The American History Guided Reading Activity the Spirit of Reform
"In the history of the earth," Ralph Waldo Emerson alleged in 1841, "the doctrine of Reform had never such telescopic as at the present hr."[1] Not much a joiner of causes himself, Emerson had in heed a remarkable flowering of reform movements from roughly 1815 until the Ceremonious War that were hitting to observers at the time and to historians e'er since for their energy, variety, and occasional strangeness.
Even the office of a "reformer" that emerged earlier the Civil War was relatively new. With some exceptions, earlier American do-gooders were generally people like the Puritan minister Cotton fiber Mather or Ben Franklin, for whom reform was role of a wider range of occupations and activities. By the 1830s at that place were men and women like Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who devoted most of their developed lives to reform causes.
Three of these movements remain especially well known. The first in time, also as the largest nineteenth-century reform motility, was a diverse set on on alcoholic beverages arising shortly after 1800. It is ordinarily chosen the temperance motion, although by the 1830s, the goal normally was not moderation in drinking, but rather total forbearance from alcohol. By the 1840s a portion of the motion advocated a legal ban on alcoholic beverages.
The second of this trio of best-known antebellum reforms was a new, more radical anti-slavery movement that emerged by the early 1830s. Its program for ending slavery stood in stark contrast to the "colonizationist" position earlier advocated by some prominent Americans and embodied in the American Colonization Social club (1816–1964). Colonizationists maintained that the right style to end slavery was gradually, either voluntarily by masters or with some bounty, and by sending freed African Americans to the ACS'south colony in Africa, Liberia. Some colonizationists (including the few African American ones) genuinely disliked slavery and believed black people had no future in the Us; others were more concerned most eliminating a growing complimentary black population in the South and Due north. Although relatively minor in numbers, post-1830 abolitionists included African Americans and whites, and women and men, and were generally less distinguished than the leaders of the ACS. They rejected every aspect of colonization. For them slavery had to be ended immediately, non gradually, without compensation to masters and with freed slaves remaining in the United States. Where colonizationists placated slaveholders (and included them in their ranks), abolitionists condemned them as sinners. This position had little entreatment outside the free states, and even there abolitionists faced enormous hostility, especially in the 1830s, only their passionate rhetoric and deeds helped shape political debates as the nation headed toward secession and civil war.
The third of the best-remembered antebellum reforms was a women's rights movement, its arrival signaled past a stirring "Declaration of Sentiments" issued in 1848 past a convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Modeled later the Proclamation of Independence, the Annunciation of Sentiments condemned men for the oppression of women and put forward a broad platform for women's emancipation. The latter'southward near controversial plank—and the just 1 not passed unanimously—called for full voting rights for women. A high proportion of those present at Seneca Falls were abolitionists. In that sense, the women'south rights motion owed much to the anti-slavery movement; only it besides foreshadowed what would become, after the Civil War, a powerful and eventually successful campaign for women's suffrage.
To focus just upon the antebellum reform movements that attract the most attention in textbooks, however, is to slight the explosion of reform movements Emerson had in mind. From a nowadays-solar day perspective, some of these seem more like fads than reforms, just that can be misleading. Consider the example of Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister and temperance lecturer, who, by 1832, had become convinced that bad diets, alcohol, and poor hygiene threatened the torso and spirit. A terrible cholera epidemic in 1832 gave him an audience for his belief that a plain vegetarian diet without stimulating spices, coffee, or tea was the key to good health and ensured amnesty from destructive impulses (including sexual ones). Graham's regimen—memorialized in a cracker—promised individuals that they could perfect themselves physically. For him, the focus of reform was non on the condition of others, such as slaves and drunkards, simply on one's cocky.
Among those who differed with Graham in that respect were men and women who dealt with issues that remain troublesome today—poverty, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, and world peace, for example. Those reformers often addressed the issues in ways radically different from twenty-showtime-century approaches. In the proper name of reform, for example, antebellum states built new-style prisons and asylums. The initial goal was non to isolate criminals and the insane from order, although they certainly did that, merely to remake them into model citizens. In the twentieth century, later generations attacked these institutions, over again in the proper name of reform.
As one might expect from the variety of antebellum reforms, they had different points of origin and different trajectories, but there were some common patterns. They most oft looked less similar a unified motility than a shifting drove of organizations with occasional schisms and unlike constituencies and agendas. The majority of reforms also rested on a base of operations of "voluntary associations," local groups—sometimes loosely affiliated with a national organization—dedicated to a common purpose. European observers, including the most famous of them all, Alexis de Tocqueville, noted with some bemusement an American penchant for joining voluntary associations. These associations could serve a number of dissimilar purposes, from religious to purely social, or annihilation in between. They were, all the same, effective tools for sustaining reform movements on the local level.
In that location was also a degree of overlapping membership inside antebellum reform. Plenty existed that a former abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, looking back after the Ceremonious State of war, could speak fondly of a "Sisterhood of Reforms" interconnected by common supporters and shared beliefs. (Abolitionists, for instance, tended to endorse temperance, although temperance—i of the few reforms strong in the South—did not necessarily mark one equally an abolitionist.) Finally, reform movements were all subject area to economic and political fluctuations. A devastating financial panic and subsequent depression first in 1837, for instance, made funding scarce for reform organizations more often than not. And territorial expansion in the 1840s, which triggered controversies over slavery, straight affected abolition and less directly afflicted other movements, including women's rights and temperance.
