SOCIAL STUDIES NOTES: GRADE 8 CHAPTER 12
AN AGE OF REFORM: 1820-1860
Section 1: Improving Society
- I. The Reforming Spirit
-The expansion of democracy in the Age of Jackson encouraged reform. Most states dropped property requirements for voting. As a result, more white men were able to vote than ever before. Political parties also developed a more open way of choosing candidates for President.
-Religious feelings and ideas also sparked the reforming impulse. Beginning in the early 1800s, a new generation of ministers challenged some traditional views. This movement became known as the Second Great Awakening.
-Leaders of the Second Great Awakening preached that people’s own actions determined their salvation. “The doctrine of free will” blended easily with political ideas about democracy and independence.
-Thus, the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening encouraged reform. People came to believe that, if they had the power to improve themselves, they could improve society as well.
-The desire to create a more perfect society spurred some reformers to found utopian communities. Utopian reformers hoped their communities would become models for others to follow.
-Robert Owen founded a utopian community in Indians in 1825. He called this colony New Harmony. It was based on common ownership of property. Residents were to raise their own food and manufacture their own goods.
-Members, however, argued among themselves about goals and actions. The colony dissolved after about two years.
II. Social Reformers at Work
-Many reformers supported the temperance movement, an organized effort to end alcohol abuse and the problems created by it.
-Alcohol was widely used in the United States. Whisky was cheaper than milk or beer. Often, it was safer to drink than water, which was frequently contaminated. As a result, alcohol abuse reached epidemic proportion.
-Most reformers favored temperance or moderation in drinking. But others called for prohibition, a total ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol. During the 1850s, supporters of prohibition got nine states to pass laws banning the sale of alcohol.
-Other reformers sought to improve the nation’s prison system. Prisons had traditionally been harsh places, designed to make people want to stay out of them. Poorly heated buildings, inadequate food, and cramped conditions were typical.
-Dorothea Dix, a Massachusetts schoolteacher, was one of those who took up the cause of prison reform. Over the years, she worked to convince state legislatures to build new, more sanitary, and more humane prisons. In addition, debtors were no longer sent to jail.
-Dix was outraged to find that prisons were also used to house individuals with mental illnesses. Dix’s shocking report helped persuade the Massachusetts legislature to fund a new mental hospital. The new asylums provided treatment, rather than punishment.
III. Education Reform
-Education was another area of concern to reformers. The first American schools were set up for religious purposes. The Puritans of Massachusetts believed that all people needed to be able to read and understand the Bible. In 1642, they passed a law requiring all large towns to hire teachers and build schools. In this way, Massachusetts set up the first public schools.
-By the 1800s, Massachusetts was still the only state to require public schools. In other states, children from wealthy families were educated privately, whereas poor children generally received no education outside the home. Under these circumstances, many American could not read or write.
-Reformers argued that education was necessary to ensure that voters were intelligently informed. Reformers also pointed out that better schools would help immigrants assimilate.
-Horace Mann of Massachusetts took the lead in education reform. After becoming head of the state board of education in 1837, Mann convinced Massachusetts to improve its public school system. It created colleges to train teachers, raised the salaries of teachers, and lengthened the school year.
-Other states followed Massachusetts’s example. By the 1850s, public schools had gained much acceptance in the Northeast. Southern and western states lagged behind, however. They would not create their own public school systems until many decades later.
-The improvements in public education did little for African Americans. Southern states prohibited teaching enslaved persons to read. In the North, free black children were seldom admitted to the same schools as white children.
-Reformers who tried to improve educational opportunities for African Americans often met with resistance.
-Still, some opportunities did open up. In major northern cities, free African Americans opened their own schools. In 1855, Massachusetts became the first state to admit African American students to public schools.
Section 2: The Fight Against Slavery
I. Roots of the Antislavery Movement
-A number of prominent leaders of the early republic, such as Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin, opposed slavery. They believed that slavery violated the most basic principle of the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal.”
