The Era of Reform
The period often called the “American Renaissance,” a tribute to
the extraordinary richness and range of literary achievement during the
decades before the Civil War, was also one of the most active periods of
reform in American history. Spurred by the rapid social change and cultural ferment of the period, reformers turned their attention to virtually
every aspect of life in the United States. Some focused their attention on
dietary concerns and domestic relations, others worked to end injustices
Fugitive Slave Law Convention
This daguerreotype was taken at a Fugitive Slave Law convention in Cazenovia,
New York, in August 1850. Frederick Douglass is pictured seated at the edge of
the table on the right. Standing behind him is Gerrit Smith, a wealthy landowner
who later helped finance John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry. On either side of
Smith, in matching attire, are the teenaged Edmonston sisters, Mary and Emily,
former slaves in the District of Columbia. Two years earlier, they had been captured while attempting to escape and put up for sale at the slave pens in Alexandria, Virginia. After they were purchased for $2,250 by an agent of the New York
Anti-Slavery Society, they were brought north to show the kind of people victimized by the slave trade.
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like slavery, and still others sought to reform the institutions of the
church and the state, including insane asylums, prisons, and schools. As
diverse as the proliferating causes were, however, there were close connections among various reforms and reformers. Most activists were involved
in a number of different causes, and the reformers were also united by several common assumptions and beliefs. Most were devout Protestants, who
viewed social reform as a religious calling or duty. Most believed in the
perfectibility — or at least the possibility of the radical improvement — of
the individual and society. And virtually all reformers affirmed the power
of the word, whether spoken or written.
The ability of reformers to spread that word was made possible by some
of the same developments that encouraged literary production during the
period. The increasing power of the periodical press led to the establishment of numerous magazines and newspapers sponsored by reform societies or devoted to a single cause. A notable example was temperance,
which drew more supporters than any other reform and which enlisted
scores of magazines and newspapers in its crusade against alcohol. Like
many literary works of the period, the work of reform was also shaped by
the popularity of lectures and the consequent development of the lyceum
system, a network of local educational institutions that sponsored lecture
series in which many writers and reformers found a hospitable welcome,
or at least a public forum. At a time when eloquence was held in high
esteem, even reformers espousing unpopular causes could hope to gain an
audience through the power of their oratory, which was displayed in meetings of reform societies and in countless lectures, both at large halls in
cities and in the lyceums that sprouted up in small towns and villages
throughout the country. By exploiting the potent combination of print and
public lectures — many of which were either reported on or printed in
newspapers — reformers appealed at once to the individual consciences of
their auditors and the conscience of the nation to address the many injustices of nineteenth-century America.
Among the injustices that began to stir the conscience of some Americans was the treatment of Native Americans. “I ask you, shall the red man
live, or shall he be swept from the earth?” the Cherokee leader Elias
Boudinot asked in An Appeal to Whites, published in 1826. “They hang
upon your mercy as to a garment. Will you push them from you, or will you
save them?” While such questions had been raised as early as the administration of President Thomas Jefferson (1800–08), they gained added
urgency during the congressional debate over bills for the removal of the
Cherokee people from their lands in Georgia to territory west of the Mississippi River. Many of the Cherokee people were literate in English, and
in 1828 Boudinot founded the Cherokee Phoenix, from which editorials
opposing the legislation were reprinted in urban newspapers around
the country. The Cherokee people also appealed directly to Congress in a
I NTRODUCTION 609
series of “memorials,” or petitions, now known as the Cherokee Memorials.
After passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, most of the Cherokee
people continued to resist the policy, both in the courts of law and the
court of public opinion, until they were forcibly driven from their lands
during the winter of 1838–39. During almost exactly the same period, the
losing battle for Native American rights was carried forward in New
England by William Apess, a Pequot of mixed Indian and Caucasian heritage. For Apess, an ordained Methodist minister, race prejudice was at
odds with the preaching of Christ and the very spirit of Christianity. He
also exposed the brutal treatment of Native Americans by their ostensibly
“Christian” conquerors, notably in his “Eulogy on King Philip,” a lecture
read in Boston in 1836.
