Readings #1- Religious Revival, Antebellum America (HIST-1483-60552) Fall 2024 PDF

Readings #1: Religious Revival, Antebellum America: Recreation and Leisure, Antebellum America: Literature and Arts, Impulse for Reform To-Do Date: Nov 5 at 11:59pm Religious Revival The term antebellum, “before the war,” is often used by historians to refer to the decades...

Readings #1: Religious Revival, Antebellum America: Recreation and Leisure, Antebellum America: Literature and Arts, Impulse for Reform To-Do Date: Nov 5 at 11:59pm Religious Revival The term antebellum, “before the war,” is often used by historians to refer to the decades before the Civil War in the United States. “Antebellum” creates an image of a time when slavery was not only legal but an integral part of life in the South, when the first spurt of industrialization occurred in the United States, and when Americans explored and settled the trans-Mississippi West. The antebellum decades were also a period during which another religious revival swept the country, reformers sought to address many of the social questions that the politicians would not or could not, and American culture, defined through its literature and art, came into its own. Beginning in the 1790s and continuing into the 1840s, evangelical Christianity once again became an important factor in American life. Revivalism began in earnest at the edge of the frontier with circuit riders, or itinerant preachers, bringing their message to isolated farms and small settlements. Open-air camp meetings, which could last as long as four days and attract more than ten thousand people from the surrounding countryside, were often characterized by emotional outbursts—wild gestures and speaking in tongues—from the participants. The number of women who converted at these meetings was much larger than the number of men, an indication of women's increasing role as defenders of the spiritual values in the home. The Methodist denomination, which was the driving force behind this so-called Second Great Awakening, grew from seventy thousand members in 1800 to more than one million in 1844, making it the largest Protestant group in the country. :  The “Burned-Over District.” After its first sweep along the frontier, revivalism moved back east. So many fiery revivals were held in western New York during the 1820s that the region became known as the “ Burned-Over District.” Foremost among the New York preachers was Charles G. Finney, who found a receptive audience in the rapidly growing and changing communities along the Erie Canal. Finney rejected such formal doctrines as predestination and original sin and emphasized that every person is free to choose between good and evil. Conversion to him was not just an individual decision to avoid drunkenness, fornication, and other sins; if enough people found salvation, Finney believed, society as a whole would be reformed. Despite its gains for the church rolls, the Second Great Awakening was not without its critics. The Unitarians, who included the well-educated and wealthy elite of New England among their members, declared the revivals far too emotional and questioned the sincerity of the conversion experience. While the Methodists emphasized the “heart” over the “head,” Unitarianism stressed reason, free will, and individual moral responsibility. The Mormons. A new religious group also came out of the Burned-Over District: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose supporters were called Mormons. Its :  founder was Joseph Smith, who claimed that he was led by the angel Moroni to decipher the Book of Mormon, which told of the migration of ancient Hebrews to America and the founding of the true church. Smith and his followers faced persecution wherever they went because of their radical teachings, particularly their endorsement of polygamy. The Mormons settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1839, but Smith and his brother were killed by an angry mob in 1844. Leadership of the church passed to Brigham Young. In 1847, Young led about fifteen thousand Mormons to the valley of Great Salt Lake and began to develop what he called the state of Deseret, which was organized as the Utah Territory by Congress in 1850. Young became the territorial governor, and although he was removed from the position during his second term because of an ongoing dispute between the Mormons and the federal government over polygamy, he remained the political as well as religious leader of the Mormons until his death. The Shaker community. Founded in England in the 1770s by Mother Ann Lee, the :  Shakers opposed materialism and believed in an imminent Second Coming. They found converts in the Burned-Over District and, during their heyday from the 1820s to the 1840s, established communities from Massachusetts to Ohio. The Shakers did not believe in marriage or the family, and the ultimate decline of the group was due to their practicing celibacy. The Shakers are remembered for their spiritual values and their craftsmanship, particularly in their simple furniture designs, but their otherworldliness set them apart from the Protestant sects that accepted material success as compatible with religion. Antebellum America: Recreation, Leisure During the antebellum period, popular pastimes included a variety of participant and spectator sports. The New York Clipper, a magazine first published in 1853, employed a network of reporters spread across the country who used the new electric telegraph to cover every