What were the main changes in the practice of religion in America during the early nineteenth century?
What were the distinguishing characteristics of American literature during the antebellum period?
What were the goals of the social-reform movement?
What was the status of women during this period?
How and where did opposition to slavery emerge?
Uring the first half of the nineteenth century, the world’s largest—and youngest—republic was a festival of contrasts. Europeans traveling in America marveled at the nation’s restless energy and buoyant optimism, its democratic idealism and entrepreneurial spirit. At the same time, however, visitors noticed that the dynamic young republic was experiencing growing pains, sectional tensions, and increasingly heated debates over the morality and future of slavery in a nation dedicated to freedom and equality. Such tensions made for an increasingly partisan political environment whose conflicts were mirrored in the evolution of American social and cultural life. Unlike nations of the Old World, which had long been steeped in history and romance, the United States in the early nineteenth century was an infant republic founded by religious seekers and economic adventurers but weaned on the rational ideas of the Enlightenment. Those “reasonable” ideas, most vividly set forth in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, influenced religion, literature and the arts, and various social reform movements during the first half of the nineteenth century. Politics was not the only contested battleground during the first half of the nineteenth century; religious and cultural life also wrenching strains and new outlooks.
Rational Religion
After the Revolution many Americans were more interested in religious salvation than political engagement. Christian activists assumed that the United States had a God-mandated mission to provide the world with a shining example of republican virtue, much as Puritan New England had once stood before sinful humanity as an example of an ideal Christian community. The concept of America’s having a special mission still carried strong spiritual overtones, for the religious fervor that quickened in the Great Awakening had reinforced the idea of the nation’s fulfilling a providential purpose. This idea contained an element of perfectionism—and an element of impatience when reality fell short of expectations. The combination of widespread religious energy and fervent social idealism brought major reforms and advances in human rights during the first half of the nineteenth century. It also brought disappointments that at times triggered cynicism and alienation.
DEISM The currents of the rational Enlightenment and the spiritual Great Awakening, now mingling, now parting, flowed on into the nineteenth century and in different ways eroded the remnants of Calvinist orthodoxy. As time passed, the puritanical image of a stern God promising predestined hellfire and damnation gave way to a more optimistic religious outlook. Enlightenment rationalism stressed humankind’s inherent goodness rather than its depravity and encouraged a belief in social progress and the promise of individual perfectibility.
Many leaders of the Revolutionary War era, such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were Deists. After the American Revolution, and especially during the 1790s, when the French Revolution generated excited attention in the United States, interest in Deism increased. In every major city “deistical societies” emerged, and college students especially took delight in criticizing conventional religion. By the use of reason, Deists believed, people might grasp the natural laws governing the universe. Deists rejected the belief that every statement in the Bible was literally true. They were skeptical of miracles and questioned the divinity of Jesus. Deists also defended free speech and opposed religious coercion of all sorts.
UNITARIANISM and UNIVERSALISM Orthodox Christians, who remained the preponderant majority in the United States, could hardly distinguish Deism from atheism, but Enlightenment rationalism soon began to make deep inroads into American Protestantism. The old Puritan churches around Boston proved most vulnerable to the appeal of religious liberalism. Boston’s progress—or, some would say, its degeneration—from Puritanism to prosperity had persuaded many affluent families that they were anything but sinners in the hands of an angry God. By the end of the eighteenth century, many well-educated New Englanders were embracing Unitarianism, a belief that emphasizes the oneness and benevolence of a loving God, the inherent goodness of humankind, and the primacy of reason and conscience over religious creeds and organized churches. Unitarians believe that Jesus was a saintly man but he was not divine. People are not inherently depraved, Unitarians stressed; people are capable of doing tremendous good, and all are eligible for salvation. Boston was the center of the Unitarian movement, and it flourished chiefly within Congregational churches. During the early nineteenth century, “liberal” churches adopted the name Unitarian.
A parallel anti-Calvinist movement, Universalism, attracted a different— and much larger—social group: working-class people. In 1779, John Murray, a British ex-Methodist clergyman, founded the first Universalist church, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Universalism stresses the salvation of all people, not just a predestined few. God, it teaches, is too merciful to condemn anyone to eternal punishment. “Thus, the Unitarians and Universalists were in fundamental agreement,” wrote one historian of religion, “the Universalists holding that God was too good to damn man; the Unitarians insisting that man was too good to be damned.” Although both sects remained relatively small, they exercised a powerful influence over intellectual life, especially in New England.
The Second Great Awakening
By the end of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment secularism had made deep inroads among the best-educated Americans, but most people remained profoundly religious, as they have been ever since. There was, the perceptive French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.”
After the American Revolution, religious life witnessed a profound transformation. The established denominations gave way to newer, more democratic sects. Anglicanism was affected the most. It suffered the stigma of being aligned with the Church of England, and it lost its status as the official religion in most states. To diminish their pro-British image, Virginia Anglicans renamed themselves Episcopalians. But even the new name did not prevent the denomination from losing its traditional leadership position in the South, as the insurgent Methodist and Baptist faiths attracted masses of congregants.
John Wesley
Wesley’s gravestone reads, “Lord let me not live to be useless.”
Around 1800, fears that secularism was taking root among well-educated Americans sparked a counterattack in the form of an intense series of revivals that grew into the Second Great Awakening. An early revivalist leader, Timothy Dwight, became president of Yale College in 1795 and resolved to purify a campus that had turned into “a hotbed of infidelity.” Like his grandfather Jonathan Edwards, Dwight helped launch a series of revivals that captivated Yale
Students and spread to all of New England. Over the next forty years the flames of revivalism crisscrossed the United States. By the time those flames died down, the landscape of American religious life had been turned topsy-turvy. The once-dominant Congregational and Anglican churches were displaced by newer sects, such as the Baptists and the Methodists. By the mid-nineteenth century, there would be more Methodist churches by far than those of any other denomination. The percentage of Americans who joined Protestant churches increased sixfold between 1800 and 1860.
