Transcript
The Locked Door
July 19, 1848
July 19, 1848 Wednesday morning
A small-town paper announced the first women's rights convention about a week ahead. About three hundred people came anyway.
But the chapel door was locked.
Somebody lifted Elizabeth Cady Stanton's eleven-year-old nephew through an open window to unbar it. The movement's own history called him “an embryo Professor of Yale College.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal;
Forty-seven years earlier and about five hundred miles away, thousands of Americans gathered in a Kentucky forest. Hundreds fell to the ground.
How did a revival about saving your soul become a crusade to remake the country, and who got left outside?
Fire in the Woods
1790s–1819
The first Great Awakening lit America in the 1740s. By 1800, it had cooled.
Thomas Jefferson took a razor to the Gospels. He kept Jesus's teachings and cut the miracles.
Thomas Jefferson …as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.
Out west, Kentucky's population tripled in the 1790s. It had few churches and fewer ministers.
In spring 1801, Barton Stone went to a camp meeting in Logan County.
Barton W. Stone The scene to me was new, and passing strange. It baffled description.
That August, Stone hosted his own, at Cane Ridge. Witnesses guessed twenty thousand people. Lexington, Kentucky's biggest town, had 1,795.
Peter Cartwright Thousands heard of the mighty work, and came on foot, on horseback, in carriages and wagons.
Peter Cartwright Hundreds fell prostrate under the mighty power of God, as men slain in battle.
People sang, wept, shouted and fell. Critics called it disorder. Believers called it the Holy Spirit. Either way, it spread.
Methodists and Baptists spread it fastest.
Peter Cartwright …instead of hunting up a college or Biblical institute, hunted up a hardy pony of a horse…
Their message was democratic. God offered salvation to everyone, and anyone could choose to accept it.
In 1776, about one American church member in forty was a Methodist. By 1850, one in three was.
The pulpit opened a crack. About 1811, Jarena Lee asked Richard Allen for permission to preach. He said no.
Jarena Lee If the man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also.
In 1819, a preacher at Bethel lost his place. Lee stood up and preached on his text. Allen said she was called.
Enslaved people heard the same promise. Many made it their own, often in secret. Their story is the next film's.
A Burnt District
1821–1835
In 1825 the Erie Canal opened, and western New York filled with strangers. Rochester grew about sixfold in ten years.
Canal towns had mills, wages, taverns, and nobody's grandparents. Families feared this market revolution was pulling people loose from God.
Charles Grandison Finney, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer in Adams, New York, went into the woods to pray. He came out converted.
The next morning, a client stopped by about his case.
Charles Grandison Finney I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and I cannot plead yours.
Finney preached like a trial lawyer to a jury of sinners. He wanted a verdict that night.
His new measures: meetings every night, and an anxious bench for the nearly convinced. Women prayed aloud in mixed company, which shocked many ministers.
Two sermon titles, ninety-three years apart. In 1741, sinners dangle in the hands of an angry God. In 1834, sinners are bound to change their own hearts.
Old Calvinism taught that God had already chosen who would be saved. Finney said every sinner has the powers of moral agency. The choice is yours.
Charles Grandison Finney It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means.
In the age of the canal lock, he engineered salvation.
In Rochester, his converts were shopkeepers, mill owners, and their wives. Then they went to work on everyone else.
In 1824 Finney called one town, Evans' Mills, a burnt district. A wild revival had scorched it, and people had hardened against religion. He preached anyway. It caught again.
Later writers stretched his phrase over all of western New York: the burned-over district. It never stopped catching fire.
Many believed Christ would return after a thousand years of godliness on earth. So Christians had better start building it.
If you could change your own heart, you could change your neighbor's. Then your town. Then the country.
Heaven on Earth
1826–1848
New faiths took root all along the canal.
Joseph Smith some crying, 'lo, here,' and some 'lo, there;' some were contending for the Methodist faith, some for the Presbyterian, and some for the Baptists.
Joseph Smith grew up near Palmyra. In 1830 he published the Book of Mormon and organized a church.
Neighbors feared their numbers and beliefs. Mobs drove them out of Ohio and Missouri. They built Nauvoo, Illinois, one of the state's biggest towns.
Smith had also begun teaching plural marriage, which outraged critics. On June 27, 1844, a mob stormed the Carthage jail and shot him dead.
Brigham Young led the Saints west. In 1847 they reached the Great Salt Lake.
William Miller, a Baptist farmer, worked out from the Bible that Christ would return in 1844. Tens of thousands believed. They settled on October 22.