kind of sport, including foot races, pedestrian (walking) events, horse races, dog fights, cock fights, rat catching, boxing matches, rowing regattas, and, of course, baseball games. Although the myth persists that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, the game actually evolved from the English sport called “rounders” and was played in the colonies during the eighteenth century. Credit for key changes to what was variously called “town ball,” “four-old cat,” and “base ball” belongs to Alexander Cartwright. In 1845, he suggested that runners be tagged with the ball rather than hit with it and that each team be limited to three outs. These rules led to modem baseball, which was on its way to becoming a national pastime :  by the Civil War. Popular reading. Improvements made to printing presses had a dramatic impact on Americans' reading. As technology reduced production costs, allowing publishers to sell newspapers for a penny an issue, readership increased. The number of newspapers in the country grew from fewer than 100 in 1790 to more than 3,700 by 1860. Large metropolitan papers, such as the New York Sun and the New York Herald, featured sensational stories about crime, sex, and scandal. The number of magazines also began to grow in the second half of the nineteenth century. “Highbrow” periodicals, such as the North American Review and Harper's, which is still in print today, carried articles by some of the most noted authors of the day, while other magazines catered to the tastes and interests of specific audiences—women, farmers, and businessmen, for example. The expansion of public education, the opening of lending libraries, and the popularity of the lyceum created a mass audience for books. Although the works of Cooper and Hawthorne sold well, even more popular were sentimental novels by and for women, books that provided advice or practical instruction (early “how-to” books), and literature with a moral message. Often, books were serialized in newspapers or magazines before they were published as full novels. Such was the case with Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which was written in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and did much to strengthen antislavery sentiment in the North. Theater and P. T. Barnum. The theater was as popular in antebellum America as movies are today. Best-selling novels were adapted for the stage; Uncle Tom's Cabin was produced in New York in 1853, for example (interestingly, African Americans had to enter the theater through a special entrance and were segregated from the rest of the audience). Shakespeare's plays were a perennial favorite, as were melodramas and comedies. Shows that touched on the social issues of the day were important. Temperance plays, which showed how alcohol :  could destroy a family, were a popular genre, and about fifty plays about Native Americans were staged between 1825 and 1860. Early in his career as a showman, Phineas T. Barnum realized that people would pay to see exotic and sensational exhibits purported to have an educational value. In 1835, he introduced the public to an aged black woman, Joice Heth, who he claimed had been George Washington's nurse. Barnum followed this hoax with the “Feejee mermaid,” created by sewing together a fish and the upper body of a monkey. The “mermaid” and other odd displays, along with appearances by the famous twenty-five-inch-tall dwarf, General Tom Thumb, were featured attractions at Barnum's American Museum in New York City (1842). Barnum was also a legitimate theatrical promoter; he brought the noted Swedish singer Jenny Lind to the United States for a concert tour in 1850. The impact of the minstrel shows. One of the most popular forms of entertainment beginning in the 1840s was the minstrel show, which featured white performers acting out skits, singing, dancing, and telling jokes in blackface makeup. African Americans were consistently portrayed either as clumsy, lazy, stupid, docile, and childlike or as arrogant and dandified, looking ridiculous as they tried to adopt white ways. The extreme stereotypes that the shows and their advertising conveyed reflected the strong racial prejudice in the United States. Minstrel shows confirmed whites' sense of superiority while providing a racial justification for slavery. Curiously, the shows were popular at a time when feelings against slavery in the North had been increasing. Long after the heyday of minstrel shows passed, American audiences could still see vaudeville entertainers such as Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson in blackface, and the tradition continued into the era of sound motion pictures. Even African-American stage actors often :  had to undergo the indignity of putting on the distinctive makeup because theatrical convention required it. Antebellum America: Literature, Art In the first half of the nineteenth century, an American national literature was born. Naturally accompanying it was the first American reference work, Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828. While Webster's work did not create American English, the dictionary did declare the independence of American usage. Webster insisted on using American spellings, such as “plow” for “plough”; taking the “u” out of such words as “labour” and “honour”; and writing definitions taken from American life. Another important literary milestone was Ralph Waldo Emerson's “American Scholar,” an address he gave at Harvard in 1837. At a time when many