3. Antebellum Period
1815 – 1860
• Westward Expansion
• Political Democratization
• Universal Male, White
Suffrage
• Industrialization vs.
Agricultural Boom
• Great Awakening
• Abolition Movement
• Development of Free
Religious Sentiment
4. Market Revolution
• 1820 – 1830 different future
between North and South
• Consumer, defense of free labor,
common man ideology
• Tremendous Technological
Change
• Transportation, Communication,
Cities
• Change from Subsistence to
Cash Crops
• Home becomes its own
Yankee Peddler Domestic Factory for
Markets
5. Market Revolution
• First Reform Period
– Thoreau & Emerson
2. Industrialization Process
3. Racial Equality
4. Gender Equality
5. War and Pacifism
6. Individual Religious and
Morality
• Emerson
– Man the Reformer
6. Market Revolution Ideology
• Individualism vs. Structure
– ‘I can remake my world’
– Reduce the ideology that
individualism is powerful
• Tremendous Optimism
– Broad social optimism, but…
– Industrial Fortunes
• Wall Street, Railroads
• Inequality would widen
• Redefinition of family, childhood
in the bourgeoisie class
• Doctrine of Progress
7. Yankee Worldview
• Inheritance from History
• Uriah Parmalee & Abolitionism, Civil War, Idealism
• Young, white, northern, yankee, anglo-saxon
protestants
• Free Labor Ideology
• “The West”
• Women, children entering the labor market,
immigrants arriving from Ireland
• Mentalité
• Habits, individual rights, mobility, morality, conception
of what men and women can give their children
8. Yankee Worldview
• Self Reliance
• Expression of Individualism (Agency)
• Without using the word ‘individualism’
• Realities of Agency in the Market Revolution
• Anxiety, Dread, Despair
• Great Fortunes, Great Inequality, Boom and Bust
• Mechanical vs. Organic Solidarity
• Young women, and girls left farms, child laborers, new concept,
definition of ‘childhood’
• Immigration and Population Boom
• Double in 1825 – 1850 (1.5 billion)
• 1830s (600,000 ), 1840s (1.5 m), 1850s (3m)
• Boston and New York had 50 percent foreign born
9. Yankee Worldview
• Mexican War of 1848
• Markers of Technological & Transportation Progress
– Steam-boats
• Romantic symbol of transportation revolution
– Railroads
• Revolutionize sense of time and travel
• Made the first multi-millionaires and private fortunes
• Deep relationship between government subsidies, business, and
official corruption
• Certain sense of economic isolation in the southern states
– Erie Canal
• 1825 – 1880s: 300 miles between Buffalo and New York City
10. Yankee Worldview
• Manifest Destiny
– Most prevalent idea of the 19th Century
– Progress: Boundless resources, boundless land,
natural wealth, the place of progress in the world
– Rooted in the principals of the Declaration of
Independence
• Assertion of American Exceptionalism
– Poets, writers, politicians
• “A new man”, “a new start for mankind”, “new hope”
– Never vanished in American Culture
– Consequences and contradictions to saying ‘this’ to the world
11. Self-Reliance and Individualism
• Trancendentalism
– New conception of how the mind knows the world, and the place and
result of thought
• Paradigm shift from empiricism and reliance on the past to a trust in the
power of original thought
• Lockean “understanding” and Emersonian “intuition”
• Sensory understanding, as Locke describes the process, reason then
interprets, but religion molds an understanding of reason, linking reason
to intuition of the soul.
• You-Tube “Self Reliance” Commercial
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hslN0C8GGaA
12. Self Reliance and Individualism
• America’s greatest cultural and political philosophy
• Individualism
• Calm and considered feeling that disposes each citizen to isolate himself
from the masses of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of his family
and friends. With this little society formed to his taste he gladly leaves
greater society to look after himself. (Tocqueville)
– For Tocqueville it is a destructive social current. He defines it as different
from ‘egoism’ but ultimately to ‘egoism’
• Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” individualism is a concept
toward self-maturity
• Breach between Puritinism and Enlightenment (Franklin)
• Breach between the Enlightenment and Unitarianism (Emerson)
– Central drama of human life returns to religion
13. Self-Reliance and Individualism
• Consistency-Contradiction
• “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…” (pg.19)
• Conformity
• Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist… (pg.17)
• If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument… (pg.18)
• Intuition
• The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of
virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instict (pg.20)
• Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I
think’, ‘I am’ but quotes some saint or sage (pg.21)
• Philanthropy/Travel/Society
14. Abolitionism
• Generation of children that inherit the
ideology of the American Revolution
– 15 % of the population of the Northern States
– Enlightenment Ideology vs. Southern Slave System
– Sanctity of the Constitution
– Monumental challenge of intractable issue
15. Abolitionism
• American Colonation Society
– Volunteer free blacks who choose to return to
Africa to found an African-American Colony
• Jeffersonian Idealism
• Rejected by a majority of free African Americans
– Liberia 1820-1822
– 1500 Free African Americans to Liberia 1821-1831
• Gradualism
16. Radical Abolitionsm
• Evangelical Christianity
– Second Great Awakening
• Realization of Southern Ideological Commitment to
Slavery
• British Influence from Anti-Slavery Crusade
– 1807 anti-slave trade act of parliament
– 1833 abolition act of parliament
• Political and Social Events
– South Carolina
– Ohio Resolution
– Domestic Slave trade and demographic movement
– William Lloyd Garrison – The Liberator