Robert Lindneux, Trail of Tears
After a decade-long struggle to retain their tribal lands in Georgia, in the winter
of 1838–39 the Cherokee people were forcibly rounded up by federal soldiers for
removal to lands west of the Mississippi. This 1942 painting portrays their long
trek to “Indian Territory,” present-day Oklahoma. The torturous journey, which
reduced the Cherokee population by over 30 percent, came to be known as “The
Path Where They Cried,” or “The Trail of Tears.”
610 T HE E RA OF R EFORM
Apess’s brief career as a preacher and writer ended with the publication
of that work, after which he was soon forgotten. In sharp contrast, another
work published in Boston in 1836 marked the beginning of the long literary career of one of the most influential writers in American literary history, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature, his first book, became a kind of
manifesto for the transcendentalists, a loosely connected group of writers
and intellectuals in and around Boston. Transcendentalism was an offshoot of Unitarianism, which by the 1820s became the dominant religion
of eastern Massachusetts. The Unitarians rejected as “irrational” the doctrine of the Trinity — the union in one God of the Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost — as well as such Puritan doctrines as predestination and the
innate depravity of human beings. Instead, the Unitarians emphasized the
individual’s freedom of choice and capacity for good. In one of his most
famous sermons, for example, the Unitarian minister William Ellery
Channing celebrated what he described as the human potential to achieve
“likeness to God.” That conception of human capacity strongly influenced
the “transcendentalists,” a term that was sometimes used in derision of
their belief in the power of human intuition, or “inward beholding,” to
apprehend a “transcendent” reality that was essentially mental or spiritual in nature. Although many of them were trained as Unitarian ministers, the transcendentalists revolted against what they viewed as the cold
rationality and materialism of Unitarianism. Some of them remained Unitarian ministers, seeking to infuse the church with a new spirit and to
transform it into a vehicle for social reform. Others abandoned the ministry, including Emerson, who resigned from his church in Boston in 1832.
Nonetheless, he remained a kind of secular minister or preacher, who once
described the lyceum as his “pulpit.” From that pulpit, Emerson delivered
hundreds of lectures throughout the North, preaching the gospel of “selfculture,” the full development of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual
nature of each individual.
Although Emerson was the most prominent of the transcendentalists,
the group encompassed diverse individuals and a wide range of views,
especially concerning social reform. Emerson’s belief that the reformation
of society would ultimately be achieved only through the spiritual transformation of its individual members was shared by his young friend Henry
David Thoreau. Like Emerson, Thoreau spoke out strongly against injustices like slavery and the Mexican War, notably in his famous essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” now better known as “Civil Disobedience.”
But he rejected the associations and methods of organized reformers, suggesting that their focus on social ills blinded them to the rich resources of
nature and the self. In fact, Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden (1854), may at
least in part be understood as a kind of manual of self-reform and a challenge to those who sought to change the world through different means.
I NTRODUCTION
He and Emerson were consequently often at odds with some of the other
transcendentalists, who insisted that individual moral reform must go
hand-in-hand with organized efforts to reform society. One of the earliest,
most militant, and most tenacious crusaders against slavery among the
transcendentalists was Theodore Parker, who attacked a wide range of
social abuses from the pulpit of his church in Boston. Other members of
the group turned their attention to the plight of exploited laborers in the
North. In 1840, Emerson’s friend George Ripley thus resigned from the
Unitarian ministry to establish the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture
and Education, one of the many utopian communities founded during that
decade. Such experiments in communal living or “association” varied
widely, but virtually all of them sought to offer models of social reorganization, harmonious communities in which individuals could escape the
corrosive influences and competitive pressures of an increasingly urban
and industrial society. Another of Emerson’s closest friends was Margaret
Charles Dubigny, View of a Phalanx (c. 1848)
The writings of the French utopian theorist Charles Fourier (1772–1837) had a
strong impact on a number of American communities, including Brook Farm,
which adopted his ideas of social organization in 1844. But the reality of Brook
Farm and other communities differed radically from this imaginary (and neverbuilt) rendering of an ideal Fourierist “phalanx,” an economic unit composed of
1,620 people whose members would live in the “phalanstery,” or community building, and in which work would be divided among people according to their natural
inclinations.
