Transcript Reform Movements

Reform
Movements
Jackson’s emphasis on the common man as
well as the Second Great Awakening
stimulated organized efforts to reform society.
Chief among these efforts were school, prison,
hospital reform, as well as temperance,
women’s rights and the abolition crusade.
These reform movements even inspired art
and literature. The transcendentalist writers,
such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson,
stressed the relationship between humans and
nature as well as the importance of the
individual conscience.
Second Great Awakening
(1790–1840s)
This was a period of great religious revival that extended
into the antebellum period of the United States, with
widespread Christian evangelism and conversions. It was
named for the Great Awakening, a similar period which had
occurred almost a century earlier. It generated excitement
in church congregations throughout New England, the midAtlantic, Northwest and the South. Individual preachers
such as Charles Grandison Finney, Lyman Beecher, Barton
Stone, Peter Cartwright, and Asahel Nettleton became very
well known as a result. Evangelical participation in social
causes was fostered that changed American life in areas
such as prison reform, abolitionism, temperance and
others.
The Reforms
•Temperance
•Education
•Special Needs
•Hospital and Prison
•Abolition
Temperance
The temperance movement was the war against alcohol, mainly led by religious
leaders. They blamed alcohol for poverty, the breakup of families, crime and even
insanity. They called for temperance, drinking little or no alcohol. Lyman Beecher, a
Presbyterian minister from Connecticut, temperance movement leader, and the father
of several noted leaders, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, was one of the biggest
crusaders against the use of alcohol. Beecher was also a leader of the Second Great
Awakening of the United States. The movement faded in the mid-1800s, but would
reemerge in the early 1900s and lead to a constitutional amendment banning alcohol.
School Reform
In the early 1800s, only New England provided free elementary education. In
other areas parents had to pay fees or send their children to schools for the
poor—a choice some parents refused out of pride. Some communities had no
schools at all.
School Reform
Horace Mann—”The Father of
American Education.”
He was a lawyer who became an
important school reformer in the
early 1800s. His efforts led to a
six month school year,
improvements in curriculum,
raised teacher salaries, and
developed better ways of training
teachers. Due to his efforts,
Massachusetts founded in 1839
the nation’s first state-supported
“normal school,” a school for
training high-school graduates as
teachers. Other states soon
adopted the reforms that Mann
had pioneered.
School Reforms led to 3 basic principles of public education:
1. School should be free and supported by taxes
2. Teachers should be trained
3. Children should be required to attend
Higher Education
During the age of reform, dozens of new colleges and
universities were created. Most admitted only men.
Religious groups founded many colleges between 1820 and
1850, including Amherst and Holy Cross in Massachusetts;
Trinity and Wesleyan in Connecticut. In 1827, a law was
established that required towns with more than 500
families to provide public English high schools.
Slowly higher education became available to groups who
were previously denied the opportunity. Oberlin College of
Ohio, founded in 1833, admitted both women and African
Americans to the student body. In 1837, Mary Lyon in
Massachusetts opened Mount Holyoke, the first permanent
women’s college in America. The first college for African
Americans—Ashmun Institute, which later became Lincoln
University—opened in Pennsylvania in 1854.
Educating those with Special Needs
Thomas Gallaudet—He was a renowned
American pioneer in the education of the deaf.
In 1817, he helped found and was for many
years the principal of the first institution for
the education of the deaf in the United States,
the Hartford School—now known as the
American School for the Deaf.
Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe—He was a prominent
19th century United States physician,
abolitionist, advocate of education for the
blind. He developed books with large raised
letters that people with sight impairments
could “read” with their fingers. He headed the
Perkins Institute, a school for the blind, in
Boston. In 1829, the 1st school for the blind
was established in New England. This is the
school Helen Keller would attend.
Prison and Hospital Reform
Dorothea Dix
A schoolteacher and prison reformer that learned through
visiting prisons that many were living in inhumane conditions
and that some were even mentally ill, not criminals.
In March, 1841, a ministerial student, frustrated with his
efforts to teach a Sunday class for women incarcerated in the
East Cambridge jail, thought that a woman might better do the
task.
He approached Dorothea for advice. She decided to teach the class herself. What she
encountered in the jail shocked her and changed her life. The jail was unheated and
some inmates were chained to the walls with little or no clothing. Those incarcerated
were not segregated; hardened criminals, feeble-minded children and the mentally ill
all occupied the same quarters. Dix secured a court order to provide heat and to make
other improvements.
