Unit 2: Building the Nation
1776-1860
• Chapter 9: The Confederation and the Constitution, 1776-1790
• Chapter 10: Launching the New Ship of State, 1789-1800
• Chapter 11: The Triumphs and Travails of the Jeffersonian Republic, 18001812
• Chapter 12: The Second War for Independence and the Upsurge of
Nationalism, 1812-1824
• Chapter 13: The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824-1840
• Chapter 14: Forging a National Economy, 1790-1860
• Chapter 15: The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790-1860
• Unit Exam: Politics & Power
Chapter 15
The Ferment of Reform and
Culture, 1790-1860
“We [Americans] will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own
hands; we will speak our own minds.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 1837
I. Reviving Religion
• Religion in the 1790-1860: ¾ of 23 million Americans still
attended church regularly in 1850.
• Religion had changed: Puritanism was out.
• Deism & Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794) were in:
reason over revelation.
• Unitarianism rejected the Holy Trinity and deity of Jesus, but
accepted free will and salvation through good works.
• Very appealing to liberal, rational, optimistic writers and artists.
• The Second Great Awakening: a reaction against the
growing liberalism in religion.
• Would inspire/influence many later reform movements:
women’s rights, abolition.
• Very popular in the south and west among Baptists and
Methodists
• Peter Cartwright & Charles Grandison Finney were the great
preachers of this movement.
Charles Grandison Finney (1792–
1875), 1834
He was said to have converted over a
half million people. That’s a few more
people than I have following me on
Instagram.
II. Denominational Diversity
• “2GA” revivals created new denominations and
split old ones.
• Western New York had so many “hellfire and
damnation” preachers that it came to be known as the
Burned-Over-District.
• Millerites: interpreted the Bible to mean that Christ
would return to Earth in 1844.
• Throughout 1840s-1850s, many denominations split
along north/south lines.
• Like the First Great Awakening, the Second tended
to inspire poorer populations.
• Prosperous and conservative denominations in the East Religious Camp Meeting, by J. Maze Burbank,
1839
were little touched.
• Methodists, Baptist, and other sects tended to come
from less prosperous communities in the rural South and
West.
NOTE: The following slides have
not yet been organized for the
current school year.
III. A Desert Zion in Utah
Joseph Smith
Founder of Mormonism
• Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)
• Joseph Smith received golden plates, which constituted the
Book of Mormon – created oligarchy.
• Mormons were not well-received in Ohio, Missouri, or Illinois.
• Joseph Smith was murdered and mangled by a mob in
Illinois (1844).
• Brigham Young took over leadership and led his people to
Utah (1846).
• Utah grew very quickly – polygamy & European immigration.
• Crisis: Washington wanted to control UT Governor
Brigham Young, so federal troops marched in 1857
against the Mormons.
• Bloodshed was avoided, but the question of who is in control
was left unanswered.
Thursday
November 12, 2015
Brigham Young
Mormon leader
following the
murder of
Joseph Smith &
the first guy
we’ve seen this
year who
rocked “Civil
War Beard”
The Mormon World
IV. Free Schools for a Free People
• Advocates of tax-supported (“free”) public education
met stiff opposition during the early days of the United
States.
• Eventually, though, the wealthy class realized that better
education of the masses might help bring stability to the
nation.
• The South was especially slow in developing public education.
• The little red schoolhouse became the norm.
• Stayed open only a few months of the year & schoolteachers
were mainly ill-trained men.
• By 1860 the nation counted only 100 public secondary
schools.
• Black slaves in the South were legally forbidden to receive
instruction in reading and writing.
• Horace Mann, Noah Webster, and William H. McGuffey
helped bring about great changes in education.
The single greatest
advancement in education
since . . . ever. Every teacher
has a shrine to one somewhere
in their house. If they deny this
fact, they are lying.
p312
V. Higher Goals for Higher Learning
• 2GA inspired many southern/western liberal arts
colleges.
• Only offered traditional courses: Latin, Greek,
mathematics, etc.
• TJ’s University of Virginia (1819):
• Dedicated the university to freedom from religion or
political shackles.