The Second Great Awakening involved two very different centers of activity. One emerged among the elite New England colleges, especially Yale, and then spread west across New York into Pennsylvania and Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The other center of revivalism coalesced in the backwoods of Tennessee and Kentucky and spread across rural America. What both forms of Protestant revivalism shared was a simple message: salvation is available not just to a select few but to anyone who repents and embraces Christ.
FRONTIER REVIVALS In its frontier phase, the Second Great Awakening, like the first, generated great excitement and dramatic behavior. It gave birth, moreover, to two religious phenomena—the backwoods circuit-riding preacher and the camp meeting—that helped keep the fires of revivalism burning in the backwoods. Evangelists found ready audiences among lonely frontier folk hungry for spiritual intensity and a sense of community. Revivals were often unifying events; they bridged many social, economic, political, and even racial divisions. Women especially flocked to the rural revivals and sustained religious life on the frontier. In small rural hamlets, the traveling revival was as welcome an event as the traveling circus—and as entertaining.
Among the established sects, Presbyterianism was entrenched among the Scots-Irish, from Pennsylvania to Georgia. Presbyterians gained further from the Plan of Union, worked out in 1801 with the Congregationalists of Connecticut and later with Congregationalists of other states. Since the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists agreed on doctrine and differed mainly on the form of church government they adopted, they were able to form unified congregations and call a minister from either church. The result through much of the Old Northwest was that New Englanders became Presbyterians by way of the “Presbygational” churches.
The Baptists, often unschooled, embraced a simplicity of doctrine and organization that appealed especially to rural people. Their theology was grounded in the infallibility of the Bible and the recognition of innate human depravity. But they replaced the Calvinist notion of predestination and selective salvation with the concepts of free will and universal redemption, while highlighting the ritual of adult baptism. They also stressed the equality of all before God, regardless of wealth, social standing, or education. Each congregation was its own highest authority, so a frontier church had no denominational hierarchy to report to.
The Methodists, who shared with Baptists the belief that everyone could gain salvation by an act of free will, established a much more centralized church structure. They also developed the most effective evangelical method of all: the traveling minister on horseback, who sought out rural converts in the most remote areas with the message of salvation as a gift free for the taking. The “circuit rider” system began with Francis Asbury, a tireless British-born revivalist who scoured the trans-Appalachian frontier for lost souls, traversing fifteen states and preaching thousands of sermons. Asbury established a mobile evangelism perfectly suited to the frontier environment and the new democratic age. After Asbury, Peter Cartwright emerged as the most successful circuit rider and grew justly famous for his highly charged sermons. Cartwright roamed across Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana, preaching a sermon a day for over twenty years. His message was simple: salvation is free for all to embrace. By the 1840s, the Methodists had grown into the largest Protestant church in the nation.
African Americans were especially attracted to the new Methodist and Baptist churches. Richard Allen, who would later help found the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, said in 1787 that “there was no religious
Religious revival
An aquatint of a backwoods Methodist camp meeting in 1819.
Sect or denomination that would suit the capacity of the colored people as well as the Methodist.” He decided that the “plain and simple gospel suits best for any people; for the unlearned can understand [it].” But even more important, the Methodists actively recruited blacks. They were “the first people,” Allen noted, “that brought glad tidings to the colored people.” The Baptists did as well. Like the Methodists, they offered a gospel of salvation open to all, regardless of wealth, social standing, gender, or race. As free as well as enslaved African Americans joined white Baptist or Methodist churches, they infused the congregations with exuberant energy and emotional songs called spirituals.
During the early nineteenth century, the energies of the Great Revival, as the Second Great Awakening was called, spread through the western states and into more settled regions back East. Camp meetings were typically held in late summer or fall, when farm work slackened. People came from far and wide, camping in wagons, tents, or crude shacks. African Americans, whether enslaved or free, were allowed to set up their own adjacent camp revivals. The largest camp meetings tended to be ecumenical affairs, with Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian ministers working as a team. The crowds often numbered in the thousands, and the unrestrained atmosphere at times made for chaos. If a particular hymn or sermon excited participants, they would shout, dance, or repeat the phrase. Mass excitement swept up even the most skeptical onlookers, and infusions of the spirit sparked strange behavior. Some went into trances; others contracted the “jerks,” laughed “the holy laugh,” babbled in unknown tongues, or got down on all fours and barked like dogs to “tree the devil,” as a hound might tree a raccoon.
But dwelling on the bizarre aspects of the camp meetings distorts an activity that offered a redemptive social outlet to isolated rural folk. This was especially true for women, for whom the camp meetings provided an alternative to the rigors and loneliness of farm life. Women, in fact, played the predominant role at camp meetings, as they had in earlier revivals. Evangelical ministers repeatedly applauded the spiritual energies of women and affirmed their right to give public witness to their faith. Camp meetings provided opportunities for women to participate as equals in large public rituals. In addition, the various organizational needs of large revivals offered numerous opportunities for women to exercise leadership roles outside the home, including service as traveling evangelists themselves. Phoebe Worrall Palmer, for example, hosted revival meetings in her New York City home, then traveled across the United States as a camp meeting evangelist. Such opportunities to assume traditional male roles bolstered women’s selfconfidence and expanded their horizons beyond the domestic sphere. Their religious enthusiasm often inspired them to work on behalf of various social-reform efforts, including expanded educational opportunities for women and the right to vote. So in many ways and on many levels, the energies of the revivals helped spread a more democratic faith among people living on the frontier. The evangelical impulse also led to an array of interdenominational initiatives intended to ensure that new converts sustained their faith. Various denominations, for example, joined forces to create the American Bible Society and the American Sunday School Union. The Bible Society gave free Bibles to new converts, and the Sunday School Union provided weekly educational instruction, including basic literacy, even in backwoods communities.