in the United States remained in awe of European culture, he argued that Americans were self-reliant enough to develop a literature reflecting their own national character. “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close,” he told his audience. Emerson espoused transcendentalism, which proclaimed that intuition and experience provided knowledge and truth just as effectively as did the intellect, that man is innately good, and that there is unity in the entire creation. Emerson's “American Scholar” speech and transcendentalism both influenced and reflected an impressive flowering of American literature. The country's literary centers were New England and New York. From New England came the historical works of George Bancroft ( History of the United States, ten volumes, the first published in 1834), Francis Parkman ( The Oregon Trail, 1849), and William H. Prescott ( History of the Conquest of Mexico, 1843) as well as the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Emily Dickinson (although Dickinson did most of her writing after the Civil War). Emerson, :  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller were the region's most noted authors. New York produced Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman; Edgar Allen Poe, though bom in Virginia, did most of his writing in New York and Philadelphia. James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper was among the first writers to appreciate the value of the frontier as a distinctly American literary setting. Beginning with the Pioneers (1823), he created a body of work that celebrates the courage and adventuresomeness of the American character and explores the conflict between the wilderness and the advance of civilization. His five novels featuring the frontiersman Natty Bumppo, collectively known as the “Leatherstocking Tales” and including such classics as the Last of the Mohicans (1826) and the Deerslayer (1841), were all bestsellers. Cooper portrayed nature as something to be used but protected and not conquered. Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau's fame rests on two works, neither of which received much attention during his lifetime. Walden (1854) is an account of two years he spent in his cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts. The stay was an experiment in self-sufficiency, a reaction to what the transcendentalists saw as growing commercialism and materialism in American society. Although Thoreau did not completely cut himself off from civilization during his stay, he believed that only in nature could individuals really understand themselves and the purpose of life. In 1846, Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax as a protest against the Mexican War, which he, like many abolitionists, saw as nothing more than an attempt to expand slavery. He spent one :  night in jail before the tax was paid by a relative. To explain his actions, he wrote “Civil Disobedience” (1849), stating, “The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right,” a position that reflected the individualism of the transcendentalists taken to an extreme. Although ignored in the nineteenth century, Thoreau's discourse influenced Mahatma Gandhi in his struggle for the independence of India and the American civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s. Walt Whitman. In 1855, Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which he continued to revise, rearrange, and enlarge until his death in 1892. A revolutionary work that greatly influenced American poetry, it expressed Whitman's love for his country in lusty and controversial free verse that included homoerotic images. While many critics at the time found Leaves crude and vulgar, Emerson found Whitman's poetry to be decidedly American, democratic and plain. Whitman shared Thoreau's abolitionist sentiments, but the two parted company on politics; Whitman had an unbridled faith in democratic government, despite its imperfections. Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. Nathaniel Hawthorne was fascinated by the dark side of the Puritan mind. His novels, especially the Scarlet Letter (1850) and the House of Seven Gables (1851), dealt with revenge, guilt, and pride. Although he had been involved with Brook Farm and wrote the Blithedale Romance (1852) based on his experiences there, Hawthorne did not share the transcendentalists' faith in the perfectibility of man. Herman Melville, unlike many of the writers before the Civil War, did not receive recognition for his work while he was alive. His first novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were set in the South Pacific, where he had visited as a sailor. Moby- Dick (1851), based on Melville's experiences on a whaling ship, was not appreciated as one of the great works of American fiction until the 1920s. Edgar Allan Poe focused on literary genres different from those of his contemporaries: the short story and short poem. His work reflected his own pessimistic outlook on life and focused chiefly on the mental state of the characters. He is credited with :  pioneering detective fiction in such stories as the “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1843) and gothic horror in the “Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and the “Tell-Tale Heart” (1843). American art. In the decades before the Civil War, a distinctive style of American landscape painting attracted considerable attention. The Hudson River school, comprising such artists as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Asher Durand, captured on canvas the massive trees, sparkling water, and lush American environment, conveying a sense of the majesty and mystery of the wilderness that was quickly disappearing. Just as Emerson had claimed that Americans should write about themselves in their own place, Cole noted in an essay published in 1836 that it was not necessary for artists to go to Europe to find subjects for their paintings: “American scenery… has features, and glorious ones, unknown to Europe. The most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.” Impulse for Reform In the first half of the nineteenth century, politicians either ignored or avoided a number of social issues, including alcoholism, the quality of public education, slavery, and women's rights. Reformers, working as individuals and through organizations, were left to tackle these problems. The temperance movement. By the early nineteenth century, the per capita consumption of hard liquor (whiskey, brandy, rum, and gin) had grown dramatically to more than five gallons a year. The high level of consumption was blamed for poverty: workingmen spent their wages on alcohol instead of rent or food and were frequently absent from their factory jobs. Alcohol abuse also contributed to the abuse of wives and children. In 1826, the American Temperance Society began a persistent campaign against the evils of :  drinking. Although focusing at first on persuading individuals to abstain, the advocates of temperance soon entered the political arena and sought laws to limit the sale and manufacture of alcohol. The movement caught on—particularly in New England but much less so in the South—and by the 1840s, national consumption had dropped to half of what it had been two decades earlier. The reformers were not satisfied, however, and they continued to press for a complete ban on the sale and use of all intoxicating liquor, an effort that culminated in the 1919 passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, ushering in the era of Prohibition. Improving public education. The demand for free public education grew during the 1830s as the franchise expanded. Education was deemed important for creating an informed electorate. In addition, factory workers wanted their children to have more opportunities than they had had, and schooling was seen as a way to assimilate the children of immigrants through the inculcation of American values. Already-existing schools generally taught the “three Rs”—reading, writing, and arithmetic— to a room full of boys and girls whose ages might have run from three to eighteen. Reformers found that system inadequate for preparing students to succeed in a rapidly changing society. Massachusetts, as it had during the early colonial period, took the lead in promoting education. In 1827, the state passed a law that provided for the establishment of high schools and set guidelines for curricula based on community size. The legislation was strictly enforced after Horace Mann was appointed the first secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1837. During his tenure, state funding for schools increased, new high schools were established, compulsory school attendance laws were passed, a specified school term (six months) was delineated, and structured curricula and teacher training were designed and implemented. Mann also called for “grade” schools that would use a placement system based on the age and skills of the students. Massachusetts pioneered popular education in addition to public education. The state was the birthplace of the lyceum (1826), an organization that attracted large audiences for its public lectures on literature, art, and science. Many of the lyceums that were developed across the country during the 1830s and 1840s also had lending libraries with books for children as well as adults. One of the results of the changes to education was an increase in women teachers. The first high school for girls was opened in New York in 1821, and Oberlin College was established as a coeducational institution in 1833. Mount Holyoke was founded as a :  women's college four years later. Educational reform was more successful in the North than in the South, where even white illiteracy was high. African Americans did not benefit from improvements in public education. Free blacks attended poor segregated schools, and slaves generally received no formal education at all. Notably, one institution of higher learning, again Oberlin College, admitted blacks as well as women. The abolitionist movement. Congress considered slavery so controversial that in 1836, the House of Representatives, largely at the insistence of southerners, passed a gag rule prohibiting discussion or debate of the subject. This move was a reaction to numerous petitions submitted to Congress that called for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, a reflection of a growing anti-slavery movement in the United States. Not all Americans who opposed slavery favored simply putting an end to it. Some considered slavery to be wrong but were unwilling to take action against it, while others accepted slavery in the states where it already existed but opposed its expansion into new territories. An early antislavery proposal was to repatriate slaves to Africa. Farfetched as it seems, in 1822, under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, the first freed slaves departed for what would become the independent nation of Liberia in West Africa. Over