• Modern languages and the sciences received emphasis
alongside traditional courses.
• Women’s higher education had been frowned
upon.
• Prejudice: too much learning injured the brain,
undermined health, and rendered a young lady unfit
for marriage.
• Many adults learned via libraries, lyceum lecture
associations, and magazines.
The University of Virginia today
What observations can
you make about TJ’s
tomb stone?
VI. An Age of Reform
• Reformers were inspired by the 2GA.
• Main Issues: debtor’s prisons, women’s
suffrage, capital offenses, purpose of prisons,
asylums, slavery, peace in general
• Dorothea Dix was a great example of a pre-Civil
War reformer.
• Travelled 60,000 miles in 8 years to document
firsthand observation of insanity and asylums.
• Her persistent prodding of government officials
resulted in improved conditions.
Patient Treatment & Conditions of
Asylums during the 19th century
prompted calls for reform. Our
understanding of mental health issues
continues to grow to this day.
(left) The Stepping Mill, Auburn
Prison, New York, 1823
Reformers like Dorothea Dix
believed that idleness was a
scourge and prescribed rigorous
exercise regimens for prisoners.
At the experimental prison in
Auburn, chained prisoners were
obliged to turn this wheel
for long periods of time.
VII. Demon Rum—The “Old Deluder”
• The American Temperance Society formed in
Boston (1826).
• Early foes of alcohol adopted two main ideas:
1.
2.
“temperance” vs. “teetotalism
legislation; leader Neal S. Dow, “Father of
Prohibition,” sponsored the Maine Law of 1851
• Maine Law of 1851
• Prohibited the manufacture and sale of
intoxicating liquor
• By 1857, a dozen states passed various
prohibition laws – loosely enforced
Signing the Pledge, Lithograph, 1846
Temperance reformers decried many evils of
alcohol such as its corrupting influence on
family life.
VIII. Women in Revolt
• Women in America – 19th Century
• Gender differences were strongly emphasized in 1800s America.
• The home – women were the center of the “cult of domesticity.”
• Female reformers demanded equal rights, temperance,
abolition
• Most notable Early reformers: Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Susan B. Anthony
• Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York in
1848:
• Stanton read a Declaration of Sentiments: “all men and women
are created equal”
• One resolution formally demanded the ballot for women
• The Seneca Falls meeting launched the modern women’s rights
movement.
• The crusade for women’s rights was eclipsed by the
campaign against slavery.
• Some small victories: college admittance, property
ownership
Suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left)
and Susan B. Anthony (right) were two of
the most persistent activists for equality.
What It Would Be If Some
Ladies Had Their Own Way
The men in this antifeminist
cartoon are sewing, tending the
baby, and washing clothes. The
scene seemed absurd then, but
not a century later.
IX. Wilderness Utopias
John Humphrey Noyes
Oneida Community
• Utopias: 40 communities of a cooperative,
communistic, or “communitarian” nature were set up:
• In 1825, Robert Owen founded a communal society of a
thousand people at New Harmony, Indiana.
• Brook Farm, Mass. (1841) with the brotherly and sisterly
cooperation of about 20 intellectuals committed to the
philosophy of transcendentalism.
• Oneida Community (1848) in NY practiced free love, birth
control, eugenic selection of parents.
• Flourished for 30 years, largely because its they made superior
steel traps.
• Shakers:
• Longest-lived sect, founded in England (1774) by Mother Ann Lee
• Attained a membership of 6000 in 1840
• But since their monastic customs prohibited both marriage and
sexual relations, they were virtually extinct by 1940.
X. The Dawn of Scientific Achievement
• Limited scientific talent:
• Professor Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864) was a pioneer
chemist and geologist taught at Yale College for 50 years.
• Professor Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) served for a quarter
century at Harvard College and insisted on original
research over memorization.
• Professor Asa Gray (1810-1888) of Harvard College wrote
textbooks which set new standards.
• Naturalist John J. Audubon (1785-1851) wrote and
illustrated Birds of America.
• Medicine in America was primitive and selfprescribed.