Hiram Edson We wept, and wept, till the day dawn.
Some had given away their farms. Out of that grief grew the Adventists.
Others tried building heaven on earth. The Shakers shared property and kept men and women apart.
They did not marry. Converts and orphans filled their villages, about six thousand by the 1840s.
At Brook Farm, near Boston, writers split their days between thinking and farming. Hawthorne lasted about seven months. He called the manure pile 'that abominable gold mine!'
Robert Owen's New Harmony, in Indiana, tried socialism without religion. It lasted about two years.
At Oneida, John Humphrey Noyes taught that people could live without sin. Members shared property and rejected ordinary marriage.
The perfect society paid its bills with steel animal traps. Later, silverware.
More than a hundred experiments began. Most failed within a few years. Reformers outside them learned how to organize.
Join the Society
1816–1848
Alexis de Tocqueville Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations.
Converts didn't wait for the government. They formed societies, and used the market revolution's tools: steam presses, cheap paper, canals, the mail.
Target number one was drink. Around 1830, the average American over fifteen drank about seven gallons of pure alcohol a year. Nearly three times today's rate.
Reformers blamed drink for beaten wives, hungry children and ruined workers. Often, they were right.
Members signed a pledge not to drink. By the 1840s, temperance societies had over a million members.
Women couldn't vote, but they ran societies of their own, like the Daughters of Temperance.
Six Baltimore drinkers sent a committee to a temperance lecture, as a lark. Three days later, they founded the Washingtonians.
It worked. By 1845, Americans drank about a quarter as much. Factory owners liked sober workers. German and Irish immigrants saw a Protestant crusade against their beer and whiskey.
From 1837, Horace Mann ran Massachusetts's new Board of Education. He pushed tax-supported schools, longer terms and trained teachers.
Horace Mann Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men,—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.
The first state school for teachers opened in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1839. Three students showed up.
Public schools read the Protestant King James Bible. Catholic families objected, and built schools of their own.
In Ohio, revivalists founded Oberlin College in 1833. It took Black students from 1835 and women in its college course from 1837.
Cages, Closets, Cellars
1817–1848
Reformers believed the right building could fix a broken person.
At Auburn, New York, prisoners marched in lockstep, worked in silence and slept alone in tiny cells.
Pennsylvania went further. At Eastern State, prisoners lived alone for years, to reflect and repent. “Penitentiary” comes from “penitence.”
Charles Dickens I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony
Charles Dickens which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers.
In March 1841, Dorothea Dix went to a jail in East Cambridge to teach Sunday school.
She found mentally ill people kept in an unheated room with criminals. They had committed no crime.
For about two years, she visited jails and almshouses across Massachusetts and wrote down everything she saw.
Dorothea Dix I proceed, Gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens!
Dorothea Dix Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.
Her claim fits in one sentence: the state must pay for hospitals.
Her evidence runs for pages: town after town, and what she saw. Any legislator could check it.
Massachusetts voted money to enlarge its state hospital at Worcester. Dix went on to help found thirty-two hospitals.
In Hartford in 1817, Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc opened America's first permanent school for deaf children.
The same hope built asylums and penitentiaries: order would heal people. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it built a new kind of cage.
I Will Be Heard
1817–1840
Many Americans who disliked slavery wanted it to end someday. A few said today.
By 1827, every Northern state had ended slavery or set it on a path to end. The free Black population grew from sixty thousand in 1790 to over four hundred thousand in 1850.
Then states fenced them in. New York demanded property from Black voters only. Ohio made Black settlers post a bond. Black Northerners built their own churches, papers and movements. The next film is theirs.
Many white Americans backed a plan: free enslaved people slowly, then send them to Africa. Some hated slavery. Some wanted free Black people gone. The American Colonization Society founded Liberia in 1822.
Most free Black Americans said no. This was their country.
In January 1831, Boston printer William Lloyd Garrison, twenty-five, began a newspaper that demanded freedom for every enslaved person, immediately.
William Lloyd Garrison I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.
William Lloyd Garrison I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.
Black readers kept The Liberator alive.
In 1833, Garrison and others founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. Lucretia Mott spoke there. Every signer was a man.
In 1835, the society mailed more than a million pieces of antislavery writing. In Charleston, a crowd burned the mail.
Petitions flooded Congress, many gathered by women, who could not vote. From 1836 to 1844, the House's gag rule tabled them all without debate.
In October 1835, a Boston mob broke up a women’s antislavery meeting and dragged Garrison through the streets on a rope. The mayor jailed him to save his life.
