Chapter 15: The Ferment of Reform and Culture 1790-1860

Intro:

• Revoultion to improve character of ordinary Americans: more upstanding, God-fearing, and literate
• Most reforms spurred by religion: the 2nd Great Awakening

Reviving Religion:

• Deism was a counter to puritanism: softened orthodoxy
• =>Unitarian faith: God existed in one person - no trinity, good works, man good
• Reaction to growing liberalism in religion => The Second Great Aweakening: spiritual fervor, conversions, reorganized churches, new sects.
• Methodists and Baptists - most conversions. Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright - flailed and spoke.
• Charles Grandison Finney - greatest revival preacher
• Feminization of religion: majority of church was women, "bring their families back to God"

Denominational Diversity:

• W. New York: sermons of hellfire and damnation, known as "Burned-over District." => Millerites/Adventists believed Christ would return Oct. 22, 1844
• Wealthy: Episcopals, Presby, Congregationalists, Unitarians
• Poor: Baptists and Methodists - supported slavery

A Desert Zion in Utah:

• Mormons: Joseph Smith -> Ohio -> Missouri -> Illinois
• 1844 Smith murdered
• Brigham Young became leader -> led Mormons to Utah (1846-1847)
• Population grew - community became prosperous frontier theocracy
• Federal Army 1857 marched against Mromons -> Congress passed antipolygamy laws in 1862 and 1882 - delayed Utah from becoming a state until 1896.

Free Schools for a Free People:

• Tax-supported public education triumphed 1825-1850
• Free vote=>free education
• 1-room schoolhouses, bad male teachers
• Horace Mann - campaigned for more and better schoolhouses, longer terms, higher teacher pay, expanded curriculum.
• Noah Webster - wrote textbooks and dictionary
• William H. McGuffey - wrote "readers" for students

Higher Goals for Higher Learning:

• Small religious colleges: taught boring junk like Latin, Greek, math, philosophy
• State universities (NC, VA)
• Oberlin College (Ohio) admitted women and black people!

An Age of Reform:

• Religion prompted crusades and reform movements - many led by women
• Imprisonment for debt sucked - as common people started voting, state legilators abolished debtors' prisons
• Brutal punishments were being eliminated
• Poor mental people were treated badly :(
• Dorthea Dix - petition of 1843 to MA legislature called for imporved conditions for mentally ill
• 1828 American Peace Society - William Ladd

Demon Rum - The "Old Deluder":

• Heavy drinking common -> less work got done.
• 1826 - American Temperence Society formed - Boston
• T.S. Arthur's Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There
• Moderates stressed "temperence," extremists believed alcohol should be forbidden by legislation - Neal Dow - "Father of Prohibition" - Maine law of 1851 prohibited manufacture and sale of liquor

Women in Revolt:

• Women were a "submerged sex" - couldn't vote, couldn't down property, treated as minors
• Women were keepers of soceity's conscience
• Women fought for: women's rights, temperence, abolition
• Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony advocated women's rights
• Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell - first female to graduate medical school, Margaret Fuller - transcendentalist, Grimke sisters - antislavery
• Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention 1848 - "Declaration of Sentiments"

Wilderness Utopias:

• 1825 Robert Owen founded New Harmony, Indiana - sank into contradiction and confusion
• Brook Farm, MA 1841 - transcendentalism - prospered until 1846 - lost building in fire.
• Oneida Community - NY 1848. Free love, birth control.
• All these communistic enterprises failed.
• Shakers - religious - no sex or marriage - went extinct by 1940 HA!

The Oneida Community:

• Founded by John Humphrey Noyes
• No private property, no exclusive relationships - material things (includeing sexual partners) should be shared.
• Ended up as a silverware company.
• I'm ashamed to say that I own Oneida silverware.

The Dawn of Scientific Achievment:

• Nathaniel Bowditch - mathematician, Matthew F. Mavry - oceanographer
• Prof. Benjamin Silliman - pioneer chemist and geologist
• John J. Audobon - Birds of America
• Medicin primative

Artistic Achievments:

• Architecture Greek and Roman - 1850s revival of Gothic.
• America exported artists to England and imported art.
• Painting was "obscene," but there were some American painters
• Daguerreotype - rough photography
• Music - blacks and whites - upbeat

The Blossoming of a National Literature:

• By 1820 literature as a profession was spurred - Knickerbocker Group - NY.
• Washington Irving - writer - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• James Fenimore Cooper - The Last of the Mohicans
• Willian Cullen Bryant - MA - poems

Trumpeters of Transcendentalism:

• "The Athens of America" - liberalizing Puritan theology.
• Everyone has an inner light that connects us with God
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: Unitarian, lecturer and writer
• Henry David Thoreau: Emerson's friend, poet and nonconformist, individualist. Lived in the woods for 2 years and wrote a book about it.
• Walt Whitman - poet - *gasp* - Leaves of Grass

Glowing Literary Lights:

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - poet - popular in US and England
• John Greenleaf Whittier - antislavery poem
• James Russell Lowell - good poet
• Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
• Emily Dickinson
• William Gillmore Sims

Literary Individualists and Dissenters:

• Edgar Allen Poe
• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
• Herman Melville - Moby Dick

Portrayers of the Past:

• Historians
• George Bancroft: founded American Naval Acadamy, "Father of American History" - wrote American history.
• William H. Prescott
• Francis Parkman
• N. England abolitionists