• Some progress began in the 1840s – EX: early anesthesia
This was sold as medicine in the 1830s.
Enough said.
XI. Artistic Achievements
• Americans wanted a unique culture to match
their unique political structure.
• Americans copied old world architecture:
classical Greek and Roman styles.
• After the War of 1812, American painters
turned away from portraits towards landscapes.
• The Hudson River school (1820s and 1830s)
celebrated nature.
• Cole’s The Oxbow (1836) portrayed the ecological
threat of human encroachment on once pristine
environments
• Music was slowly becoming popular as Puritan
restrictions faded.
The Oxbow, by Thomas Cole, 1836
XII. The Blossoming of a National Literature
• Early Americans focused practicality: The
Federalist (1787-1788), Common Sense (1776),
political orations of Daniel Websters, Benjamin
Franklin’s Autobiography (1818)
• Romanticism then grew out of a reaction to
rational thinking of the Enlightenment.
• It emphasized imagination over reason, nature over
civilization, intuition over calculation, and the self over
society.
• American Writers: Washington Irving, James
Fenimore Cooper, & William Cullen Bryant – the
“Knickerbocker Group”
From Top to Bottom:
Washington Irving,
James Fenimore
Cooper, William
Cullen Bryant
XIII. Trumpeters of Transcendentalism
• Transcendentalism: resulted from new liberal ideas
• Truth “transcends” the senses: it cannot be found by observation
alone.
• Every person possesses an inner light that can illuminate the highest
truth, and indirectly touch God.
• Stressed self-reliance, self-culture, self-discipline, anti-authority,
humanitarianism
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
• The American Scholar urged American writers to throw off
European traditions.
• Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
• Walden: Or Life in the Woods (1854): his two year life on the edge
of Walden Pond
• On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849): influenced Gandhi & MLK
Jr
• Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
• Edited the transcendental journal, The Dial in the name of
intellectual dialogue
• Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
• Leaves of Grass (1855) highly emotional and unconventional poetry
Top to Bottom:
Emerson, Thoreau,
Fuller, Whitman
XIV. Glowing Literary Lights
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882): one of
America’s first (world) famous poets
• Wrote Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The
Courtship of Miles Standish (1858)
• John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892): a great poet of
the abolition movement
• James Russell Lowell (1819-1891): one of America’s
most famous poets & essayist
• Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888): Little Women (1868) Longfellow
(Top) &
• Emily Dickinson (1830-1886): lived as a recluse—an
Dickinson
extreme example of the romantic artist’s desire for
social remove
• William Gilmore Stuart (1806-1870): most noteworthy
literary figure produced by the South
• His reputation suffered as a result of his proslavery and
secessionist ideas during the Civil War.
XV. Literary Individualists and Dissenters
• Not all writers believed in human goodness and social
progress.
• Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849): Gothic Horror
• Poetry: 1845’s “The Raven”
• Short Stories: “The Fall of the House of Usher”
• Two writers reflected the continuing Puritan obsession with
original sin and with the never-ending struggle between good
and evil:
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864):
• His masterpiece was The Scarlet Letter (1850); describes the practice of
forcing an adulteress to wear a scarlet “A” on her clothing
• In The Marble Faun he explores the concepts of the omnipresence of evil
• Herman Melville (1819-1891):
• His masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851), a complex allegory of good and evil
• It had to wait until the twentieth century for readers and for proper
recognition
Top to Bottom:
Poe, Hawthorne,
Melville
XVI. Portrayers of the Past
• American Historians:
• George Bancroft (1800-1891):
• Deservedly received the title “Father of American History”
• He published a spirited, super patriotic history of the United States in ten volumes.
• William H. Prescott (1796-1859):
• Published classic account of the conquest of Mexico (1843) and Peru (1847).
• Francis Parkman (1823-1893):
• Penned a brilliant series of volumes beginning in 1851
• He chronicled the struggle between France and Britain in colonial times for the mastery
of North America.
Exam: Chapters 13-15
• 40 Multiple Choice Questions
• 1 Short Answer Question