-In 1780, Pennsylvania became the first state to pass a law that gradually eliminated slavery. By 1804, every northern state had ended or pledged to end slavery. Congress also outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory. As a result, when Ohio entered the Union in 1803, it became the first state to ban slavery in its constitution.
-The American Colonization Society, established 1817, was an early antislavery organization. This society proposed that slaves be freed gradually and transported to Liberia, a colony founded in 1822 on the west coast of Africa.
-The colonization movement did not work. Most enslaved people had grown up in the United States and did not desire to leave.
II. Growing Opposition to Slavery
-The Second Great Awakening inspired further opposition to slavery. By the mid-1800s, a small but growing number of people were abolitionists. Rejecting gradual emancipation, abolitionists called for a complete and immediate end to slavery.
-One of the most forceful voices for abolition was William Lloyd Garrison. A Quaker, he strongly opposed the use of violence to end slavery. Still, Garrison was more radical that many others, because he favored full political rights for all African Americans.
-Perhaps the most powerful speaker for abolitionism was Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery. Douglass had broken the law by learning to read. He later escaped to freedom in the North. By appearing in public, Douglass risked being sent back to slavery. Yet, he continued to speak before larger and larger audiences.
-Abolitionists won the support of a few powerful people. Former President John Quincy Adams, now a member of Congress, read antislavery petitions from the floor of the House of Representatives.
-Two years later, Adams made a dramatic stand against slavery. Captive Africans aboard the slave ship Amistad had rebelled, killing the captain and ordering the crew to sail back to Africa. Instead, the crew sailed the ship to America. The 73-year-old Adams spoke to the Supreme Court for nine hours and helped the captives regain their freedom.
III. The Underground Railroad
-Some courageous abolitionists dedicated themselves to helping people escape from slavery. They established a system known as the Underground Railroad. Despite its name it was neither underground nor a railroad. It was a network of people-black and white, northerners and southerners-who secretly helped slaves reach freedom.
-Working for the Underground Railroad was illegal and dangerous. Harriet Tubman, who had herself escaped from slavery, escorted more than 300 people to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Slave owners promised a $40,000 reward for her capture.
-In total, perhaps as many as 50,000 gained their freedom in this way.
IV. Opposing Abolition
-Abolitionists faced powerful obstacles in the North as well as in the South. Many northerners profited from the existence of slavery. Northern textile mill owners and merchants relied on the cotton produced by the southern slave labor. Northern workers feared that freed slaves might come north and take their jobs.
-By the 1840s, the North and the South were increasingly divided by the issue of slavery. Abolitionists succeeded in making converts in the North. Slavery was spreading along with the cotton boom in the South.
Section 3: A Call for Women’s Rights
I. The Struggle Begins
-In 1820, the rights of American women were limited. They could not vote, serve on juries, attend college, or enter such professions as medicine or law. Married women could not own property or keep their own wages.
-Women began to demand rights as equal citizens. Among these women was Sojourner Truth. Born into slavery in New York State, she was illiterate, but her words inspired the crowds that heard her.
-Lucretia Mott, a Quaker, had spent years working in the antislavery movement.
II. Seneca Falls Convention
-In 1840, Mott traveled to London to attend an international antislavery convention. There, she met another abolitionist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But when Mott and Stanton tried to attend a meeting, they were told that women were not permitted to take an active role in the proceedings.
-Mott and Stanton were infuriated at being excluded. Sitting outside the convention hall, they agreed on the need for a convention to advance women’s rights. They followed through on that idea in the summer of 1848.
-Their convention met in Seneca Falls, New York, “to discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of women.” The Seneca Falls Convention attracted over 300 men and women.
-Stanton wrote a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence. It began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”
-The Declaration of Sentiments demanded full equality for women in every area of life.
-Stanton’s argument was the beginning of the long battle for women’s suffrage.
III. New Opportunities for Women
-The Seneca Falls Convention launched the women’s rights movement in the United States. In the years after the Seneca Falls Convention, Susan B. Anthony became a close ally of Stanton. The two made a dynamic team. Together, they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.