Her experience in the East Cambridge jail made Dix wonder about conditions in jails
in less populated areas of Massachusetts. She was particularly distressed to learn
that the mentally ill were commonly housed with felons. She prepared herself to
embark upon a mission of reform, to call for decent accommodations for those
suffering from mental and emotional disease. She made it her life’s work to educate
the public as to the poor conditions for both the mentally ill and for prisoners.
The
Abolitionists
Movement
Abolish: To put an end to
Abolitionist Movement:
The effort to do away
with slavery completely
Early efforts to end slavery
1775—Quakers in Pennsylvania organized the first anti-slavery
society in the US
1785-1792—Emancipation societies were formed in states from MA
to VA
1787—Slavery was prohibited in Northwest Territory
1807—Importation of slaves was prohibited, according to a provision
in the US Constitution
1817—The American Colonization Society was formed by Southerners
to encourage emancipation and to send free blacks to Africa. By
1860, about 15,000 blacks had been sent to the society’s colony,
Liberia. In 1847, Liberia becomes an independent country and formed
a government based on that of the United States, naming their capital
city Monrovia after James Monroe, the fifth president of the United
States.
By 1840—more than 2,000 abolition societies sprang up throughout
the North.
William Lloyd Garrison
was a prominent abolitionist,
journalist, and social reformer.
He changed the earlier antislavery efforts when he started
abolitionism in Boston in 1831.
He founded The Liberator, a
newspaper demanding the
immediate abolition of slavery.
The Grimké Sisters
Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké Weld
known as the Grimké sisters, were 19thcentury American Quakers, educators and
writers who were early advocates of
abolitionism and women's rights.
The Grimké sisters were born in Charleston,
South Carolina. Throughout their life they
traveled throughout the North, lecturing
about their first-hand experiences with
slavery on their family's plantation. Among
the first women to act publicly in social
reform movements, they received abuse and
ridicule for their abolitionist activity. They
both realized that women would have to
create a safe space in the public arena to be
effective reformers, and became early
activists in the women's rights movement.
Frederick Douglass
Born in 1817, he learned to read and
write while he was a household slave. He
later escaped and became one of the most
effective abolitionists. He also founded an
antislavery newspaper, The North Star.
Douglass was an American abolitionist,
editor, orator, author, statesman and
reformer. He was one of the most
prominent figures of African American
history during his time, and one of the
most influential lecturers and authors in
American history. Douglass was a firm
believer in the equality of all people,
whether black, female, or recent
immigrant. He spent his life advocating
the brotherhood of all humankind.
Douglass campaigned for the extension of
the vote for blacks as well as for women.
Sojourner Truth
(1797-1883)
She was born a slave named
Isabella Baumfree, but was freed
at age 28 due to a New York law.
She joined the Anti-Slavery
Society and became an
abolitionist lecturer and a
speaker for women's rights both
black and white. She changed her
name to reflect her new
mission—“traveling” to “tell the
truth.” After the Civil War, she
spoke for equal rights.
The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was a network of secret passages by which African slaves
in the 19th century United States attempted to escape to free states, or as far north
as Canada, with the aid of abolitionists. Other routes led to Mexico or overseas. At its
height between 1810 and 1850, an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people escaped
enslavement via the Underground Railroad, though census figures only account for
6,000. The Underground Railroad has captured public imagination as a symbol of
freedom, and it figures prominently in Black American history.
Harriet Tubman
Born about 1820 as a slave, she
later escaped and became one
of the Underground Railroad’s
most famous conductors
(people who led slaves to
safety). She made 19 trips
risking her own life to lead
300+ slaves to freedom,
becoming known as “the Black
Moses.” Bounty hunters were
constantly after her, hoping for
the reward of up to $40,000 for
her capture.
Watch “The
Underground
Railroad” video clip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8
nwJDR2O40&feature=related
The Abolitionists crusade of the 1830s is
responsible for accidentally sparking a
woman’s rights crusade that radically changed
American society.
Women abolitionists met opposition to their
right to speak in public. Rejected as equals
by male abolitionists and barred from their
organizations, women formed female abolition
societies and began to speak for their own
rights as well as those of blacks.
***We will talk about the women’s rights movement later***
Cultural Trends
Social changes in the United States also
influenced art and literature.
American artists began to find their own
style instead of looking to Europe for
inspiration. Beginning in the 1820s,
American artists began to explore
American themes and develop their own
style.
The American spirit of reform influenced
Transcendentalists.
Transcendentalists stressed the
relationship between humans and nature
as well as the importance of the individual
conscience.
Transcendentalists Writers & Poets:
Margaret Fuller
Emily
Dickinson
Henry David
Thoreau
Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow
Ralph Waldo
Emerson
Walt Whitman