Antebellum Culture and Reform

CHAPTER 12 Antebellum Culture and Reform

CHAPTER SUMMARY By the 1820s, many Americans were caught up in the spirit of societal reform and improvement. This was especially true of northerners, even more specifically those who had experienced the Second Great Awakening. The desire to set the world right was not surprising, given that Americans had never been shy about proclaiming their nation’s promise and greatness. The natural American landscape became the canvas for the influential Hudson River School of painters. The individual American’s relationship with that nature was celebrated by American writers, starting with James Fenimore Cooper. But the impulse to examine or change American life also was a result of fears—that Americans were losing their relationships to nature and were becoming too caught up in the narrow and spiritually stifling pursuits of labor and materialism. New philosophies and even whole experimental communities emerged as part of diverse “back- to-nature” and “communitarian” movements. With the odd exception of medical care, the result was an outpouring of social reform the like of which had not been seen before and would not be seen again—at least not for a long time. Reformers attacked society’s ills wherever they found them, producing in the process a list of evils so long that many people were convinced that a complete reorganization of society was necessary. And organization may well have been the operative word. In the mind of many reformers, it was time to build institutions, whether for students, prisoners, the poor, or the insane. But in time, reformers seemed to focus on an institution that had to be eliminated—the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Although the desire for the rights of women coursed through the reform impulse, slavery emphatically denied all that the reformers believed in—equality, opportunity, and, above all, freedom. Therefore, the abolition of slavery eventually became the supreme cause for northern reformers.

OBJECTIVES A thorough study of Chapter 12 should enable the student to understand:

1. The reasons that reform movements began to attract significant support in the United States and the overall philosophy that governed those movements 2. The contributions of the Hudson River School, Walt Whitman, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe to American cultural nationalism 3. The nature of American transcendentalism and the place of transcendentalists in American society 4. The sources, objectives, and leadership of American religious reform movements 5. American educational reform during the antebellum period and the contribution of education to the growth of American nationalism 6. The status of medical care before the Civil War, its advances, and its continued limitations 7. The role of women in American society and the rise of a feminist movement during the pre– Civil War period 8. The role of abolitionism in the antislavery movement, and the strengths and weaknesses of

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MAIN THEMES 1. How American intellectuals and artists developed a national culture committed to the liberation of the human spirit 2. How this commitment to the human spirit and how the spirit of the Great Awakening led to and reinforced the reform and communitarian movements of this period 3. How the crusade against slavery influenced feminism and how slavery became the most powerful element within this reform movement

POINTS FOR DISCUSSION 1. How did American intellectuals create a national culture committed to the liberation of the human spirit? How were their efforts related to the efforts of the social reformers? How was the Hudson River School of art influenced by romanticism? What was nationalist about it? 2. How did the spirit of romanticism influence American culture from the 1820s through the 1850s? What was transcendentalism, and why did it gain followers during this same time? 3. What role did religion and religious leaders play in the reform movements described in this chapter? 4. Why did communitarian experiments gain adherents during this period? Why did some communities, such as Brook Farm and New Harmony, fail? Why did others, especially the Mormons, succeed? Why was the status of women often a major issue in these communities? What changes to their traditional roles were attempted? 5. Why did improvements in medical care lag behind other reforms in society? How did reformers within the medical profession adapt to this situation? 6. What were Horace Mann’s goals when he thought about an American public education system? What was the condition of American public education by 1860? 7. Who were the major critics of slavery? On what grounds did they attack the institution? What means did they propose to use to end it? How did abolitionists disagree on those means? What were the consequences of those disagreements? 8. What role did women play in these efforts to reform America? What did they accomplish by way of changing society? How did their efforts to improve their own status fare? 9. Discuss how and why the American antislavery movement changed between the 1820s and approximately 1850. Analyze the reasons for and the results of the internal strains and divisions that characterized abolitionism.

INTERPRETATIVE QUESTIONS 1. Where was the “literary flowering” of America concentrated? What other regions had literary movements as well? How, and why, did these movements differ? 2. Where were most of the efforts to reform and improve education taking place? What connection might there be between these movements and the “literary flowering”? 3. Where were the major utopian communities located? What factors played a part in the choice Brinkley 5e, IM, Ch 12 | 2 of 3 of these locations? 4. Why was the South less involved in the reform movements of this era? How did this failure to be involved contribute to growing differences between the two sections?

BIBLIOGRAPHY Elizabeth Ann Bartlett, Liberty, Equality, and Sorority (1994) B. F. Boller, Jr., American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (1974) Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995) Mary Kupiec Cayton, Emerson’s Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800-1845 (1989) Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (1977) Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (1984) Laurie D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (1990) Stanley Harold, The Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861 (1995) Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989) Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (1988) Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (1976) Steven Mintz, Moralists and Moralizers: America’s Pre-Civil War Reformers (1995) Stephen L. Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (1980) Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860 (1978) Larzer Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (1981)

For Internet resources, practice questions, references to additional books and films, and more, see this book’s Online Learning Center at www.mhhe.com/unfinishednation5.

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