Chapter 11: Religion and Reform, 1820-1860

Individualism
- This was a phrase coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 to describe the lives led by Americans
becoming increasingly more solitary.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated this “liberation of the individual from traditional constraints.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalism
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Ralph Waldo Emerson was the leading voice of the Transcendentalism movement.
- Other advocates were spiritual young men, often Unitarian ministers from wealthy New
England families who questioned the Puritan style of life.
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This movement was the liberation from understanding and the cultivation of reasoning.
- The goal was to “transcend” the limits of intellect and allow the emotions, the SOUL, to
create an original relationship with the Universe.
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Some of the key aspects were…
- Man must acknowledge a body of moral truths that were intuitive and transcend more
sensational proof.
1. The infinite benevolence of God.
2. The infinite benevolence of nature.
3. The divinity of man.
- They instinctively rejected all secular authority and the authority of organized churches
and the scriptures, of law, or of conventions.
- Therefore, if man was divine, it would be wicked that he should be held in slavery, or his
soul corrupted by superstition, or his mind clouded by ignorance.
- Thus the role of the reformer was to restore man to that divinity which god had endowed
them.
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The Transcendentalist Agenda was to…
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Give slaves their freedom
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Give well-being to the poor and the miserable
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Give learning to the ignorant
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Give health to the sick
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Give peace and justice to society

Emerson’s Literary Influence
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One of the tasks Emerson set for himself was the remaking of American literature.
- He sought for American to have literary independence from “courtly muse” of Old Europe,
and for American writers to find inspiration in ordinary human experiences.
- Emerson wrote these famous books; Nature (1832), The American Scholar (1837), and SelfReliance (1841).

Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller
- Henry David Thoreau was one of the American writers that Emerson influenced, and in
response to his brother’s death, Thoreau went to go live in the woods so as to “search for
meaning beyond the artificiality of “civilized life.””
- He wrote these famous books; Walden (1854) and Resistance to Civil Disobedience
(1849).
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Thoreau advocated social nonconformity and civil disobedience against unjust laws.
Margaret Fuller was an explorer of the possibilities of freedom for women.
- She was from a wealthy family, and was very intelligent – she mastered six
languages, read all types of literature, and educated her brothers and sisters.
- Fuller became the editor for the leading Transcendentalist journal, and she also
published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which stated that a “new era” was coming
to the relationships between the sexes.

Walt Whitman
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Whitman was another writer that responded to Emerson’s call.
- He wrote about human suffering with passion, and he thought that individuals had
expanded to become divine, and democracy had become a sacred character.
-

He wrote the famous book Leaves of Grass (1855).
Darker Visions: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville
- Both Hawthorne and Melville were influenced by Emerson, however, these two writers
were much more pessimistic in their world views and also opposed the idea of
transcendentalism, and this can be clearly seen in their writing.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) thought that the pursuit of the ideal led to a distorted
view of human nature and possibilities, which can be seen in his famous book The Blithedale
Romance (1852).
- He thought that people should instead accept the world as an imperfect place, which
can be seen in his novels; The Scarlet Letter (1850) and House of the Seven Gables.
- Herman Melville explored the limits of individualism in an even more extreme and
tragic manner.
- He also emerged as a scathing critic of transcendentalism, and this can be seen in his
most famous book Moby Dick (1851).
- In this book, the quest for spiritual meaning in nature brings death, not
transcendence, because the main character lacks inner discipline and self-restraint.

Brook Farm
- To escape America’s emerging market society, many transcendentalists and other radical
reformers created ideal communities, or utopias.
- One of the most famous utopias is Brook Farm, which was the most important
transcendentalist communal experiment founded just outside in Boston in 1841.
- All the major transcendentalists, including Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller were either
residents or frequent visitors.
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However, Brook Farm was a failure economically.
- While all these intellectuals hoped to escape the ups and downs of the market by
becoming self-sufficient, only a few of them had any knowledge of farming at all and those
that did had very little.
-

By 1846, Brook Farm had been disbanded permanently.
Rural Communalism and Urban Popular Culture
- Even as Brook Farm collapsed, thousands of Americans were joining together to form communal
settlements all over America.
- Many were formed for economic stability during the Panic of 1837, but they were also symbols of
social protest and experimentation.
- By creating common ownership of property and unconventional forms of marriage and family life,
communalist leaders and their followers challenged the legitimacy of capitalist values and traditional
gender roles.