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T HE E RA OF R EFORM
Fuller, a sympathetic observer of and visitor to Brook Farm. Her career
illustrated the growing trend toward social activism within transcendentalism, as she became increasingly engaged in various reforms, including
“woman’s rights,” as the feminist movement was then known. In Woman in
the Nineteenth Century (1845), Fuller affirmed that women must develop
their personal natures and their public roles, an argument that influenced
many of those who emerged as leaders of the feminist movement, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
The crusaders for women’s rights faced formidable obstacles. One was
the domestic ideology of the period, often called “the cult of domesticity.”
On the one hand, that pervasive ideology emphasized the crucial role of
women, who were widely viewed as more virtuous than men and consequently as the primary nurturers of moral values from their central position in the domestic sphere. On the other hand, the belief that women’s
proper place was in the home effectively barred them from careers and
direct involvement in public issues. Although some women challenged
such a narrow definition of their role, they encountered firm opposition
and often harsh censure. The experience of the Grimké sisters, Sarah
and Angelina, was instructive. Daughters of a slaveholding family from
South Carolina, the sisters became devout Quakers and strong opponents
of slavery. When they began to speak out publicly on the issue, first in
small gatherings of women and then in larger “mixed” gatherings of men
and women, the sisters were chastised both in the press and the pulpit.
In a “Pastoral Letter” read from every Congregational pulpit in the state
in 1837, the Congregationalist Clergy of Massachusetts called attention
to what the New Testament defined as “the appropriate duties and influence of women.” Asserting that the “power of woman is in her dependence,” the clergy added: “When she assumes the place and tone
of a man as a public reformer . . . her character becomes unnatural.” Despite such opposition, the Grimkés continued to speak
“The investigation of the
rights of the slave has led me out against slavery and increasingly on behalf of women’s
rights. As Angelina Grimké observed in 1837, “The investigation
to a better understanding of
of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of
my own.”
my own.” That understanding of the connections between slavery and their own oppressed condition, “the slavery of sex,” led a
growing number of women into the feminist crusade. Their efforts to generate public discussion of the issue culminated in July 1848, when a convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, to consider the “the condition
and rights of woman.” That was a signal event in the history of women
in the United States, largely because of the “Declaration of Sentiments”
adopted at the end of the convention. At once an indictment of the “repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman” and a
call for women’s full equality, that radical document gained national atten-
I NTRODUCTION
tion and generated strong momentum for the feminist movement during
the following decade.
After 1850, however, women’s rights and all other reforms were overshadowed by the antislavery movement. That movement had a long history in America, especially among the Quakers, who in the late eighteenth
century became the first religious sect to bar slaveholders from their
“Society.” Beginning in the 1820s, the gentle persuasion of the Quakers
began to be superseded by far more militant demands for the end of slavery, as exemplified by An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829),
a fierce assault on slavery and American racism by David Walker, a free
black who grew up in the South before settling in Boston. Like many other
writings of the period, Walker’s book revealed an important influence on
antebellum reform, the religious revivalism that was such a powerful force
within American Protestantism during the first half of the nineteenth century. Walker insisted that slavery must end, if necessary by a slave revolt,
an affirmation of violent means that distinguished him from the most
prominent of the radical abolitionists, the pacifist William Lloyd Garrison, founder and editor of the Boston Liberator (1831–65). That was the
first newspaper to call for the immediate end of slavery, without compensation to slaveholders, and Garrison was viewed as a dangerous radical by
many Americans. In fact, his views were so unpopular that Garrison was
A Printing Press Demolished at Slavery’s Bidding
The caption of this widely distributed illustration read: “The people of the free
states have attacked ‘the tyrant’s foe, and the people’s friend,’ — Oct. 1835, at
Utica, July 1836, at Cincinnati, O., Aug. 1837 at Alton, Ill. and finally shot E. P.