CHARLES FINNEY AND THE BURNED-OVER DISTRICT Regions swept by revival fevers were compared to forests devastated by fire. Western New York, in fact, experienced such intense levels of evangelical activity that it was labeled the burned-over district. The most successful evangelist in the burned-over district was an energetic former lawyer named Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875). In the winter of 1830-1831, he preached with “a clear, shrill voice” for six months in upstate New York, three evenings a week and three times on Sunday, and generated one hundred thousand conversions. Finney claimed that it was “the greatest revival of religion. . . since the world began.” Where rural camp meeting revivals attracted farm families and other working-class groups, Finney’s audiences attracted more affluent seekers. “The Lord,” Finney declared, “was aiming at the conversion of the highest classes of society.”
Finney wrestled with a question that had plagued Protestantism for centuries: what role can the individual play in earning salvation? Orthodox Calvinists had long argued that people could neither earn nor choose salvation of their own accord. Grace was a gift of God to a select few, a predetermined decision by God incapable of human understanding or control. In contrast, Finney insisted that the only thing preventing conversion was the individual. The sinner must simply choose salvation by embracing the promise of Jesus. Finney and other “free will” evangelists wanted to democratize the process of salvation, just as Jacksonians sought to democratize the political process. Finney transformed revivals into well-organized popular spectacles: collective conversion experiences in which spectacular public events displaced the private worship experience.
Finney compared his theatrical methods with those of campaigning politicians who used advertising and showmanship to attract attention. He carried the methods of the frontier revival to the cities and factories of the East and as far as Great Britain. His gospel combined faith and good works: revival led to efforts at social reform. By embracing Christ, a convert could thereafter be free of sin, but Christians also had an obligation to improve the larger society. Finney therefore helped found an array of groups designed to reform various social ills: alcoholism, prostitution, war, and slavery. The revivals thus provided one of the most powerful motives for the sweeping reform impulse that characterized the age. Lyman Beecher, one of the towering champions of revivalism, stressed that the Second Great Awakening was not focused simply on promoting individual conversions; it was also intended to “reform human society.”
Finney and other evangelists stirring the Second Great Awakening had a profound impact upon the contours of religious and social life. By 1830 the percentage of Americans who were church members had doubled over that of 1800. Moreover, more people engaged in religious activities than political activities. Among the most intensely committed religious believers were those embracing a new denomination, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons.
THE MORMONS The Second Great Awakening not only generated a “revival” of spiritual intensity among traditional denominations; it also helped to spawn new religious groups. The burned-over district in western New York crackled with spiritual fervor and gave rise to several religious movements, the most important of which was Mormonism. Its founder,
Joseph Smith, was the barely literate child of wandering Vermont farmers who finally settled in the village of Palmyra in western New York. In 1820 young Smith reported to his vision-prone parents that he had seen God and Christ, both of whom had forgiven his sins and told him that all religious denominations were false. Three and a half years later, in 1823, Smith, who had become an avid seeker of buried treasure and an ardent believer in folk magic and the occult, reported that an angel named Moroni had visited him and led him to a hillside near his father’s farm, where he unearthed golden tablets on which was etched the Book of Mormon, supposedly a lost “gospel” of the Bible buried some 1,400 years earlier.
With the remarkable Book of Mormon as his gospel, the charismatic Smith set about forming his own church. He dismissed all Christian denominations as frauds, denied that there was a hell, opposed slavery, and promised that the Second Coming was imminent. Within a few years, Smith, whom the Mormons simply called Joseph, had gathered thousands of devout converts, most of them poor New England farmers who, like Smith’s family, had migrated to western New York. These religious seekers, many of them cut off from organized communities and traditional social relationships, found in Mormonism the promise of a pure kingdom of Christ in America. Mormons rejected the notion of original sin staining the human race in favor of an optimistic creed stressing human goodness.
From the outset the Mormon “saints” upset their “gentile” neighbors as well as the political authorities. Mormons stood out with their close-knit sense of community, their secret rituals, their assurance of righteousness, and their refusal to abide by local laws and conventions. Joseph Smith denied the legitimacy of civil governments and the federal Constitution. As a result, no community wanted to host him and his “peculiar people.” In their search for a refuge from persecution and for the “promised land,” the ever-growing contingent of Mormons moved from western New York to ohio, then to Missouri, and finally, in 1839, to the half-built town of Commerce, Illinois, on the west bank of the Mississippi River, which they renamed Nauvoo (a Hebrew word meaning “beautiful land”). Within a few years, Nauvoo had become a bustling, well-planned community of twelve thousand centered on an impressive neo-classical temple overlooking the river. In the process of developing Nauvoo, Joseph Smith, “the Prophet,” became the community’s leading planner, entrepreneur, and political czar: he owned the hotel and general store, served as mayor and commander of the city’s militia (the Nauvoo Legion), and was the trustee of the church. Smith’s lust for power grew as well. He began excommunicating dissidents and in 1844 announced his intention to become president of the United States, proclaiming that the
United States should peacefully acquire not only Texas and Oregon but all of Mexico and Canada.
Brigham Young
Young was the president of the Mormons for thirty years.