Mother Ann Lee and the Shakers
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The Shakers were the first successful American communal movement.
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They were named thus because of the frequent dancing they did in their worship.
- Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784), the founder, had a dream she was the reincarnation of Christ,
and four years later she founded a church near Albany, NY.
- Members of Shaker communities embraced the common ownership of property, the strict
oversight of church leaders, and pledged to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, politics, war, and sex.
- Because they were a celibate community, the only way they grew in numbers was from
adoption of orphans or through conversion.
- The Shaker’s economy was primarily based on the manufacturing of furniture, which they
made by hand.
- By 1900, the Shakers had virtually disappeared due primarily to the decreasing number of
orphans available to be taken into their communities.
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However, their communities will largely be remembered for being based on simplicity.

Arthur Brisbane and Fourierism
- As the Shakers’ craze leveled off in the 1840s, the American Fourierist movement was
rapidly expanding.
- Charles Fourier (1777-1837) was a French reformer who devised an eight-stage theory of
social evolution that predicted the imminent decline of individualism and capitalism.
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Fourierists sought to rid America of slavery and to replace capitalism with socialism.
- In this system, men and women would work for the community, in cooperative groups
called phalanxes.
- The members of each phalanx would be the shareholders; they would own all its
property in common, including stores and a bank, a school, and a library.
- However, most Fourierist communities collapsed within a decade or two because of disputes
over work responsibilities and social politics.

John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community
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The Oneida Community was also known as the Free-Love Community.
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This society was founded by John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886).
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They believed in Millenarianism, that the second coming of Christ had already occurred.
- Because of this, they felt that humans were no longer obliged to follow the moral rules
of the past.
- They believed in “complex marriage”, in which all residents were married to each
other.
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They did, however, carefully regulate “free love.”
- Noyes eventually fled to Canada in 1879 to avoid prosecution for adultery, and when he left
the community abandoned complex marriage but retained its cooperative spirit and they founded
the Oneida Community, Ltd.

Joseph Smith and the Mormon Experience
- Whilst both the Shakers and the Oneidians were radical utopias, they were small and thus
aroused little hostility, the Mormons had cohesive organization and substantial numbers and thus
provoked more animosity.
- The Mormons, also known as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
were utopians with a much more conservative social agenda – continuing the traditional
patriarchal family.

Joseph Smith
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Joseph Smith Jr. was the founder of the Mormon Church (1805-1844).
- In a series of religious experiments that began in the early 1820s, Smith came to believe
that God had singled him out to receive special revelations of divine truth, which he
published in The Book of Mormon in 1830.
- He claimed to have written The Book of Mormon from translations made from
hieroglyphics on gold plates shown to him by an angel named Moroni.
- In this book, Smith explained the presence of native peoples in the Americas and
integrated them into the Judeo-Christian tradition.
- He encouraged the revival of traditional social doctrines, such as patriarchal authority
with the family.
- By the early 1840s, Smith had moved his converts to Nauvoo, IL, where they now
numbered 30,000 inhabitants – the largest utopian community in the US.
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Resentment for Smith and the Mormons began to grow rapidly because of…
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Their economic prosperity.
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Bloc voting in IL elections.
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Hostility toward other sects.
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Smith refused to abide by any IL law of which he disapproved.
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Asked Congress to turn Nauvoo into a separate federal territory.
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Smith declared himself as a candidate for President of the United States.
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Smith now endorsed polygamy, the practice of men having more than one wife at
one time.
- In 1844, Illinois officials arrested Smith and charged him with treason for allegedly
conspiring with foreign powers to create a Mormon colony in Mexican territory.
- When he was in jail, an anti-Mormon mob stormed the jail in Carthage, IL, and
killed Smith and his brother.

Brigham Young and Utah
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Brigham Young was Smith’s leading disciple and an energetic missionary.
- Young led a large contingent of Mormons out of the US and into Mexican territory,
where they settled in the Great Salt Lake Valley in present-day Utah.
- The Mormons that stayed behind were the ones that rejected polygamy, and led by
Joseph Smith III, they formed the reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
and settled throughout the Midwest.
- When the US acquired the title to Mexico’s northern territories, Young petitioned for a
vast new state known as Deseret, which would stretch from present-day Utah to the Pacific
coast.
- However, Congress set up the much smaller state of Utah and named Young the
governor.
- In 1858, however, President James Buchanan responded to pressure from Protestants to
eliminate polygamy by removing Young from the governorship and sending a small army to
Salt Lake City.
- However, fearing that this would serve as a precedent for ending slavery, the prosouth Buchanan withdrew the troops.

