An Age of Reform in two minutes
- Revival converts believed society could be perfected and formed voluntary societies. Temperance groups had over a million members by the 1840s, and drinking fell sharply after about 1830.
- Horace Mann led Massachusetts's Board of Education from 1837 and pushed tax-supported schools and trained teachers. Oberlin College (1833) admitted Black students from 1835 and women to its college course from 1837.
- Penitentiaries such as Auburn and Eastern State tried to reform prisoners through silence and solitude. Dorothea Dix's 1843 report on the mentally ill in jails persuaded Massachusetts to enlarge its state hospital.
- William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator (1831) and the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833) demanded immediate abolition, rejecting gradual plans and colonization. Abolitionists faced mobs, burned mail and a House gag rule (1836–1844).
- Sarah and Angelina Grimké spoke for abolition and women's rights, and the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London refused to seat women delegates.
- At Seneca Falls in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and others issued a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, that urged women to claim the vote.
- On the exam: expect causation (how the Second Great Awakening and the market revolution produced reform), comparison of reform movements, and the link between abolition and women's rights.
Topic 4.11 key terms
- Voluntary organizations (the Benevolent Empire)
Groups Americans formed on their own, without government help, to change behavior and fix social problems. The Benevolent Empire was the network of Protestant societies for Bibles, tracts, Sunday schools, temperance, peace and, later, ending slavery.
- Temperance movement
The era's most popular reform. It began with the American Temperance Society (1826), which urged drinkers to sign a pledge of total abstinence, and later pushed states to restrict the sale of liquor.
- Washingtonians
A temperance society founded in Baltimore in 1840 by recovering drinkers. It argued that alcoholism was a disease needing practical help, and it spread as members told their own stories at public meetings.
- Common school movement
A reform effort led by Horace Mann in the 1830s and 1840s for free, tax-supported public schools open to all children, with a longer school year and trained teachers. By the 1840s it was spreading to other states.
- Oberlin College
An Ohio college founded in 1833 by revival Christians. It admitted Black students from 1835 and women to its college course from 1837, when most colleges admitted neither.
- Auburn system
Prison plan developed at Auburn, New York, in the 1820s. Convicts marched in lockstep, worked together in silence by day and slept in solitary cells at night. Reformers believed discipline, labor and quiet would reform them.
- Penitentiary
A prison meant to make convicts penitent: sorry for their crimes and reformed by reflection. Two rival models: the Auburn system in New York and solitary confinement at Eastern State in Pennsylvania.
- Claim and evidence
A claim is the point an author argues. Evidence is the specific facts that support it. Dix's claim: the state must pay for hospitals. Her evidence: places, dates and what she saw.
- Asylum movement
Reform effort of the 1830s–1850s, led by Dorothea Dix, to replace jails and almshouses with state-funded hospitals where mentally ill people would be sheltered and treated. It shared the era's faith that institutions could reform people.
- Gradual emancipation
A plan to end slavery over time instead of at once. Pennsylvania passed the first Northern law in 1780. Such laws usually freed only children born to enslaved mothers after a set date, often after years of forced service. Some people stayed enslaved in the North into the 1840s.
- American Colonization Society
A group founded in Washington in December 1816 by white Americans, some antislavery and some slaveholders, to send free Black Americans to Africa. It settled Liberia in 1822. Most free Black Americans rejected it, and later abolitionists condemned it.
- Immediatism
The demand that slavery end at once, not gradually and not by sending freed people abroad. William Lloyd Garrison and his allies rejected both gradual emancipation and colonization as delays that let slavery go on.
- The Liberator (1831)
William Lloyd Garrison's Boston antislavery newspaper. It first appeared on January 1, 1831, and ran until the end of slavery in 1865. Few people subscribed, but its words were reprinted and answered across the country.
- American Anti-Slavery Society (1833)
A national organization founded in Philadelphia in December 1833 to demand immediate emancipation. It spread its case through lecturers, newspapers and mailed pamphlets, and it grew into a network of local societies.
- Gag rule
A rule the House of Representatives adopted on May 26, 1836 to table every petition about slavery without reading or debating it. It stood until December 1844. Critics said it violated the First Amendment right to petition.
- Liberty Party (1840)
An antislavery party formed in 1840 by abolitionists who believed voting, not Garrison’s moral appeals, was the practical way to end slavery. It ran James Birney for president in 1840 and 1844.
- World Anti-Slavery Convention
A meeting held in London, June 12–23, 1840. About 500 delegates from Britain, the United States and other countries came to press for the end of slavery everywhere. How it treated the women who came as delegates helped start the American women's rights movement.
- American Anti-Slavery Society
Founded in Philadelphia in December 1833 by William Lloyd Garrison and others to demand immediate emancipation. In 1840 it split, partly over whether women could take part as equals.
- Cult of domesticity
The early-1800s ideal that a woman's proper place was the home, where she was to guard the family's morals. It kept most middle-class women out of politics and public speaking, even in reform movements.
- Women's rights movement
The reform effort, begun in the 1840s, to win women equal legal and political standing. Its first national moment was the Seneca Falls Convention of July 1848, which grew out of abolitionism.
- Coverture
The old legal rule that a married woman had no separate legal identity. Her property, her wages and her legal rights passed to her husband. New York's 1848 act began to chip away at it.
- Seneca Falls Convention
The first U.S. women's rights convention, held July 19–20, 1848, in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls, New York. It launched the organized women's rights movement.
- Declaration of Sentiments
The document Stanton read at Seneca Falls. It copied the form of the Declaration of Independence, changed “all men” to “all men and women,” listed women's grievances as evidence, and demanded the vote.
- Suffrage
The right to vote. The ninth resolution demanded it for women. It was the only resolution not adopted unanimously, and women did not win the vote nationwide until 1920.
- Disfranchised
Stripped of the right to vote or of other rights of citizenship. Apess asked white readers to picture losing theirs because of their skin.
- Fifteenth Amendment (1870)
Said no state could deny the vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It did not mention sex, so women were still shut out.
- Nineteenth Amendment (1920)
Ratified in August 1920, it said no state could deny the vote “on account of sex.”
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Join the Society
1816–1848
Key terms: Voluntary organizations (the Benevolent Empire), Temperance movement, Washingtonians, Common school movement, Oberlin College
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
Key terms: Auburn system, Penitentiary, Claim and evidence, Asylum movement
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
Key terms: Gradual emancipation, American Colonization Society, Immediatism, The Liberator (1831), American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), Gag rule, Liberty Party (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. In response, Black Northerners built their own churches, papers and movements.
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
Key terms: World Anti-Slavery Convention, American Anti-Slavery Society, Cult of domesticity, Women's rights movement
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
Key terms: Cult of domesticity, Coverture, Seneca Falls Convention, Declaration of Sentiments, Suffrage
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
Key terms: Disfranchised, Fifteenth Amendment (1870), Nineteenth Amendment (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.