Smith also excited outrage by practicing “plural marriage,” whereby he accumulated two dozen wives and encouraged other Mormon leaders to do the same. In 1844, a crisis arose when Mormon dissidents, including Smith’s first wife, Emma, denounced his polygamy. The upshot was not only a schism in the church but also an attack on Nauvoo by non-Mormons from the neighboring counties. When Smith ordered Mormons to destroy an opposition newspaper, he and his brother Hyrum were arrested and charged with treason. On June 27,
1844, an anti-Mormon lynch mob of
Masked men stormed the feebly defended jail in the nearby town of Carthage and killed Joseph and Hyrum Smith.
In Brigham Young (1801-1877), the remarkable successor to Joseph Smith, the Mormons found a stern new leader who was strong-minded, intelligent, and authoritarian (as well as husband eventually to twenty-seven wives who bore fifty-six children). A Vermont carpenter and an early convert to Mor-monism, Young succeeded Smith and promised Illinois officials that the Mormons would leave the state. Their new destination was 1,300 miles away, in the isolated, barren valley near the Great Salt Lake in Utah, a vast, sparsely populated area owned by Mexico. In early 1846, in wagons and on foot, twelve thousand Mormon migrants started their grueling trek to the “promised land” of Utah. On a good day they traversed only about ten miles. The first to arrive at Salt Lake, in July 1847, found only “a broad and barren plain hemmed in by the mountains. . . the paradise of the lizard, the cricket and the rattlesnake.” But Brigham Young declared that “this is the place” for the Mormons to settle.
By the end of 1848, the Mormons had developed an efficient irrigation system, and over the next decade they brought about a spectacular greening of the desert. At first they organized their own state, named Deseret (meaning “Land of the Honeybee,” according to Young), but their independence was short-lived. In 1848, Mexico, having been defeated by U. S. armies, signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding to the United States what is now
California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. Two years later, Congress incorporated the Utah Territory, including the Mormons’ Salt Lake settlement, into the United States. Nevertheless, when Brigham Young was named the territorial governor, the new arrangement afforded the Mormons virtual independence. For over twenty years, Young successfully defied federal authority. By 1869 some eighty thousand Mormons had settled in Utah, and they had developed an aggressive program to convert the twenty thousand Indians in the territory.
Romanticism in America
The democratization of religious life and revivalism during the early 1800s represented a widespread tendency throughout the United States and Europe to accentuate the stirrings of the spirit and the heart rather than succumb to the dry logic of reason. Another great victory of heart over head was the Romantic movement in thought, literature, and the arts. By the 1780s a revolt was brewing in Europe against the well-ordered world of scientific rationalism. Were there not, after all, more things in this world than reason and logic could box up and explain: moods, impressions, and feelings; mysterious, unknown, and half-seen things? Americans also took readily to the Romantics’ emphasis on individualism, idealizing the virtues of common people, now the idea of original or creative genius in the artist, the author, or the great personality.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant gave the transatlantic Romantic movement a summary definition in the title of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), an influential book that emphasized the limits of science and reason in explaining the universe. People have innate conceptions of conscience and beauty, the Romantics believed, and religious impulses too strong to be dismissed as illusions. In areas in which science could neither prove nor disprove concepts, the Romantics believed that people were justified in having faith. The impact of such ideas elevated intuitive feelings at the expense of rational knowledge.
TRANSCENDENTALISM The most intense proponents of such Romantic ideals were the transcendentalists of New England, America’s first cohesive group of public intellectuals. The transcendental movement was another form of religious awakening stirring American thought during the early nineteenth century. It drew its name from its emphasis on those things that transcend (or rise above) the limits of reason. Transcendentalism, said one of its apostles, meant an interest in areas “a little beyond” the scope of reason. If transcendentalism drew much of its inspiration from Immanuel Kant and the Romantic movement he inspired, it was also a reaction against Calvinist orthodoxy and the “corpse-cold” rationalism of Unitarianism. The transcendentalists sought to embody the “truest” piety—a pure form of personal spirituality, which in their view had been corrupted and smothered by the bureaucratic priorities and creedal requirements of organized religion. Transcendentalists wanted to “awaken” a new outlook for a new democratic age. Their goal was to foster spirituality in harmony with the perfectionism of both the divine and of divinity’s creation: nature. All people, they believed, had the capacity to realize the divine potential (“spark”) present in all of God’s creatures. Transcendentalism during the 1830s became the most influential intellectual and spiritual force in American culture.
In 1836 an informal discussion group known as the Transcendental Club began to meet in Boston and nearby Concord, Massachusetts, to discuss philosophy, literature, and religion. It was a loosely knit group of diverse individualists who rejected traditional norms and nurtured a relentless intellectual curiosity. Some were focused on individual freedom while others stressed collective efforts to reform society. They were united by their differences. The transcendentalists called themselves the “club of the like-minded,” quipped a Boston preacher, “because no two. . . thought alike.” A woman who participated in the discussions more tartly noted that the tran-scendentalists “dove into the infinite, soared into the illimitable, and never paid cash.” They asserted the right of individuals to interpret life in their own way. The club included liberal clergymen and militant reformers such as Theodore Parker, George Ripley, and James Freeman Clarke; writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and orestes Brownson; and learned women such as Elizabeth Peabody and her sister Sophia (who married Hawthorne in 1842) and Margaret Fuller. Fuller edited the group’s quarterly review, the Dial (1840-1844), for two years before the duty fell to Ralph Waldo Emerson, soon to become the acknowledged high priest of transcendentalism.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON More than any other person, Ralph Waldo Emerson embodied the transcendentalist gospel. Sprung from a line
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson is most remembered for leading the transcendentalist movement.