Urban Popular Culture
- As utopian reformers organized new communities, rural migrants and foreign immigrants
created a new culture in the cities.
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From 1800 to 1860, urban populations had increased by more then tenfold.
- At the very heart of this culture were the thousands of young men and women from rural
areas, who flocked to cities in search of fortune and adventure.
- However, most men found only meager wages on the construction crews, low-paid
operatives or clerks.
- It was even worse for women, who mostly toiled as live-in domestic servants, ordered
about by the mistress of the house and often sexually abused by their well-to-do masters.
Many women also worked as needlewomen in NY’s booming clothes manufacturing
industry.
- Whilst many women did these, many were not able to scrape a living from it, and
thousands of women turned to prostitution.

Sex and Dress
- Commercialized sex – and sex in general – was an important facet of this new urban
culture.
- “Sporting men” engaged freely in sexual conquests, respectable married men kept
mistresses in hand apartments, and working men frequented bawdy houses in the city.
- This new culture also changed how young men and women found their partner. Many
would move from sexual partner to sexual partner until they chanced on an ideal mate.
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During this time, men and women began to dress in “sexy” clothing, i.e. lace, silk, etc.

Racism and Nativism
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Popular entertainment was also a facet of this new culture.
- They could see traditional plays, such as those of Shakespeare, but the most popular
were the Minstrel Shows.
- These shows were performed by white actors in blackface, and were a complex blend
of racist caricature and social criticism.
- The most famous of these was John Dartmouth Rice, who would dress up as “Jim
Crow”.

Abolitionism
- Like other reform movements, Abolitionism drew on religious energy and ideas generated by the
Second Great Awakening.
- Now abolitionists condemned slavery as a sin, along with arguing that human bondage was contrary
to republicanism and liberty.

Black Social Thought: Uplift, Race, Equality, Rebellion
- In the 1790s, leading blacks in the North advocated a strategy of social uplift in which free
blacks would “elevate” themselves through education, temperance, moral discipline, and hard
work.
- They sought to gain the respect of white people, so that they could assume a position of
equality with them.
- Some of the most famous African Americans to embrace this were James Forten, Prince
Hall, Hosea Easton and Richard Allen.
- This elicited a violent response from whites in Boston, Pittsburgh, and many other northern
cities, where whites refused to accept blacks as their equals.

Evangelical Abolitionism
- A cadre of evangelical Christians in the North and the Midwest launched a moral crusade to
abolish slavery.
- Many Quakers, and some Baptists and Methodists, had already freed their slaves, and
they advocated for the gradual emancipation of all blacks.
- However, the new radical Christian abolitionists were demanding for immediate
emancipation, claiming that this issue was absolute.
- They said that if “the slave owners did not allow slaves their God-given status as free
moral agents; they faced revolution in this world and damnation in the next.”

William Lloyd Garrison and this American Anti-Slavery Society
- William Lloyd Garrison was a leading abolitionist, and was perhaps the most
uncompromising.
- In 1830, Garrison went to jail, convicted of libeling a New England merchant engaged in
the domestic slave trade.
- When released, he moved to Boston and started his own anti-slavery weekly, The
Liberator, and also founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society.
- In 1833, Garrison met with 61 other abolitionists, both black and white, and his New
England Anti-Slavery Society into the American version that spanned the nation.
- Women also formed their own abolitionist organizations, such as the Philadelphia
Female Anti-Slavery Society (Lucretia Mott in 1833) and the Anti-Slavery Conventions of
American Women (late 1830s).
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Abolitionists used a three-pronged attack…
1. Appeal to religious Americans.
2. Help African Americans who had fled from slavery.
3. Appeal to state and national legislators.

Opposition and Internal Conflict
- Still abolitionists were the minority, with only 10% of northerners and Midwesterners
strongly in support, and another 20% sympathetic to its goals.
-
Their opponents were more numerous and equally aggressive.
Also whites almost universally opposed “amalgamation”, which was the racial mixing and
intermarriage that Garrison seemed to support by encouraging meetings of black and white
abolitionists of both sexes.

Antiabolitionist Mobs
- Motivated by racial fears, such as free blacks taking their jobs for lower wages, white
workers in the North periodically took part in violent mob actions.
- They attacked places that had reputation where blacks and whites mixed, including
taverns and brothels.
- They also sank as low as attacking “respectable” African American institutions
churches, temperance halls, and orphanages.
- In the south, things were much worse. Abolitionist groups were banned and anyone who was
associated with the abolitionist movement could be flogged, arrested, imprisoned, and tried.
- In 1836, the House of Representatives adopted the so-called gag rule. Under this informal
rule (which lasted until 1844), issues that had to do with slavery or abolition of slavery were
tabled so that they could not become the subject of debate in the House, thus keeping the
explosive issue of slavery off the national stage.

