1. Reforming American Society
The Perfectibility
of Man

2. Second Great Awakening
• Calvinism &
Predestination =
obsolete
• New movement –
“You can go to
Heaven”
Most Likely
to Sell
Religion
Charles Grandison Finney
Class of

3. African American Church
• Slaves heard of this
democratic god
• In North camp
meetings were open
to all

4. Richard Allen
Bethel African Church
African Methodist
Episcopal Church
Developed into
community center

5. Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism
Philosophical and literary movement
I The rounded world is fair to see,
was on:
Focusas much affected by the faint hum of a
Ninemosquito making mystery: and
times folded on living
• Emphasis in its invisible a
Though baffled through my apartment
Simple Life
unimaginable tourseers cannot impart at
Thesimple life,
secret when I was sitting with
earliest dawn, of its laboring heart, door and
Nature
Throb thine with could be by any trumpet
windows open, as INature's throbbing
celebrating truth
breast,
Personal imagination
that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's
Andfound in from east to west.
all is clear nature &
requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air,
“Perfectibility of Man” form within
Spirit its own wrath and
singing that lurks each wanderings. There
personal of
Beckons to spiritemotion and
was Waldo Emerson its kin;
Ralphsomething cosmical about it; a standing
Self-kindled till forbidden, of the
advertisement, every atom glows everlasting
imagination
And hints the future which it owes.
vigor and fertility of the world.
Henry David Thoreau – Walden –
Civil Disobedience

6. Unitarianism
• William Ellery
Channing –
“Christianity was the
perfection of human
nature”
• Focus on reason –
not emotion like
revivalists –support
form educated &
wealthy

7. • George Ripley –
Brook Farm
Utopia!
This is Hyde Park, MA

8. Shakers
• Followers of Ann Lee
• Shared goods
• men & women
equal?!?
• Refused to fight
• Do not marry
• No kids…

9. Prisons & the Mentally Ill
• Dorothea Dix
• Focus on
rehabilitation
• MA & 9 southern
states
• Moved mentally
ill out of prison

10. Education
• Before: mostly private academies or
private tutor
• Shift – Education is needed for
democracy.
• Perfectibility of Man
• Changing world needs smarter people

11. 1821 – Emma Willard opens
Troy Female Seminary
“They will be educating cows next”
1831 – Prudence Crandall – opened a school
& soon allowed black girls
1834 - Crandall was forced to close down
1837 – Mary Lyon – Mount Holyoke Female
Seminary (Holyoke College)
1837 – Oberlin College (Ohio) became coed
Franklin High School
Girls Basketball Team
1834-35

12. Horace Mann
• What do you know?
Ohio gave him a statue…..
We gave him Shaw’s !

13. Abolition
• 1820’s – Recolonization – good idea?
over 100 antislavery societies
Most Northern states had abolished slavery

14. William Lloyd Garrison
do not wish to think, or speak, Newspaper (MA)
• 1831 I– The Liberator – or write,
with moderation. . . . I am in earnest -- I
will not equivocate -- will
excuse -immediate singleI inchnotAND I WILL
emancipationI
will not retreat a
-no $$ for BE HEARD."
slave owners

15. David Walker
• Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World
• Advised blacks to fight for their freedom

16. Frederick Douglass struggle,
“If there is no
there is no progress. Those who
profess to favor freedom, and
deprecate agitation, are men who
want crops without plowing up the
ground, they want rain without
thunder and lightning.”
• Run away
slave –
became
famous
abolitionist –
worked with
Garrison
• North Star Newspaper

17. Nat Turner
Perspective?
• 1831 – Led
slave revolt
• Eclipse?
• 60 whites
killed
• 200 blacks
killed
• Good or
bad?

18. Women in Reform
Early 1800’s – cult of domesticity

19. Abolition
• Angelina Grimke
An Appeal to the Christian
Women of the South
“The doctrine of blind obedience and
1836
unqualified submission to any human
power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the
doctrine of despotism, and ought to have
no place among Republicans and
Christians.”

20. Education
• Sarah Grimke
I ask no favors for my sex, I surrender not our
1838 – Letters on the
claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is
that they will take their feet from off our necks,
Equality of the Sexes and
and permit us to stand upright on the ground
which God has designed us to occupy.
the Condition of Women

21. New use of the
Cult of
Domesticity?
Temperance
Movement
Effective?

22. Labor Movement
• 1834 – Lowell Mills –
15% wage cut
– 800 women went on
strike
“Union is power!”

23. Results?
• Newspapers & local
churches
supported…
The Mills
Why? What do you
think happened?