Of New England ministers, he set out to be a Unitarian parson but quit the “cold and cheerless” denomination before he was thirty. Emerson thereafter dismissed all religious denominations. “In the Bible,” he explained, “you are not directed to be a Unitarian or a Calvinist or an Episcopalian.” After traveling in Europe, where he met England’s greatest Romantic writers, Emerson settled in Concord to take up the life of an essayist, poet, and popular speaker on the lecture circuit, preaching the sacredness of Nature and celebrating the virtues of optimism, self-reliance, and the individual’s unlimited potential. Having found pure reason “cold as a cucumber,” he was determined to transcend
The limitations of inherited conventions and rationalism in order to penetrate the inner recesses of the self.
The spirit of freedom in Emerson’s lectures and writings, often stated in maddeningly vague language, expressed the core of the transcendentalist worldview. His notable speech titled “The American Scholar,” delivered at Harvard in 1837, urged young Americans to put aside their awe of European culture and explore their own new world. It was “our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” said one observer.
Emerson’s essay on “Self-Reliance” (1841) has a timeless appeal to youth, with its message of individualism and independence. Like most of Emerson’s writings, it is crammed with pungent quotations that express the distinctive transcendentalist outlook:
Henry David Thoreau
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. . . . It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of a crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. . . . A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. . . . Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. ... To be great is to be misunderstood.
Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU Emerson’s young friend and Concord neighbor Henry David Thoreau practiced the reflective self-reliance that Emerson preached. “I like people who can do things,” Emerson stressed, and Thoreau, fourteen years his junior, could do many things well: carpentry, masonry, painting, surveying, sailing, gardening. The philosophical son of a man who was a pencil maker and a woman who was a domineering reformer, steadfastly opposed to slavery, Thoreau displayed a sense of uncompromising integrity, outdoor
Vigor, and prickly individuality that Emerson found captivating. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions,” Thoreau wrote, “perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”
Thoreau himself marched to a different drummer all his life. After Harvard, where he exhausted the resources of the library in gargantuan bouts of reading, and after a brief stint as a teacher, during which he got in trouble for refusing to cane his students, Thoreau settled down to eke out a living by making pencils with his father. But he made frequent escapes to drink in the beauties of nature. Thoreau revered Nature as a living Bible. He showed no interest in the contemporary scramble for wealth, for it too often corrupted the pursuit of happiness. “The mass of men,” he wrote, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Thoreau was committed to lead what Emerson called a life of “plain living and high thinking.” Thoreau rented a room at the Emersons’ home for a time and then embarked upon an unusual experiment in self-reliance. On July 4, 1845, he took to the woods to live in a tiny, one-room cabin he had built on Emerson’s land near Walden Pond outside of Concord. Thoreau wanted to free himself from the complexities and hypocrisies of conventional life so as to devote his time to observation, reflection, and writing. His purpose was not to lead a hermit’s life. He frequently walked the mile or so to Concord to dine with his friends and often welcomed guests at his cabin. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he wrote in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), “. . . and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
While Thoreau was at Walden Pond, the Mexican War erupted. He quickly concluded that it was an unjust war to advance the cause of slavery. He refused to pay his poll tax as an anti-war gesture, for which he was put in jail (for only one night; an aunt paid the tax). The incident was so trivial as to be almost comic, but out of it grew Thoreau’s classic essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849), which would later influence the passive-resistance movements of Mahatma Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the American South. “If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another,” Thoreau wrote, “then, I say, break the law.”
The broadening ripples of influence more than a century after Thoreau’s death show the impact that a contemplative person can have on the world of action. Thoreau and the other transcendentalists taught a powerful lesson: people must follow their conscience. Transcendentalists portrayed the movement as a profound expression of moral idealism; critics dismissed it as an outrageous expression of egotism. Though the transcendentalists attracted only a small following in their own time, they inspired many reform movements, including a revived emphasis on the importance of education.
Education
Politics in an Oyster House (1848) by Richard Caton WoodviUe
Newspapers often fueled public discussions and debates.
A well-informed citizenry equipped with knowledge not only for obtaining a vocation but also for promoting civic virtue was one of the animating ideals of the Founding Fathers. Literacy in Jacksonian America was surprisingly widespread. In 1840, according to census data, some 78 percent of the total population and 91 percent of the white population could read and write. Ever since the colonial period, in fact, Americans had had the highest literacy rate in the Western world. Most children were taught to read in church or in private “dame” schools, by formal tutors, or by their families. By 1830
No state had a public school system in the modern sense, although for nearly two centuries Massachusetts had required towns to maintain schools.
Early public schools In the 1830s, the demand for public schools peaked. Workers wanted free schools to give their children an equal chance to pursue the American dream. In 1830 the Workingmen’s party of Philadelphia called for “a system of education that shall embrace equally all the children of the state, of every rank and condition.” Education, it was argued, would improve manners and at the same time reduce crime and poverty.
Horace Mann of Massachusetts led the early drive for statewide school systems. Trained as a lawyer, he sponsored the creation of a state board of education, and then served as its leader. Mann went on to sponsor many reforms in Massachusetts, including the first state-supported “normal school” for the training of teachers, a state association of teachers, and a minimum school year of six months. He repeatedly promoted the public-school system as the way to achieve social stability and equal opportunity.
In the South, North Carolina led the way in state-supported education. By 1860, North Carolina had enrolled more than two thirds of its white school-age population for an average term of four months, kept so low because of
The George Barrell Emerson School, Boston, ca. 1850
Although higher education for women initially met with some resistance, seminaries like this one, started in the 1820s and 1830s, taught women mathematics, physics, and history, as well as music, art, and the social graces.
