US History - Reform Movements

Aim: How do the reform movements of the 1800s affect American society today?

Do Now: What is a reform?

Lesson Overview:

Item	Approx Time
Do Now	3-5 Min
Mini Lesson	5 Min
Activity	30 Min

Social Reform

During the Expansion Era, many Americans came to believe that social reforms were needed to improve their society. Reformers worked to reduce the working day of labourers from the usual 12 or 14 hours to 10 hours. Other reformers worked to improve conditions in prisons and insane asylums. Prohibitionists--convinced that drunkenness was the chief cause of poverty and other problems--persuaded 13 states to outlaw the sale of alcohol between 1846 and 1855. Other important targets of reformers were women's rights, improvements in education, and the abolition of slavery.

The drive for women's rights. Early American women had few rights. There were almost no colleges for women, and most professional careers were closed to them. A married woman could not own property. Instead, any property she had legally belonged to her husband. In addition, American women were barred from voting in all elections.

A women's rights movement developed after 1820, and brought about some changes. In 1835, Oberlin College, Ohio, became the first men's college in the United States to admit women. In 1848, New York became the first state to allow married women to own property. That same year, a Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, issued the first formal appeal for woman suffrage (the right to vote). But nationwide suffrage did not come about until 1920.

Education reform. In the early 1800's, most good schools in the United States were expensive private schools. Poor children went to second-rate "pauper," or "charity," schools, or did not go at all. During the 1830's, Horace Mann of Massachusetts and other reformers began demanding education and better schools for all American children. States soon began establishing state school systems, and more and more children received an education. Colleges started training teachers for a system of public education based on standardized courses of study. As a result, schoolchildren throughout the country were taught much the same lessons.

The abolition movement became the most intense and controversial reform activity of the period. Beginning in colonial times, many Americans--called abolitionists--had demanded an end to slavery. By the early 1800's, every Northern state had outlawed slavery. But over the years, the plantation system of farming had spread throughout the South, and the economy of the Southern States depended more and more on slaves as a source of cheap labour.

The question of whether to outlaw or allow slavery became an important political and social issue in the early 1800's. Throughout the years, a balance between the number of free states (states where slavery was prohibited) and slave states (those where it was allowed) had been sought. This meant that both sides would have an equal number of representatives in the United States Senate. As of 1819, the federal government had achieved a balance between free states and slave states. There were 11 of each.

When the Territory of Missouri applied for admission to the Union in 1818, bitter controversy broke out over whether to admit it as a free or slave state. In either case, the balance between free and slave states would be upset. But in 1820, the nation's leaders worked out the Missouri Compromise, which temporarily maintained the balance. Massachusetts agreed to give up the northern part of its territory. This area became the state of Maine, and entered the Union as a free state in 1820. In 1821, Missouri entered as a slave state, and so there were 12 free and 12 slave states.

The Missouri Compromise had another important provision. It provided that slavery would be "forever prohibited" in all the territory gained from the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri's southern border, except for Missouri itself.

The Missouri Compromise satisfied many Americans as an answer to the slavery question. But large numbers of people still called for complete abolition. Many blacks who had gained their freedom became important speakers for abolition.

The growing strength of the abolition movement raised fears among Southerners that the federal government would outlaw slavery. Increasingly, the South hardened its defence of slavery. Southerners had always argued that slavery was necessary to the plantation economy. But after 1830, some Southern leaders began arguing that blacks were inferior to whites, and therefore fit for their role as slaves. Even many Southern whites who owned no slaves took comfort in the belief that they were superior to blacks. As a result, Southern support of slavery increased.

Transcendentalism

What is Transcendentalism?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I first learned about Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in high school English class, I admit: I couldn't figure out what the term "Transcendentalism" meant. I couldn't figure out what the central idea was that held all those authors and poets and philosophers together so that they deserved this categorical name, Transcendentalists. And so, if you're at this page because you're having difficulty: you're not alone. Here's what I've learned since high school about this subject.

Walden's Pond - Henry David Thoreau

The Transcendentalists can be understood in one sense by their context -- by what they were rebelling against, what they saw as the current situation and therefore as what they were trying to be different from.

One way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of well educated people who lived in the decades before the American Civil War and the national division that it both reflected and helped to create. These people, mostly New Englanders, mostly around Boston, were attempting to create a uniquely American body of literature. It was already decades since the Americans had won independence from England. Now, these people believed, it was time for literary independence. And so they deliberately went about creating literature, essays, novels, philosophy, poetry, and other writing that were clearly different from anything from England, France, Germany, or any other European nation.

Another way to look at the Transcendentalists is to see them as a generation of people struggling to define spirituality and religion (our words, not necessarily theirs) in a way that took into account the new understandings their age made available.

The new Biblical Criticism in Germany and elsewhere had been looking at the Christian and Jewish scriptures through the eyes of literary analysis and had raised questions for some about the old assumptions of religion.