Explaining why reform movements emerged in antebellum America is no unproblematic task. Their proliferation was the product of a convergence of multiple changes in American life, none of which necessarily caused the explosion of reforms, only all of which, taken together, enabled and shaped it. At the most bones level, reform movements require people who believe that human endeavour can—and should—change things. That has not ever been the case. In their optimism about change, antebellum reformers were heirs of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century shifts in secular and religious thought. On the secular side was a new religion in human reason and its power to remake the globe, a faith manifested in the American and French revolutions. Antebellum reform besides drew heavily on an early nineteenth-century moving ridge of Protestant revivalism, often called the Second Great Enkindling. In complicated ways this form of evangelical Christianity encouraged some believers (not all) to engage in reform movements. That is not to say all reformers were evangelicals—not-evangelical sects like the Quakers and Unitarians were well represented among their numbers and southern evangelicals were markedly unenthusiastic about anti-slavery and women's rights. Religion, even so, gave antebellum reform its moral urgency, just equally secular languages of reason and rights also molded it.
Economical, demographic, and technological changes likewise inspired and shaped antebellum reform. Although America remained predominately a rural and small-town nation into the twentieth century, its cities were growing later 1820. Urban areas provided some of the problems reformers addressed, but they and modest towns also had the critical mass of people and resource reform organizations required. Urban growth and an expanding economy, moreover, produced a new heart course with a level of financial comfort and leisure time necessary to engage in reform. Among its members were educated women denied much of a public voice except in religious and reform activities. They were the backbone of many causes. Finally, past the 1830s improvements in printing technology and in transportation—notably canals, steamboats, and eventually railroads—made it far less expensive for reformers and their messages to circulate over wider distances. Peculiarly hitting, in fact, is how reformers used an extraordinary range of oral, impress, and visual media to make their instance to the public—amongst them, speeches, newspapers, plays, poetry, novels, children's literature, songs, demonstrations, and cartoons. Antebellum reform propaganda aimed broadly at public opinion, non just elites, and used new media in means that expect modern.
The diversity of antebellum reformers' tactics—similar the diversity of their causes—masks a choice they all faced: If I want to modify the world, where practise I offset? A common response would take been "with 'moral suasion,'" a term that would be revived in the twentieth century to refer to means of influencing economic behavior. Before the Civil War, withal, it meant persuading people to do the correct thing. Behind it was something of a religious conversion model of reform: change begins, and proceeds, 1 person at a fourth dimension. Some other notion of how to implement reform relied on compulsion, non just persuasion—legislation, social pressure, or incarceration in corrective institutions, for example. In 1840, abolitionists divide over several issues, amongst them whether to appoint in partisan politics or stick to moral suasion. At almost the same time some temperance advocates similarly moved from encouraging forbearance from alcohol to using state legislators to ban it.
A third reply to "Where to brainstorm?" was a minority one: create a model community, a physical example of how society ought to exist organized, and promise the residue of the globe follows. Between the Revolution and the Civil War more than a hundred of these small utopian communities materialized, some religious in origin, some based on secular ideologies. Almost were ephemeral, only all represented yet another way of imagining how to accomplish social change and what the world would look similar afterwards it occurred. The fourth reply was likewise a minority ane and the polar opposite of moral suasion. Information technology was "with violence against evil." Its about famous proponent was the abolitionist John Brown. The blow he struck confronting slavery in a raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859, was a fateful step toward the Ceremonious War. Information technology was also deeply disturbing for many reformers because it posed a question that would haunt subsequent generations: "Is it right to apply immoral means in a only cause?"
From the perspective of the longer history of reform in America, there were continuities, shifts, and discontinuities after the Civil War. The temperance movement gained forcefulness in the second half of the nineteenth century and achieved its greatest victory in 1920 with the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" inside the United States. The women's rights move came to focus more sharply—but not exclusively—on voting rights after the Fourteenth Subpoena to the Constitution (1868) guaranteed suffrage for male person citizens, but not for women. That campaign culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1920), long advocated by reformers with roots in the antebellum years like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Many abolitionists retired from the field after the Civil State of war ended slavery, while others—notably Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips—remained faithful to a wide vision of homo rights and economic opportunity that included women, African Americans, and immigrants. Later the state of war, however, new approaches to achieving social change emerged. At i end of the spectrum there arrived from Europe a multifariousness of anarchism advocating revolutionary violence. Toward the other end was the late nineteenth-century notion, associated with Progressivism, that professional expertise, science, and social science could lead to positive social change. Since the early nineteenth century, ways of thinking about how to achieve reform have evolved as dynamically as have ways of thinking about what needs to exist reformed.
Across their successes and failures, insights and blind spots, antebellum reform movements put on the tabular array a question of enduring relevance: In a political system similar ours, with many layers and much inertia, what is the function of social movements that effort to push the country 1 style or some other? Are they safe valves that release discontent without necessarily addressing its root causes? Practise they marking the outer limits of what is conceivable within the political arrangement? Do they forcefulness into the open issues mainstream politicians prefer to ignore? Are they social clubs for cranks and fanatics, as critics claim? Are they the nation's conscience and an essential office of American democracy? The men and women Emerson had in mind in 1841 would have answered "yes" to the latter.
[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Human being the Reformer," January 25, 1841, in The Dial: A Mag for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, and Co., 1841) i:523.
Ronald G. Walters , professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism afterwards 1830 (1976) and American Reformers, 1815–1860 (rev. ed., 1997).
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