The rural state’s need for children to do farm work. But the educational pattern in the south continued to reflect the aristocratic pretensions of the region: the South had a higher percentage of college students than any other region but a lower percentage of public-school students. And the South had some five hundred thousand white illiterates, more than half the total number in the young nation.
For all the effort to establish state-supported schools, conditions for public education were seldom ideal. Funds were insufficient for buildings, books, and equipment; teachers were poorly paid and often poorly prepared. Most students going beyond the elementary grades attended private academies, often subsidized by church and public funds. Such schools, begun in colonial days, multiplied until in 1850 there were more than six thousand of them. In 1821 the Boston English High School opened as the nation’s first free public secondary school, set up mainly for students not going on to college. By a law of 1827, Massachusetts required a high school in every town of five hundred; in towns of four thousand or more, the school had to offer
Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and other college-preparatory courses. Public high schools became well established only after the Civil War. In 1860 there were barely three hundred in the whole country.
The Reform Impulse
The United States in the first half of the nineteenth century was awash in reform movements led by prophets, dreamers, and activists who saw injustice and fought to correct it despite the blindness and outright hostility of the larger society. The urge to eradicate evil had its roots in the widespread sense of spiritual zeal and moral mission, which in turn drew upon the growing faith in human perfectibility promoted by both revivalists and Romantic idealists such as the transcendentalists. Reformers tackled varied issues such as observance of the Sabbath, dueling, crime and punishment, the hours and conditions of work, poverty, vice, care of the disabled, pacifism, foreign missions, temperance, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery.
While an impulse to “perfect” people and society helped excite the reform movements during the first half of the nineteenth century, social and economic changes helped supply many of the reformers themselves, most of whom were women. The rise of an urban middle class offered affluent women greater time to devote to societal concerns. Prosperity enabled them to hire cooks and maids, often Irish immigrants, who in turn freed them from the performance of household chores. Many women joined churches and charitable organizations, most of which were led by men. Some reformers proposed legislative remedies for social ills; others stressed personal conversion or private philanthropy. Whatever the method or approach, earnest social reformers mobilized in great numbers during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.
Temperance The temperance crusade was perhaps the most widespread of all the reform movements. The census of 1810 reported some 14,000 distilleries producing 25 million gallons of alcoholic spirits each year. William Cobbett, an English reformer who traveled in the United States, noted in 1819 that one could “go into hardly any man’s house without being asked to drink wine or spirits, even in the morning” In 1826, a group of ministers in Boston organized the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, which organized lectures, press campaigns, an essay contest, and the formation of local and state societies. A favorite device was to ask each person who took the pledge to put by his or her signature a T for “total abstinence.” With that a new word entered the language: teetotaler. In 1833, the society organized a national convention in Philadelphia, where the American Temperance Union was formed. Like nearly every reform movement of the day, temperance had a wing of absolutists. They would brook no compromise with Demon Rum and carried the day with a resolution that liquor was evil and ought to be prohibited by law. The Temperance Union, at its spring convention in 1836, called for abstinence from all alcoholic beverages, a costly victory in that it caused moderates to abstain from the temperance movement instead.
PRISONS AND ASYLUMS The Romantic impulse often included the liberal belief that people are innately good and capable of improvement. such an optimistic view of human nature brought about major changes in the treatment of prisoners, the disabled, and dependent children. Public institutions (often called asylums) arose that were dedicated to the treatment and cure of social ills. If removed from society, the theory went, the needy and the deviant could be made whole again. Unhappily, however, the asylums had a way over time of turning into breeding grounds for brutality and neglect.
Gradually the idea of the penitentiary developed as a new approach to reforming criminals. It would be a place where the guilty experienced penitence and underwent rehabilitation, not just punishment. An early model of the new system, widely copied, was the Auburn Penitentiary, which opened in New York in 1816. The prisoners at Auburn had separate cells and gathered only for meals and group labor. Discipline was severe. The men were marched out in lockstep and never put face-to-face or allowed to talk. But prisoners were at least reasonably secure from abuse by their fellow prisoners. The system, its advocates argued, had a beneficial effect on the prisoners and saved money, since the workshops supplied prison needs and produced goods for sale at a profit. By 1840, there were twelve penitentiaries of the Auburn type scattered across the nation.
The Romantic reform impulse also found outlet in the care of the insane. Before 1800 few hospitals provided care for the mentally ill. The insane were usually confined at home with hired keepers or in jails or almshouses. In the years after 1815, however, asylums that separated the disturbed from the criminal began to appear.
The most important figure in heightening the public’s awareness of the plight of the mentally ill was Dorothea Lynde Dix. A pious Boston schoolteacher, she was called upon to instruct a Sunday-school class at the East Cambridge House of Correction in 1841. There she found a roomful of insane people completely neglected, without even heat on a cold March day. Dix was so disturbed by the scene that she commenced a two-year investigation of jails and almshouses in Massachusetts. In a report to the state 1 egislature in 1843, she revealed that insane people were confined “in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.” Those managing asylums dismissed her charges as “slanderous lies,” but she won the support of leading reformers. From Massachusetts she carried her campaign throughout the country and abroad. By 1860 she had persuaded twenty states to heed her advice, thereby helping to transform social attitudes toward mental illness.
Women’s rights Dorothea Dix was but one sterling example of many middle-class women who devoted themselves to improving the quality of life in American society. Others argued that women should first focus on improving domestic life. Catharine Beecher, a leader in the education movement and founder of women’s schools in Connecticut and Ohio, published a best-selling guide prescribing the domestic sphere for women. A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) became the leading handbook of what historians have labeled the cult of domesticity. While Beecher upheld high standards in women’s education, she also accepted the prevailing view that the “woman’s sphere” was the home and argued that young women should be trained in the domestic arts.