William Lloyd Garrison …to save him from the violence of a “respectable and influential” mob, who sought to destroy him for preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine, that “all men are created equal,”…
In Alton, Illinois, the minister and editor Elijah Lovejoy defended his fourth printing press from a mob. They shot him dead.
Sarah and Angelina Grimké grew up in a slaveholding Charleston family. They left, became Quakers, and told Northern audiences what they had seen. What shocked many ministers was that men were listening.
Reader of the 1837 Pastoral Letter If the vine, whose strength and beauty is to lean upon the trellis-work, and half conceal its clusters, thinks to assume the independence and the overshadowing nature of the elm, it will not only cease to bear fruit, but fall in shame and dishonor into the dust.
Sarah Grimké I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality.
Sarah Grimké All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.
Philadelphia abolitionists built Pennsylvania Hall for free speech. A mob gathered outside.
Angelina Grimké What is a mob? What would the breaking of every window be? What would the levelling of this Hall be?
The next night, the mob burned the hall down. Firemen hosed down the buildings next door and let it burn.
In 1839, Theodore Weld and the Grimké sisters published American Slavery As It Is. Its evidence came from slaveholders’ own newspapers, with the name, place and date. Every ad in it could be checked.
In May 1840, Garrison’s side put Abby Kelley on a committee. Opponents walked out. Others had formed the Liberty Party to fight slavery at the ballot box. A few weeks later, both sides sailed for London.
Behind the Barrier
June 1840
In June 1840, antislavery delegates sailed from America to London for a world convention. Britain had outlawed slavery across most of its empire. Its abolitionists wanted the world to follow.
Freemasons' Hall on Great Queen Street. Nearly five hundred delegates crowded in for twelve days. Benjamin Haydon sat through opening day, sketching faces. Then he painted them all.
Thomas Clarkson, eighty, lame and nearly blind, had fought the slave trade for more than fifty years. The hall stood as he was helped to the chair.
American societies had sent women as delegates. Wendell Phillips moved that anyone with credentials be counted. The debate ran late. The women lost by an overwhelming majority.
The women sat behind a bar and curtain. Stanton called it “a low curtained seat like a church choir.” It was a place where they could watch but not speak.
It took them eight years.
The Ninth Resolution
1840–1848
In 1847 the Stantons moved to Seneca Falls, a mill town on the canal. Henry was often away. Elizabeth ran the house and three small boys.
As a girl, Elizabeth planned to cut the laws against women out of her father's books. He told her to try the legislature.
In April 1848, New York let married women keep property they owned or inherited. Until then, a wife's property became her husband's.
In July, Lucretia Mott was visiting upstate New York. Over tea in Waterloo, five women decided to call a convention.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton I poured out, that day, the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself… to do and dare anything.
The notice ran in the Seneca County Courier: women on the first day, the public on the second.
Drafting, their own history says, felt like building a steam engine. Then someone read the Declaration of Independence aloud, and they chose it as their model.
Stanton read her draft aloud in a chapel built by Methodists who broke with their church over slavery.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man…
James Mott chaired day two. Every resolution passed unanimously but one. The ninth urged women to claim the vote. Some feared that would “make the whole movement ridiculous.”
Frederick Douglass had escaped slavery ten years before. He rose to back the ninth. His speech wasn't recorded. His paper printed this eight days later:
Frederick Douglass if that government is only just which governs by the free consent of the governed,
Frederick Douglass there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise…
Frederick Douglass Our doctrine is, that “Right is of no sex.”
Stanton and Douglass kept arguing for it. At last it passed, by a small majority.
One hundred people signed.
Editor of the Oneida Whig If our ladies will insist on voting and legislating, where, gentlemen, will be our dinners and our elbows? Where our domestic firesides and the holes in our stockings?
Papers across the country laughed. Many signers took their names back.
Outside the Chapel
1848–1920
Nearly everyone in the room was white and Protestant. Frederick Douglass is the only Black person known to have been there.
William Apess, a Pequot Methodist preacher, handed white Christians a looking-glass in 1833.
Two weeks later, in Rochester, the convention voted for a woman to preside: Abigail Bush. Mott, Stanton and McClintock thought it “a most hazardous experiment.” They lost.
In 1869, Stanton opposed the Fifteenth Amendment for leaving out women, at times in ugly racial terms. Frederick Douglass supported it.
Charlotte Woodward is the only signer known to have lived to see women win the vote. Ill on Election Day 1920, she never voted, as far as anyone knows.
They called this district burned over. It never stopped catching fire. The ninth resolution took seventy-two years.