Abolitionists Dorothea Dix and the Treatment of the Mentally

CK_4_TH_HG_P087_242.QXD 10/6/05 9:03 AM Page 231 expansion of women’s rights. Other areas that attracted reformers were the temperance movement, prison reform, and the crusade to provide adequate care and educational opportunities for those with physical disabilities such as blindness. Abolitionists Teaching Idea While political events involving slavery were unfolding in Washington, D.C., Have students do research on the and in the territories during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the antislavery movement abolitionist movement and on promi- was becoming more active and more vocal. There had been calls for the abolition of nent abolitionists. Then have students slavery as soon as there had been a United States. The first formal abolitionist organ- work in pairs to create posters ization was formed in 1787 when a group of free African Americans met in announcing an abolitionist meeting. Philadelphia and founded the Free African Society to work to end slavery. They should list the day, time, date, name of the speaker, and give the Although the U.S. Constitution had ended the foreign slave trade in 1808, the speaker’s talk a title. The title should inter- and intrastate slave trade continued and by the 1830s, slavery had become reflect the person’s viewpoint and entrenched in the southern states. As slavery grew, ordinary people, both white experience. For example, a speech by and black (including many former slaves), actively opposed it, giving voice to Sojourner Truth might be titled “Doing what became known as the abolitionist movement. The goal of the movement was God’s Work by Speaking Out Against to abolish, or get rid of, slavery. Slavery,” and one by Frederick Among the most notable abolitionists was Frederick Douglass, an escaped Douglass might be “Freedom Now!” slave, who wrote an autobiography describing his life as a slave in Maryland and Students should also write a sen- later published the abolitionist newspaper North Star. A powerful speaker, tence or two describing what the Douglass was joined on the abolitionists’ lecture circuit by others, including speaker will talk about. Sojourner Truth, a former slave, and Harriet Tubman, a former slave and conduc- tor on the Underground Railroad. Influential white abolitionists included William Lloyd Garrison, who published The Liberator, another abolitionist newspaper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold over 300,000 copies in its first year. The novel describes the life of the gentle slave Tom who eventually dies at the hands of his brutal overseer. Being an abolitionist, especially an outspoken activist, was dangerous. Those who supported slavery sometimes used violence to try to silence critics. They burned the homes and offices of abolitionists, ran abolitionists out of town, and even murdered some. Opposition to abolitionism came not only from white south- erners, but also from some working-class northerners, who feared freed African Americans would work for lower wages and put white workers out of a job. Dorothea Dix and the Treatment of the Mentally Ill At the time that Dorothea Dix began her crusade to help people with mental illness, they were usually housed in jails, prisons, and poorhouses. In 1821, Dix, a teacher, founded her own school in Boston. In the next decade, she published a number of books dealing with education and religious themes. In 1841, she was asked to teach Sunday school in a jail in Cambridge. There she saw firsthand the way those with mental illness were treated. The revelation motivated Dix to visit jails and prisons around Massachusetts, and she found them no better than the one in Cambridge. Those with mental illness were confined in cells with prison- ers, without proper food, clothing, and sanitary facilities. They were sometimes chained and beaten. Dix reported to the Massachusetts legislature on her History and Geography: American 231.

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