Lovejoy, because he would not basely surrender ‘THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS, THE PALLADIUM OF ALL OUR LIBERTIES.’ ”
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attacked by a mob in Boston in 1836, part of a wave of violence against
antislavery lecturers, meetings of antislavery societies, and those seeking
to distribute antislavery literature. Antislavery newspapers were also the
target of violence during the decade. The first great martyr of the abolitionist movement was the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy, editor of the Observer in Alton, Illinois, where he was killed while defending his press
from a proslavery mob in 1837. In response to such attacks, the abolitionists sought to link their cause with the rights of freedom of the press and
freedom of speech, articles of faith among most Americans. The antislavery appeal slowly began to shape public opinion, especially after 1850,
when the message began to be amplified and spread in mass-market urban
dailies like Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, the most influential newspaper in the United States.
As crucial as they were, newspapers were not the only means by which
abolitionists exploited the growing power of the printing press. As David
Walker demonstrated, books could also be used to carry the antislavery
message to ever-larger numbers of people. One writer who was determined
to do so was Lydia Maria Child, who risked her reputation as one of
Boston’s most respected authors by publishing An Appeal on Behalf of
That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), the first book to
call for the immediate emancipation of the slaves and the end of
“The fugitive slave literature all forms of discrimination against people of color in the United
States. Among the most moving appeals for an end to slavery
is destined to be a powerful
and racism were the so-called slave narratives, autobiographilever. . . . We see in it the easy
cal accounts written by former slaves. “The fugitive slave literaand infallible means of aboli- ture is destined to be a powerful lever,” an anonymous reviewer
tionizing the free States. Argu- observed in 1849. “We see in it the easy and infallible means of
ment provokes argument,
abolitionizing the free States. Argument provokes argument,
reason is met by sophistry.
reason is met by sophistry. But narratives of slaves go right to
But narratives of slaves go
the hearts of men.” Of the hundreds of slave narratives pubright to the hearts of men.”
lished in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil
War, few went so deeply into the hearts of readers in the North
as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written
by Himself (1845). The phenomenal success of his book inspired a vivid
succession of similar accounts during the following few years, including
Narrative of the Life of William Wells Brown (1848) and Life and Adventures
of Henry Bibb, Written by Himself (1849). Such narratives also provided
inspiration and material for fictional treatments of slavery, especially
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a best-selling novel that more
than any other single work helped to generate antislavery sentiment in the
North. The impact of the novel was so great that, when he met Stowe during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln reportedly greeted her with the words,
“So you’re the little lady who made this big war.”
I NTRODUCTION
Slave Sale Broadside,
1852
The abolitionists often
cited the selling of slaves
and the consequent
breaking up of their families as a vivid illustration
of the inhumanity of a
system that mistreated
and sought to transform
human beings into
brutes. (As the note at the
bottom of this duotoned
reproduction of the
broadside indicates,
“Slaves will be sold separate, or in lots, as best
suits the purchaser.”) The
struggle against such
dehumanization was a
major theme in many of
the slave narratives and
much of the antislavery
fiction of the period.
(Chicago Historical Society
[ICHi–22003].)
Certainly, the long war of words between the abolitionists and proslavery apologists was a major source of the sectional divisions that
culminated in the Civil War. On the eve of that war, Harriet Jacobs — who
adopted the pseudonym “Linda Brent” — added yet another powerful
appeal to Northern readers with Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the
first full-length narrative written by a former female slave in America. In a
letter to the Liberator, the black abolitionist William C. Nell expressed the
hope that Jacobs’s account would “find its way into every family, where all,
especially mothers and daughters, may learn yet about the barbarism of
American slavery and the character of its victims.” In fact, few read the
book, which appeared only three months before the outbreak of the war in
April 1861. But the abolitionists continued their crusade during the four
long years of the conflict, which they sought to transform into a war to end
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slavery, not simply a struggle to preserve the Union. They helped convince
President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which ended
slavery only in areas not controlled by Union forces, and their efforts were
finally crowned by the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment shortly
before the end of the Civil War. The abolition of slavery hardly ended injustice in the United States. On the contrary, African Americans and other
minorities continued to struggle for full equality, while women, who had
contributed so much to the antislavery movement, did not gain the right to
vote until 1920. Nonetheless, the end of slavery was a major victory for the
abolitionists, who like so many of the other reformers and writers of the
period 1830–65 had so persistently sought to expose the yawning gap
between American ideals of freedom and equality and the harsh realities
of life in the United States.