CommunityNew York, 1848

The Oneida CommunityNew York, 1848

John Humphrey Noyesescaped prosecution for adultery, by fleeing to central New York where he formed the Utopian Oneida Community (1848). He wrote extensively on social and

economic experiments and advocated limiting the permission to procreate to an advanced elite; in 1879 he fled to Canada to avoid a charge of statutory rape.

(1811-1886)

Millenarianism --> the 2nd

coming of Christ had already occurred in 70 A.D. Humans were no longer obliged to follow the moral rules of the past.• all residents

married to each other.• carefully regulated “free love.”

John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Perfectionists

But by far their most lucrative venture was the production of the steal traps being used by the Hudson's Bay Company and other trappers throughout the United States to trap beaver. When the fur trade tapered off, the Oneidans turned to the production of silverware as their main source of income. They were so financially productive, that by the time the community voted to disbanded in 1881, due to a decreasing commitment to the idea of complex marriage, the community's holdings were valued at over $600,000. Instead of dissolving entirely, the members transformed themselves into the Oneida Community, Limited, a joint stock company. They are know today simply as as Oneida, Ltd..

Utopian Communities Utopian CommunitiesOhio had its own utopian experiments.

"...Zoar is the quaintest, most interesting and most absolutely unique village that...[you] could find in all the length and breadth of our magnificent country. It is situated in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, and is owned and occupied exclusively by a most singular sect of German pietist-mystics, (used as a Historical term: a reform movement in the German Lutheran Churches during the 17th and 18th centuries that

strove to renew the devotional ideal) socialists and communists known as Zoarites, who founded it in the year 1817.“ --Geoffrey Williston Christine Peterson's Magazine January 1889

http://www.learn360.com/ShowVideo.aspx?ID=143557 2:18 min

(movie)

The Shakers were one of a few religious groups that formed in eighteenth-century England.

New communities of “charismatic” Christians also took shape during this time. One of the most important of these new movements was the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (USBCSA), or the Shakers. While their monastic, communitarian life has been studied extensively, little attention has been given to Shaker preaching, particularly in the early days of the order. The first members of the group were known as “Shaking Quakers” because of the ecstatic nature of their worship services. Begun in 1747, the members looked to women for leadership

InShakers did not practice procreation themselves. Children were added to their communities through indenture, adoption, or conversion. Occasionally a foundling was anonymously left on a Shaker doorstep. They welcomed all, often taking in orphans and the homeless. For children, Shaker life was structured, safe, and predictable, with no shortage of adults who cared about their young charges.

Although there were six thousand believers at the peak of the Shaker movement in the 1840s, there were only twelve Shaker communities left by 1920. In the United States, there was one remaining active Shaker community, at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, which as of January 2011 has only three members: Sister June Carpenter, Brother Arnold Hadd, and Sister Frances Carr.

The Sabbathday Lake community still accepts new recruits, as it has since its founding. Shakers are no longer allowed to adopt orphans after new laws were passed in 1960 denying adoption to religious groups, but adults who wish to embrace Shaker life are welcome.

Shaker Round Barn, Hancock, Massachusetts

Annual Consumption of Alcohol

Annual Consumption of Alcohol1826 the American Society for

the Promotion of Temperance

More

In the early 1800s, the Second Great Awakening spread a new sense of religious fervor often at frontier camp meetings called revivals

Reformers waged a war against alcohol, blaming it for family breakups, crime, and insanity.

Reformers called for temperance, or drinking little or no alcohol.In 1826 the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance was formed.

In 1851 Maine was the first state to pass a law banning the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.

Temperance was one of the most important of the reform movements before the Civil War, attracting the largest and most diverse group of supporters. It was the least sectional of the antebellum reform movements: such men as William Lloyd Garrison, an abolitionist, and Robert Barnwell Rhett, a Southern defender of slavery, could agree on the evils of alcohol. Although many temperance societies aimed at recruiting male members, others gave women an important opportunity to participate in debate over public issues. 1846 lithograph by Nathaniel Currier.

The school ‘marm’ and the one room school house

school·marm  (sk l märm )

II. Reforming Education (Pages 473-475)

In the early 1800s, the nation (10th Amendment) did not provide free public education for all. Only New England provided free elementary education.

Horace Mann was the leader of education reform. He became the head of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837. Reforms included the following: lengthening the school year to six months improving the school curriculumdoubling teachers' salariesfinding better ways of training teachers In 1839 Massachusetts founded the first state-supported school for training teachers.

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” (1859) H. Mann

The McGuffey Eclectic Readers

The McGuffey Eclectic Readers

Used religious parables to teach “American values.” Teach middle class morality and respect for order. Teach “3 Rs” + “Protestant ethic” (frugality, hard work, sobriety)

R3-8

McGuffey Hall at Ohio University. named for William McGuffey

moreBy the 1850s all states accepted these three basic principles of public education:

1. Schools should be free and supported by taxes.

2. Teachers should be trained.

3. Children should be required to attend schoolIt took time before these principles were effective, however. Schools lacked funds, teachers lacked training, and some people opposed compulsory education. Most females did not go to school, or if they did, they studied music or needlework, not science, mathematics, and history.

Many children in the West had no school to go to.

African Americans had few opportunities to go to school

During the age of reform, religious groups founded many colleges such as Amherst, Holy Cross, Trinity, and Wesleyan

between 1820 and 1850.

Still More…

Some higher institutions did provide opportunities to people previously denied an education.

Oberlin College of Ohio, founded in 1833, admitted women and African Americans.Mount Holyoke was established as the first permanent women's college in America.Ashmun Institute was the first college for African Americans. It later became Lincoln University.

Some reformers dealt with teaching people with disabilities. Thomas Gallaudet—method to educate hearing impairedDr. Samuel Gridley Howe– books with raised letters. It was called Howe Type and later as Boston Line Type. It was used at Perkins until braille came into common usage at the turn of the century.

Dorothea Dix—prison reform and hospitals for mentally ill

The Lunatic Asylum at New York. Although after 1850 asylums increasingly became institutions for the control and separation from society of those who did not conform to society's definition of "normal," under Dorothea Dix's initial impetus hospitals like this one attempted to cure the insane through kind treatment and healthful living conditions.

“I come to present the strong claims of suffering humanity. I come to place before the Legislature of Massachusetts the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast. I come as the advocate of helpless, forgotten, insane men and women; of beings sunk to a condition from which the unconcerned world would start with real horror.”

http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/lib/docs/737.htm

III. Cultural Trends (Page 415)

Reform influenced art and literature. Transcendentalists (description of) were writers and poets who stressed the relationship between humans and nature and the importance of the individual conscience.The following were leading writers of the transcendental movement:

Margaret Fuller, who supported women's rightsRalph Waldo Emerson, (quotes) who believed in the inner voice of conscience and the idea that people can break the bonds of prejudice “All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”

Henry David Thoreau went to jail rather than pay a $1 tax to support the Mexican War, which he was against. He practiced civil disobedience, or refusing to obey laws he thought were unjust.

“... I felt that it would be to make myself the laughing-stock of the scientific community to describe to them that branch of science which specially interests me, inasmuch as they do not believe in a science which deals with the higher law. So I was obliged to speak to their condition and describe to them that poor part of me which alone they can understand. The fact is I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a

natural philosopher to boot. Now that I think of it, I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations.”Henry David Thoreau

On the difficulty of understanding Transcendentalism in his well-known personal journal entry for March 5, 1853: