What social conditions were present to promote reform?
"In the history of the world," Ralph Waldo Emerson alleged in 1841, "the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour."[1] Not much a joiner of causes himself, Emerson had in mind a remarkable flowering of reform movements from roughly 1815 until the Civil War that were striking to observers at the fourth dimension and to historians ever since for their free energy, variety, and occasional strangeness.
Even the part of a "reformer" that emerged before the Ceremonious State of war was relatively new. With some exceptions, earlier American exercise-gooders were mostly people like the Puritan minister Cotton fiber Mather or Ben Franklin, for whom reform was part of a wider range of occupations and activities. By the 1830s there were men and women like Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who devoted virtually of their adult lives to reform causes.
Three of these movements remain especially well known. The first in time, as well every bit the largest nineteenth-century reform movement, was a diverse assail on alcoholic beverages arising shortly after 1800. Information technology is commonly called the temperance motility, although by the 1830s, the goal usually was not moderation in drinking, but rather total abstinence from alcohol. By the 1840s a portion of the move advocated a legal ban on alcoholic beverages.
The second of this trio of best-known antebellum reforms was a new, more radical anti-slavery movement that emerged by the early 1830s. Its plan for ending slavery stood in stark dissimilarity to the "colonizationist" position earlier advocated by some prominent Americans and embodied in the American Colonization Society (1816–1964). Colonizationists maintained that the right way to stop slavery was gradually, either voluntarily by masters or with some compensation, and by sending freed African Americans to the ACS'southward colony in Africa, Liberia. Some colonizationists (including the few African American ones) genuinely disliked slavery and believed black people had no future in the The states; others were more concerned about eliminating a growing free black population in the South and N. Although relatively modest in numbers, post-1830 abolitionists included African Americans and whites, and women and men, and were mostly less distinguished than the leaders of the ACS. They rejected every attribute of colonization. For them slavery had to be ended immediately, not gradually, without compensation to masters and with freed slaves remaining in the United States. Where colonizationists placated slaveholders (and included them in their ranks), abolitionists condemned them as sinners. This position had little entreatment outside the free states, and even at that place abolitionists faced enormous hostility, peculiarly in the 1830s, but their passionate rhetoric and deeds helped shape political debates as the nation headed toward secession and ceremonious state of war.
The 3rd of the all-time-remembered antebellum reforms was a women's rights motion, its arrival signaled by a stirring "Declaration of Sentiments" issued in 1848 by a convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Modeled after the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments condemned men for the oppression of women and put forwards a broad platform for women's emancipation. The latter'due south nigh controversial plank—and the only one not passed unanimously—chosen for full voting rights for women. A high proportion of those present at Seneca Falls were abolitionists. In that sense, the women's rights motion owed much to the anti-slavery movement; simply information technology also foreshadowed what would become, after the Civil State of war, a powerful and eventually successful campaign for women'southward suffrage.
To focus only upon the antebellum reform movements that concenter the most attention in textbooks, however, is to slight the explosion of reform movements Emerson had in heed. From a present-solar day perspective, some of these seem more than like fads than reforms, but that tin can exist misleading. Consider the example of Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian government minister and temperance lecturer, who, past 1832, had become convinced that bad diets, alcohol, and poor hygiene threatened the body and spirit. A terrible cholera epidemic in 1832 gave him an audience for his belief that a plain vegetarian diet without stimulating spices, java, or tea was the key to skillful health and ensured immunity from destructive impulses (including sexual ones). Graham'south regimen—memorialized in a cracker—promised individuals that they could perfect themselves physically. For him, the focus of reform was not on the condition of others, such as slaves and drunkards, simply on one'southward self.
Amid those who differed with Graham in that respect were men and women who dealt with issues that remain troublesome today—poverty, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, and globe peace, for example. Those reformers often addressed the bug in means radically dissimilar from 20-showtime-century approaches. In the proper name of reform, for instance, antebellum states built new-style prisons and asylums. The initial goal was not to isolate criminals and the insane from society, although they certainly did that, but to remake them into model citizens. In the twentieth century, after generations attacked these institutions, again in the proper name of reform.
As one might wait from the diversity of antebellum reforms, they had unlike points of origin and different trajectories, but in that location were some mutual patterns. They nigh ofttimes looked less like a unified motility than a shifting drove of organizations with occasional schisms and different constituencies and agendas. The majority of reforms also rested on a base of operations of "voluntary associations," local groups—sometimes loosely affiliated with a national organization—defended to a mutual purpose. European observers, including the most famous of them all, Alexis de Tocqueville, noted with some bemusement an American penchant for joining voluntary associations. These associations could serve a number of different purposes, from religious to purely social, or annihilation in between. They were, still, constructive tools for sustaining reform movements on the local level.
