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Reforms in American
Society: 1790-1860
Chapter 15
2nd Great Awakening
!   Causes
!   1. The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
!   2. Deism and Unitarians
2nd Great Awakening
!   Event:
!   Began on the southern frontier
!   One of the most momentous episodes in the history of
American religion
!   Would lead to social issues: prison reform, temperance
movement, women’s movement, abolitionism
!   Methodists and Baptists were the most affected religions
!   Peter Cartwright & Charles Grandison Finney
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2nd Great Awakening
!   Key feature of the Second Great Awakening- WOMEN
!   Most enthusiastic revivalists
!   Majority of new church members
!   “Save the rest of society”- would lead to reforms of the
1800s
Mormons
!   Led by Joseph Smith (Book of Mormon)
!   Smith and Mormon followers ran into trouble in Ohio,
Missouri, and Illinois (killed in Carthage, IL 1844)
!   Brigham Young took control and led Mormon
followers to Utah
!   27 wives, 56 kids
!   Why so many problems with Mormons?
Public Education
!   Early tax-supported schools were scarce- only educated
the “poor children”
!   Why the “turn-around” for well-to-do, conservative
Americans?
!   Little red schoolhouses- the “shrine of American
democracy”
!   Problems with early schools and early teachers
!   Horace Mann- more and better schoolhouses, longer
school terms, higher pay for teachers & expanded
curriculum
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Public Education
!   Other educational advances!   Noah Webster
!   William H. McGuffey- McGuffey’s Readers
Higher Education
!   2nd Great Awakening led to the growth of small,
denominational, liberal arts college-mainly South &
West
!   Not very effective
!   Narrow curriculum of Latin, Greek, Math, and Moral
Philosophy- BORING
!   1st state supported universities
!   North Carolina (1795)
!   University of Virginia (1819)
Higher Education
!   Women’s Education
!   Frowned upon in early 1800s
!   Emma Willard- Troy Female Seminary (1821)
!   Mary Lyon- Mount Holyoke Seminary (1837)
!   Oberlin College (1837)
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The Age of Reform
!   Promises of the 2nd Great Awakening inspired people
to battle “earthly evils”
!   Modern idealists pictured a old Puritan vision of a
perfected society
!   Women were the strongest proponents in the reform
movements- escape from home
!   Most activists were unaware of new industrial age-
ignored factory workers, blamed problems on bad
habits, and were very single-minded
Debtors’ Prisons
!   Late 1830s- hundreds in prison for debt (some less than
a $1)
!   Debtors’ prisons gradually abolished as laborers
continued to win in elections and state laws were
rewritten
Criminal Codes
!   Number of capital offenses were being reduced
!   Less brutal punishments (whipping/branding)
!   New idea- prisons should “reform” as well as punish-
“penitentiaries” (for penance)
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Dorothea Dix
!   Collected observations on insanity and asylums over 8
years
!   Her report to the Mass. Legislature resulted in
improved conditions for mentally ill- also- concept that
mentally ill were not perverse and demented
Temperance Movement
!   American drinking problem- excessive drinking caused
by way of life and custom
!   Why a call for temperance movement?
!   Drinking decreased the efficiency of labor
!   Increased the danger of accidents at work
!   “fouled” the sanctity of the family
!   Threatened the spiritual, physical welfare of women/
children
Temperance Movement
!   Temperance Society formed at Boston in 1826
!   T.S Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw
There
!   Moderate reformers- temperance (moderation)
!   Radicals- new legislation to remove alcohol
!   Maine Law of 1851
!   Neal Dow
!   Prohibited the manufacture and sale of liquor
!   By 1857, close to a dozen states joined
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Women in Revolt
!   Early 1800s women:
!   Could not vote
!   Could be legally beaten by her husband
!   Could not retain title to her property (became her
husband’s)
!   Women’s role- special responsibility to teach the young
how to be good and productive citizens
Women in Revolt
!   Early Women’s Reformers
!   Lucretia Mott
!   Quaker who was a hard-fought abolitionist
!   Elizabeth Cady Stanton
!   Suffrage for women
!   Re-wrote her wedding vows- no “obey”
!   Quaker who was a hard-fought abolitionist
!   Susan B. Anthony
!   Advocate for women’s rights- “Suzy Bs”
Women in Revolt
!   Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell
!   First female graduate from a medical college
!   Sarah and Angelina Grimke
!   Abolitionists
!   Lucy Stone
!   Retained her maiden name “Lucy Stoners”
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Seneca Falls Convention
!   1848- Seneca Falls, NY
!   Launched the modern women’s rights movement
!   “All men and women created equal”
Wilderness Utopias
!   More than 40 communities were established during
this time period- wanting to create a society “seeking
human betterment”
!   Robert Owen in New Harmony, Indiana (1825)
!   Oneida Community- New York (1848)- free love
!   Most died out or changed their methods
!   Longest running- the Shakers- 1770s-1940
Scientific Achievements
!   Nathaniel Bowditch- mathematician for navigation
!   Matthew Maury- oceanographer- ocean winds and
currents
!   Lousi Agassiz- Biology
!   Asa Gray- his textbooks on botany set new standards
for clarity/interest
!   Medicine- bleeding remained the common cure,
doctors eventually used laughing gas & ether instead of
whiskey
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National Literature
!   Knickerbocker Group
!   Washington Irving- “Rip Van Winkle”, “Legend of
Sleepy Hollow”
!   James Fenimore Cooper- The Spy, The Last of the
Mohicans
!   William Cullen Bryant- “Thanatopsis”, editor of the
New York Evening Post
Transcendentalism
!   Transcendentalism- Truth “transcends” the senses- it
cannot be found by observation alone. Every person
has an inner light that can illuminate the highest truth
and put him/her in direct touch with God.
!   Commitment to self-reliance, self-culture, and self-
discipline
!   Hostility to authority, dignity of the individual, leader
of reform movements
Transcendentalism
!   Ralph Waldo Emerson-his popularity was because his
ideals reflected the expanding America: selfimprovement, self-confidence, optimism, and freedom.
!   “The American Scholar” speech at Harvard (1837)
!   Henry David Thoreau- Walden: Or Life in the Woods,
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience- inspired Gandhi
!   Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass
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