Antebellum Reform Movements

Several Stages of Reform

1) Improve behavior through moral
persuasion.
2) Political action and new institutions.

Second Great Awakening

Sweeping wave of Protestant revival

Revival meetings and circuit ministers
Church membership soared
Attempt to apply Christian teachings to social
problems

Temperance
The problem: high rate of alcohol
consumption (5 gal. hard liquor per person).
Believed to be the cause of social problems.
American Temperance Society
Over 1 million members
Maine was first of 13 states to prohibit
manufacture and sale of alcohol.
Overshadowed by issue of slavery but well
see it come back after the war.

Abolition
Second Great Awakening encouraged people
to think of slavery as sin.
Several forms
Gradual abolition or immediate abolition
Colonization move freed slaves to an African
Colony in Liberia. 12,000 African Americans were
settled there.
Newspapers like The Liberator pushed the
radical abolition movement.

Abolition contd
Black abolitionists were escaped slaves and
free blacks.
Frederick Douglas was a major leader of black
aboltionists and wrote and spoke about the
brutality of slavery from his own experience.
Others like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and
David Ruggles helped fugitive slaves get to free
territory in the Underground Railroad.

Abolition Contd
Violent abolitionism
Slaves should take actions by rising in revolt
Nat Turner led a revolt where 55 whites were
killed
Before the event, there had been some antislavery
sentiment, but after the event, everyone was
afraid, and antislavery talk stopped.

Womens Movement
Started in large part because women were
being barred from antislavery movements.
Sarah and Angelina Grimke
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Seneca Falls Convention (1848)
Declaration of Sentiments

Public Asylums
People in institutions were being forced to live
in poor conditions and were often abused.
1) Mental Hospitals
* Dorothea Dix

2) Schools for blind and deaf persons

* Thomas Gallaudet school for deaf
* Dr. Samuel Howe school for blind

3) Prisons

Public Education
Fear for the republic that was getting growing
numbers of uneducated poor
1) Free common schools
2) Moral education
Protestant tone of schools led Roman Catholic
groups to start Catholic schools.

3) Higher Education

Separation Movements
Religious Groups
Shakers
Mormons

Utopian Societies

Reforms North v. South

These reforms took place in regions.
Succeeded at state level in northern and
western states, but not the South.
North had more modernizers, and South had
more traditionalists
More and more, the South grew to see social
reform as a northern conspiracy against the
southern way of life

Why does this matter?