The Enlightenment had come to new rational conclusions about the natural world, mostly based on experimentation and logical thinking. The pendulum was swinging, and a more Romantic way of thinking -- less rational, more intuitive, more in touch with the senses -- was coming into vogue. Those new rational conclusions had raised important questions, but were no longer enough.

German philosopher Kant raised both questions and insights into the religious and philosophical thinking about reason and religion.

This new generation looked at the previous generation's rebellions of the early 19th century Unitarians and Universalists against traditional Trinitarianism and against Calvinist predestinationarianism. This new generation decided that the revolutions had not gone far enough, and had stayed too much in the rational mode. "Corpse-cold" Emerson called the previous generation of rational religion.

The spiritual hunger of the age that also gave rise to a new evangelical Christianity gave rise, in the educated centers in New England and around Boston, to an intuitive, experiential, passionate, more-than-just-rational perspective. God gave humankind the gift of intuition, the gift of insight, the gift of inspiration. Why waste such a gift?

Added to all this, the scriptures of non-Western cultures were discovered in the West, translated, and published so that they were more widely available. The Harvard-educated Emerson and others began to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and examine their own religious assumptions against these scriptures. In their perspective, a loving God would not have led so much of humanity astray; there must be truth in these scriptures, too. Truth, if it agreed with an individual's intuition of truth, must be indeed truth.

And so Transcendentalism was born. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."

Yes, men, but women too.

Most of the Transcendentalists became involved as well in social reform movements, especially anti-slavery and women's rights. (Abolitionism was the word used for the more radical branch of anti-slavery reformism; feminism was a word that was invented deliberately in France some decades later and was not, to my knowledge, found in the time of the Transcendentalists.) Why social reform, and why these issues in particular?

Emily Dickinson

The Transcendentalists, despite some remaining Euro-chauvinism in thinking that people with British and German backgrounds were more suited for freedom than others (see some of Theodore Parker's writings, for instance, for this sentiment), also believed that at the level of the human soul, all people had access to divine inspiration and sought and loved freedom and knowledge and truth.

Thus, those institutions of society which fostered vast differences in the ability to be educated, to be self-directed, were institutions to be reformed. Women and African-descended slaves were human beings who deserved more ability to become educated, to fulfill their human potential (in a twentieth-century phrase), to be fully human.

Men like Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson who identified themselves as Transcendentalists, also worked for freedom of the slaves and for women's freedom.

Women's Movement

The women's suffrage movement lasted at least 70 years, from the first formal women's convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, to the passage of the 19th amendment. English women won full voting privileges later than American women, but women in both countries began the worldwide suffrage movement.

Changing social conditions for women during the early 1800's, combined with the idea of equality, led to the birth of the woman suffrage movement. For example, women started to receive more education and to take part in reform movements, which involved them in politics. As a result, women started to ask why they were not also allowed to vote. One of the first public appeals for woman suffrage came in 1848.

Seneca Falls Convention 1848

Lucretia Mott

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Two reformers, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, called a women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., where Stanton lived. The men and women at the convention adopted a Declaration of Sentiments that called for women to have equal rights in education, property, voting, and other matters. The declaration, which used the Declaration of Independence as a model, said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. ..."Suffrage quickly became the chief goal of the women's rights movement. Leaders of the movement believed that if women had the vote, they could use it to gain other rights. But the suffragists faced strong opposition. Most people who opposed woman suffrage believed that women were less intelligent and less able to make political decisions than men. Opponents argued that men could represent their wives better than the wives could represent themselves. Some people feared that women's participation in politics would lead to the end of family life.

Abolitionism

Abolition Poster

While it seems that the United States was founded on the premise of slavery. The movement to abolish slavery, or abolition, has existed nearly as long. In the late 1700s, northern states became less dependent on slavery for labor, and the southern states became more so. As the division between the North and South depended around this issue, abolitionists became more radical.

William Lloyd Garrison

Frederick Douglass

William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator in Boston, Massachusetts, a newspaper dedicated to the abolition movement. He was soon joined by a self-educated runaway slave from Maryland named Frederick Douglass. Douglass toured the nation speaking out against the brutality and inhumane treatment of slaves in the United States. He eventually started his own publication, The North Star, and became a major benefactor of the Underground Railroad in upstate New York. This system provided a safe means for runaway slaves to travel North to Canada where they could not be recaptured.

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Education Reform

Schoolhouse in the 1800s

Education reform. In the early 1800's, most good schools in the United States were expensive private schools. Poor children went to second-rate "pauper," or "charity," schools, or did not go at all. During the 1830's, Horace Mann of Massachusetts and other reformers began demanding education and better schools for all American children. States soon began establishing state school systems, and more and more children received an education. Colleges started training teachers for a system of public education based on standardized courses of study. As a result, schoolchildren throughout the country were taught much the same lessons.

Classwork & Homework

Lesson Activity: Reform Movements Activity - Day 1 - Research

• 5W's Worksheet - (Need 5 Per Group)

• Social Reforms
• Education Reforms
• Transcendentalism
• Women's Movement
• Abolitionism

Homework: Gather some pictures from some magazines for your topic.