The social custom of assigning the sexes different roles was not new, of course. In earlier agrarian societies gender-based functions were closely tied to the household and often overlapped. As the more complex industrial economy of the nineteenth century matured, economic production came to be increasingly separated from the home, and the home in turn became a refuge from the outside world, with separate and distinct functions for men and women. Some have argued that the home became a trap for women, a suffocating prison that hindered individual fulfillment. But others noted that the middle-class home often gave women a sphere of independence in which they might exercise a degree of initiative and leadership. The so-called cult of domesticity idealized a woman’s moral role in civilizing husband and family.
The official status of women during the first half of the nineteenth century remained much as it had been in the colonial era. Women were barred from the ministry and most other professions. Higher education was hardly an option. Women could not serve on juries, nor could they vote. A wife often had no control over her property or even over her children. A wife could not make a will, sign a contract, or bring suit in court without her husband’s permission. Her legal status was like that of a minor, a slave, or a free black.
Gradually, however, women began to protest their status, and men began to listen. The organized movement for women’s rights emerged in 1840, when the anti-slavery movement split over the question of women’s right to participate. Women decided then that they needed to organize on behalf of their own emancipation, too.
In 1848, two prominent moral reformers and advocates of women’s rights, Lucretia Mott, a Philadelphia Quaker, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a graduate of New York’s Troy Female Seminary who refused to be merely “a household drudge,” called a convention to discuss “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” The hastily organized Seneca Falls Convention, the first of its kind, issued on July 19, 1848, a clever paraphrase of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Called the Declaration of Sentiments, it proclaimed the self-evident truth that “all men and women are created equal.” All laws that placed women “in a position inferior to that of men, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority.” Such language was too strong for most of the one thousand
Delegates, and only about a third
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
Stanton (left) “forged the thunderbolts and Miss Anthony hurled them.”
Of them signed the radical document. Yet the Seneca Falls gathering represented an important first step in the evolving campaign for women’s rights.
From 1850 until the Civil War, the leaders of the women’s rights movement held annual conventions, delivered lectures, and circulated petitions. The movement struggled in the face of meager funds and antifeminist women and men. Its success resulted from the work of a few undaunted women who refused to be cowed by the odds against them. Susan B. Anthony, already active in temperance and anti-slavery groups, joined
The crusade in the 1850s. Unlike Stanton and Mott, she was unmarried and therefore able to devote most of her attention to the women’s crusade. As one observer put it, Stanton “forged the thunderbolts and Miss Anthony hurled them.” Both were young when the movement started, and both lived into the twentieth century, focusing after the Civil War on demands for women’s suffrage. Many of the feminists, like Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott, had supportive husbands, and the movement recruited prominent male champions, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, William Ellery Channing, and William Lloyd Garrison.
The fruits of the women’s rights movement ripened slowly. Women did not gain the vote but did make some legal gains. In 1839, Mississippi became the first state to grant married women control over their property; by the 1860s, eleven more states had such laws. Still, the only jobs open to educated women in any number were nursing and teaching, both of which extended the domestic roles of health care and nurture to the outside world. Both professions brought relatively lower status and pay than “man’s work” despite the skills, training, and responsibility involved.
UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES Amid the pervasive climate of reform during the early nineteenth century, the quest for utopia flourished. Plans for ideal communities had long been an American passion, at least since the Puritans set out to build a wilderness Zion in New England. More than a hundred utopian communities sprang up between 1800 and 1900. Those founded by the Shakers, officially the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, proved to be long lasting. Ann Lee (Mother Ann Lee) arrived in New York from England with eight followers in 1774. Believing religious fervor to be a sign of inspiration from the Holy Ghost, Mother Ann and her followers had strange fits in which they saw visions and prophesied. These manifestations later evolved into a ritual dance—hence the name Shakers. Shaker doctrine held God to be a dual personality: in Christ the masculine side was manifested; in Mother Ann, the feminine element. Mother Ann preached celibacy to prepare Shakers for the perfection that was promised them in heaven.
Mother Ann died in 1784, but the group found new leaders. From the first community, at New Lebanon, New York, the movement spread into New England, Ohio, and Kentucky. By 1830 about twenty groups were flourishing. In these Shaker communities all property was held in common. The Shakers’ farms were among the nation’s leading sources of garden seed and medicinal herbs, and many of their manufactures, including clothing, household items, and especially furniture, were prized for their simple beauty.
John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, had a quite different model of the ideal community. The son of a Vermont congressman, educated at Dartmouth College and Yale Divinity School, Noyes was converted at one of Charles Grandison Finney’s revivals and entered the ministry. He was forced out, however, when he declared that with true conversion came perfection and a complete release from sin. In 1836 he gathered a group of “Perfectionists” around his home in Putney, Vermont. Ten years later, Noyes announced a new doctrine, “complex marriage,” which meant that every man in the community was married to every woman and vice versa. “In a holy community,” he claimed, “there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be.” Authorities thought otherwise, and Noyes was arrested for practicing his “free love” theology. He fled to New York State and in 1848 established the Oneida Community, which numbered more than two hundred by 1851.
Brook Farm in Massachusetts was the most celebrated of all the utopian communities because it grew out of the Transcendental movement. George Ripley, a Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist, conceived of Brook Farm as a kind of early-day think tank, combining high thinking and plain living. In 1841 he and several dozen other like-minded utopians moved to the 175-acre farm eight miles southwest of Boston. Brook Farm became America’s first secular utopian community. One of its members, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, called Brook Farm “our beautiful scheme of a noble and unselfish life.” The social experiment attracted excited attention and hundreds of visitors. Its residents shared the tasks of maintaining the buildings, tending the fields, and preparing the meals. They also organized picnics, dances, lectures, and discussions. The place survived, however, mainly because of an excellent community school that drew tuition-paying students from outside. In 1846, Brook Farm’s main building burned down, and the community spirit expired in the embers.