-In 1860, Stanton and Anthony convinced New York to pass a law protecting women’s property rights. Many other states followed. Some states revised their laws to allow married women to keep their wages.
-The women’s rights movement focused much attention on education. In 1821, Emma Willard started an academy in Troy, New York, that soon became the model for girls’ schools everywhere.
-Mary Lyon began an even bolder experiment when she opened Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts, in 1837. Mount Holyoke was, in fact, the first college for women in the United States.
-Gradually, American society came to accept that girls could be educated and that women could be teachers. Some women began entering other professions as well.
-Margaret Fuller made a career as a journalist, scholar, and literary critic. Other women excelled in science. Elizabeth Blackwell was admitted to Geneva Medical College in New York. Blackwell graduated first in her class in January 1849, becoming the first woman to graduate from an American medical school.
-The astronomer Maria Mitchell was the first professor hired at Vassar College. A crater on the moon was later named in her honor.
Section 4: American Literature and Arts
I. An American Culture Develops
-Before 1800, American writers and artists modeled their work on European styles. Poets used complex, formal language and filled their poems with references to Greek and Roman myths.
-By the mid-1800s, American writers and artists had begun to develop styles that reflected American optimism and energy. Their work explored subjects that were uniquely American.
-Two early writers, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, reflected this interest in American themes. Irving drew upon the Dutch history of New York in his stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”
-Cooper created the popular character Natty Bumpo, a frontiersman who kept moving westward. Cooper’s novels about Bumpo, such as The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, helped American literature gain popularity in Europe.
-By the early 1800s, a new artistic movement took shape in Europe, called Romanticism. Unlike thinkers of the Enlightenment, who emphasized reason, Romantics placed greater value on nature, emotions, and imagination.
- II. Flowering of American Literature
-Irving and Cooper set a high standard for American writers. Two later novelists, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, began to change the tone of American literature.
-Both Hawthorne and Melville were fascinated by psychology and extreme emotions. Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851) told the story of a sea captain who is obsessed with pursuing a white whale. In the end, Captain Ahab’s mad pursuit destroys himself, his ship, and his crew. Today, Moby-Dick is considered one of the greatest American novels.
-Hawthorne was descended from the Puritans of Massachusetts. He often used historical themes to explore the dark side of the mind. In his 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, a young minister is destroyed by secret guilt. The novel paints a grim picture of Puritan life.
-Louisa May Alcott presented a gentler view of New England life. In 1868, Alcott published Little Women, a novel based on her own experiences growing up with three sisters. The main character, Jo March, was one of the first young American heroines to be presented as a believable, imperfect person rather than as a shining ideal.
-Poets helped create a new national voice. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow based poems on American history, such as “Paul Revere’s Ride.” His long poem The Song of Hiawatha was one of the first works to honor Native Americans.
-Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855. This book of poems shocked many readers because it rejected formal rules. But today, Whitman is seen as the poet who best expresses the democratic American spirit.
-Some poets used their pens to support social reform. John Greenleaf Whittier, a Massachusetts Quaker, and Frances Watkins Harper, an African American woman from Maryland, wrote poems that described and condemned the evils of slavery.
III. Art and Music
-After 1820, artists also began to create a unique American style. Turning away from European themes, they focused on the landscapes around them or on the daily lives of common Americans.
-A group of artists painted scenes of the Hudson River valley. Thomas Cole and other painters of this school reflected the values of Romanticism.
-Other American painters were inspired by everyday life. George Caleb Bingham created a timeless picture of life on the great rivers. George Catlin captured the ways and dignity of Native Americans.
Most early American songs had their roots in English, Irish, or Scottish tunes. Over time, a wide variety of new American songs emerged. Many were work songs chanted by men as they sailed on whaling ships, laid railroad tracks, or hauled barges along canals.
-The spiritual was a special type of song developed by enslaved African Americans.