The Fight over Gender Splits the Abolitionist Movement
- Whilst also facing opposition from anti-abolitionists, abolitionists were split along the
roles that women should have in this movement.
- Many men condemned the fact that women were involved, whilst all women and the
rest of the men embraced the fact.
- The Liberty party was the first antislavery party, and in 1840, they elected James G.
Birney, a former Alabama slave owner, to run for president.
- However, he received few votes, and thus the future of political abolitionism
appeared dim.

The Women’s Rights Movement
- The prominence of women among the abolitions reflected a broad shift in American culture – a shift
in which women had entered public life.
- Their recent activism (in the abolitionist movement, Second Great Awakening, Benevolence
movement, etc) caused issues of gender – sexual behavior, marriage, family authority – to become
subjects of debate.
- In 1848, the debate entered a new phase, when some reformers turned their advocacy toward
women’s rights and demanded complete equality with men.

Origins of the Women’s Movement
- Mary Walker Ostram may have been the first women to largely influence American culture,
and was a large supporter of women’s suffrage.
- She was married to lawyer-politician but was childless, and thus devoted her life to
evangelical Presbyterianism and its program of benevolent social reform.
- Her minister, Philemon Fowler, referred to her as “a “living fountain” of faith, an exemplar
of “Women’s Sphere of Influence” in the world.”

Transcending the “Separate Sphere”
- A public presence for women was hard won and rarely seen during this time in
American history, and even as Ostram’s minister praised her, he reiterated the Revolutionaryera precept that women should limit their political role to that of “republican mother,”
instructing “their sons in the principles of liberty and government.”
- Fowler contended that women inhabited a “separate sphere” then man, and had no
business in markets, politics, the courts of justice, or legislation. Instead her “sphere” was her
home.
- However, many women had transcended this “sphere” by joining in with the Second
Great Awakening.

Dorothea Dix and Institutional Reform
- Dorothea Dix was a woman who turned her energies to the improvement of public
institutions.
- Dix, as a child, was poor and emotionally abused, and thus grew up to become a
compassionate young woman with a strong sense of moral purpose.
- She utilized her grandparents resources to set up charity schools, and became a
successful author and a public figure.
- In 1841, Dix took up a new cause; that of convincing lawmakers to enlarge state
hospitals so as to accommodate indigent mental patients.
- When this worked in Massachusetts, she set out on a journey that took her to 18 state
penitentiaries, 300 county jails and houses of correction, and more than 500 almshouses
in addition to innumerable hospitals.
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Both as reformers and teachers, other northern women transformed public education.

Abolitionist Women
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Women had long been active in the abolitionist movement.
- As early as the Revolutionary era, Quaker women in Philadelphia established schools for
free slaves, and Baptist and Methodist women in the Upper South endorsed religious
arguments against slavery.
- One of the first abolitionist recruits of Garrison was Maria W. Stewart, an African
American, who spoke to mixed audiences of men and women in Boston in the early 1830s.
- Women abolitionists could best sympathize with the horrors black female slaves had to go
through – for they knew how often African American women slaves were sexually abused by
their masters.
- However, as women attacked slavery and sexual oppression, many men challenged their
right to participate in public debate.

In response to this, women activists rejected the subordinate status of their sex.
The Program of Seneca Falls and Beyond
- During the 1840s, women’s rights activists devised a pragmatic program of reform, in which
they tried to strengthen the legal rights of married women, especially when it came to property.
- This won crucial support from affluent men who wanted to protect their wife’s assets in
case their own businesses went into bankruptcy in the volatile new market economy.
- These considerations prompted legislatures to pass married women’s property acts between
1839 and 1845 in three states – Maine, Mississippi, and Massachusetts.
- The Seneca Falls meeting was comprised of 70 women and 30 men, and they issued a
rousing manifesto for women’s equality in 1848…
- “All men and women are created equal; the history of mankind is a history of repeated
injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the
establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”
- To persuade Americans to right this long-standing wrong, the activists resolved to use all of
their power to repudiate the idea that the natural order of society demanded separate spheres for
men and women.
- Most men dismissed this, but the women’s rights movement still attracted a growing number
of supporters.