Utopian communities, with few exceptions, quickly ran out of steam. The communal social experiments, performed in relative isolation, had little effect on the outside world, where reformers wrestled with the sins of the multitudes. Among all the targets of the reformers’ wrath, one great evil would finally take precedence over the others: human bondage. The Transcendentalist reformer Theodore Parker declared that slavery was “the blight of this nation, the curse of the North and the curse of the South.” The paradox of American slavery coupled with American freedom, of “the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime,” in the novelist Herman Melville’s words, would inspire the climactic crusade of the age, abolitionism, one that would ultimately move to the center of the political stage and sweep the nation into an epic civil war.
Anti-Slavery Movements
The men who drafted the federal constitution in 1787 were pragmatists. They realized that many of the southern states would tolerate no effort to weaken, much less abolish, the “peculiar institution” of slavery. So they worked out compromises that avoided dealing with the moral stain of slavery on a young nation dedicated to liberty. But most of them knew that there eventually would be a day of reckoning. That day of reckoning approached as the nineteenth century unfolded.
Early opposition to slavery Efforts to weaken or abolish slavery gathered momentum with each passing year after 1800. The first organized emancipation movement appeared in 1817 with the formation of the American Colonization Society, which proposed to return freed slaves to Africa. Its supporters included such prominent figures as James Madison, James Monroe, Henry Clay, John Marshall, and Daniel Webster. Some supported the colonization movement because of their opposition to slavery; others saw it as a way to bolster slavery by getting rid of potentially troublesome free blacks. Leaders of the free black community denounced it from the start. The United States of America, they stressed, was their native land. Nevertheless, in 1821, agents of the American Colonization Society acquired from local chieftains in West Africa a parcel of land that became the nucleus of a new nation. In 1822 the first freed slaves were transported there, and twenty-five years later the society relinquished control to the Free and Independent Republic of Liberia. But given its uncertain purpose, the African colonization movement received only meager support from either antislavery or pro-slavery elements. In all only about fifteen thousand blacks migrated to Africa up to 1860, approximately twelve thousand with the help of the Colonization Society. The number was infinitesimal compared with the number of slave births each year in the United States.
From gradualism to abolitionism Meanwhile, in the early 1830s the anti-slavery movement adopted an aggressive new strategy. Its initial efforts to promote a gradual end to slavery by prohibiting it in the new western territories and encouraging owners to free their slaves by the act of manumission gave way to demands for immediate abolition everywhere. A zealous white Massachusetts activist named William Lloyd Garrison best exemplified the change in outlook.
In 1831, Garrison launched in Boston a new anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator. Garrison had edited several anti-slavery papers but had grown
Impatient with the strategy of moderation. In the first issue of The Liberator, he renounced “the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual emancipation.” In calling for immediate abolition, he vowed, “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. . . . I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE heard.”
Portrait of WUliam Lloyd Garrison
Garrison was a vocal abolitionist: an advocate of immediate emancipation.
Garrison’s militancy outraged slave owners as well as some whites in the North. In 1835 a mob of angry whites dragged Garrison through the streets of Boston at the end of a rope. A southern slaveholder warned Garrison “to desist your infamous endeavors to instill into the minds of the negroes the idea that ‘men must be free.’” Garrison reminded critics that, however violent his language, he was a pacifist opposed to the use of force. “We do not preach rebellion,” he stressed. The prospect “of a bloody insurrection in the South fills us with dismay,” but “if any people were ever justified in throwing off the yoke of their tyrants, the slaves are the people.”
During the 1830s, Garrison became the nation’s most fervent, principled, and unyielding foe of slavery. He and others making up the vanguard of the abolitionist crusade were evangelical Christians. Most of the northerners involved in the anti-slavery movement were white churchgoers and their ministers. In 1831, two prominent New York City evangelical merchants, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, provided Garrison with the funds to launch his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Two years later, the Tappans, Garrison, and a group of Quaker reformers, black activists, and evangelicals organized the American Anti-Slavery Society. That same year, Parliament ended slavery throughout the British Empire by passing the Emancipation Act of 1833, whereby slaveholders were paid to give up their “human property.” In 1835 the Tappans hired Charles Grandison Finney to head the anti-slavery faculty at Oberlin, the new college established by the Tappans in northern Ohio.
The American Anti-Slavery Society, financed by the Tappans, created a national network of newspapers, offices, chapters, and activists. Virtually every chapter was affiliated with a local Christian church. By 1840, some 160,000 people belonged to the American Anti-Slavery Society and its affiliate organizations. The Society stressed that “slaveholding is a heinous crime in the sight of God, and that the duty, safety, and best interests of all concerned, require its immediate abandonment" The society went beyond the issue of emancipation to argue that blacks should “share an equality with the whites, of civil and religious privileges." The group organized a barrage of propaganda for its cause, including periodicals, tracts, agents, lecturers, organizers, and fund-raisers. In 1835, the American Anti-Slavery Society flooded the South with anti-slavery pamphlets and newspapers. Infuriated southern slaveholders called for state and federal laws to prevent the distribution of anti-slavery literature.
The most radical figure among the mostly white Garrisonians was a free black named David Walker. In 1829, he published Walker’s Appeal, in which he denounced the hypocrisy of Christians in the slaveholding South endorsing the practice of race-based human bondage. “Are we men?” he asked. “I ask you, O my brethren, are we MEN? Did our Creator make us to be slaves to dust and ashes like ourselves?”
World History