the next forty years, however, only about fifteen thousand blacks emigrated to Liberia, a number far below the natural increase in the slave population that accounted for most of the population's growth before the Civil War. :  Advocates of an immediate end to slavery were known as abolitionists. The movement's chief spokesperson was William Lloyd Garrison, who began publishing his antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, in 1831. His American Anti- Slavery Society (organized in 1833) called for the “immediate abandonment” of slavery without compensation to slaveholders; the end to the domestic slave trade; and, radically, the recognition of the equality of blacks and whites. The abolitionists, however, were divided on how best to achieve these goals. While Garrison opposed political action, moderate abolitionists formed the Liberty party and ran James G. Birney for president in 1840. The party's strength was such that it determined the outcome of the presidential election four years later. The movement split, however, in 1840 over the appropriate role of women within the organization. Even though women, such as Angelina and Sarah Grimke, were deeply committed to the cause, many members of the society felt it was inappropriate for women to speak before predominantly male audiences. More important, there was significant opposition to the inclusion of women's rights issues under the umbrella of the abolitionist program. Free blacks were the strongest supporters of the abolitionist movement and its most effective speakers. Escaped slaves like Frederick Douglass provided northerners with vivid firsthand accounts of slavery, and his book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) was just one of many slave autobiographies popular in abolitionist circles. While most blacks supported a peaceful end to slavery, some believed that only insurrection could actually bring it about. Beginnings of the women's rights movement. The various reform movements of the :  nineteenth century gave women—particularly, middle- class women—an opportunity to participate in public life, and they were mainly successful in their efforts. A prime example is the work by Dorothea Dix to create public mental-health institutions that would provide humane care for the insane. American women turned their attention to their own situation when activists split from the abolitionists. The specific event that led to the organized push for women's rights was the exclusion of a group of American women from the 1840 World Anti- Slavery Convention in London. One hundred women met in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, both abolitionist activists, to draft a statement of women's rights. The Seneca Falls “ Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” called for equality for women before the law, including changes in divorce laws that automatically gave custody of children to the husband. Equal employment opportunity and the right to vote were other important demands. The only women's rights issue that was addressed before the Civil War concerned property. Several states, but far from all, gave married women control over inherited property during the antebellum period. Women did not get the right to vote until 1920 (through the Nineteenth Amendment), and they were still limited to careers in either teaching or nursing. It took more than a century for the issues of equal employment and full legal and social equality to be seriously addressed. The utopian communities. During the period from about 1820 to 1850, a number of people thought that creating utopian communities, which would serve as models for the world, could solve society's ills better than the reform movements. All of these utopian communities failed, usually because of the imperfections in those seeking perfection. For example, British industrialist Robert Owen, who knew firsthand the evils of the factory system, established New Harmony (Indiana) in 1825 as a planned community based on a balance of agriculture and manufacturing. The nine hundred men and women who went :  there either refused to work or quarreled among themselves, and New Harmony collapsed after just a few years. French Socialist Charles Fourier's idea for small mixed- economy cooperatives known as phalanxes also caught on in the United States. Brook Farm (1841–46) in Massachusetts, perhaps the best- known utopian experiment because it attracted support from writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, combined manual labor with intellectual pursuits and became a phalanx in 1844. Utopian communities were also founded by religious groups. John Humphrey Noyes, a product of the Second Great Awakening, and disciples of the Society of Inquiry founded the Oneida Community in New York in 1848. In contrast to the celibate Shakers, Noyes's followers accepted “complex marriage,” the idea that every man and every woman in the community were married to each other. Boys and girls were trained in sexual practices when they reached puberty, but only those who accepted Jesus Christ as their savior were allowed to have sexual relations. Oneida prospered because it developed products known for their quality, first steel traps and later silver flatware. When Noyes left Oneida to avoid prosecution for adultery, the members abandoned complex marriage and formed a company to continue manufacturing tableware. It remains in business today as Oneida Community, Ltd. :  19th Century Reforms: Crash Course US History #15 :