There was also a degree of overlapping membership within antebellum reform. Enough existed that a former abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, looking dorsum after the Civil War, could speak fondly of a "Sisterhood of Reforms" interconnected by common supporters and shared beliefs. (Abolitionists, for instance, tended to endorse temperance, although temperance—one of the few reforms strong in the South—did not necessarily marking i as an abolitionist.) Finally, reform movements were all subject to economic and political fluctuations. A devastating financial panic and subsequent depression kickoff in 1837, for instance, fabricated funding scarce for reform organizations generally. And territorial expansion in the 1840s, which triggered controversies over slavery, directly affected abolition and less direct afflicted other movements, including women's rights and temperance.
Explaining why reform movements emerged in antebellum America is no simple task. Their proliferation was the production of a convergence of multiple changes in American life, none of which necessarily caused the explosion of reforms, simply all of which, taken together, enabled and shaped it. At the virtually basic level, reform movements require people who believe that human attempt tin—and should—change things. That has non ever been the case. In their optimism virtually alter, antebellum reformers were heirs of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century shifts in secular and religious idea. On the secular side was a new faith in human reason and its power to remake the world, a faith manifested in the American and French revolutions. Antebellum reform as well drew heavily on an early nineteenth-century wave of Protestant revivalism, frequently called the 2d Groovy Awakening. In complicated means this grade of evangelical Christianity encouraged some believers (non all) to engage in reform movements. That is not to say all reformers were evangelicals—not-evangelical sects similar the Quakers and Unitarians were well represented amidst their numbers and southern evangelicals were markedly unenthusiastic almost anti-slavery and women'southward rights. Religion, all the same, gave antebellum reform its moral urgency, just as secular languages of reason and rights likewise molded it.
Economic, demographic, and technological changes likewise inspired and shaped antebellum reform. Although America remained predominately a rural and small-town nation into the twentieth century, its cities were growing later on 1820. Urban areas provided some of the bug reformers addressed, but they and pocket-sized towns also had the critical mass of people and resource reform organizations required. Urban growth and an expanding economy, moreover, produced a new centre class with a level of financial comfort and leisure time necessary to engage in reform. Among its members were educated women denied much of a public voice except in religious and reform activities. They were the backbone of many causes. Finally, by the 1830s improvements in printing applied science and in transportation—notably canals, steamboats, and eventually railroads—made it far less expensive for reformers and their messages to circulate over wider distances. Especially striking, in fact, is how reformers used an boggling range of oral, print, and visual media to make their case to the public—amongst them, speeches, newspapers, plays, poetry, novels, children's literature, songs, demonstrations, and cartoons. Antebellum reform propaganda aimed broadly at public opinion, non but elites, and used new media in ways that wait modern.
The diversity of antebellum reformers' tactics—similar the diversity of their causes—masks a choice they all faced: If I desire to change the world, where do I beginning? A mutual response would have been "with 'moral suasion,'" a term that would be revived in the twentieth century to refer to ways of influencing economic behavior. Before the Civil War, all the same, it meant persuading people to do the correct matter. Behind information technology was something of a religious conversion model of reform: change begins, and proceeds, ane person at a time. Another notion of how to implement reform relied on compulsion, non just persuasion—legislation, social pressure, or incarceration in corrective institutions, for case. In 1840, abolitionists split over several issues, amongst them whether to engage in partisan politics or stick to moral suasion. At virtually the aforementioned time some temperance advocates similarly moved from encouraging abstinence from alcohol to using land legislators to ban it.
A 3rd answer to "Where to begin?" was a minority one: create a model customs, a concrete example of how society ought to exist organized, and hope the rest of the world follows. Between the Revolution and the Civil War more than than a hundred of these small utopian communities materialized, some religious in origin, some based on secular ideologies. Most were ephemeral, only all represented yet another mode of imagining how to achieve social change and what the world would look like afterward it occurred. The 4th answer was likewise a minority one and the polar opposite of moral suasion. It was "with violence confronting evil." Its almost famous proponent was the abolitionist John Brown. The accident he struck against slavery in a raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859, was a fateful step toward the Civil War. Information technology was besides securely disturbing for many reformers considering it posed a question that would haunt subsequent generations: "Is it right to employ immoral means in a only cause?"
From the perspective of the longer history of reform in America, there were continuities, shifts, and discontinuities later the Civil War. The temperance movement gained strength in the 2nd half of the nineteenth century and accomplished its greatest victory in 1920 with the Eighteenth Subpoena to the Constitution prohibiting the "industry, auction, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" within the United States. The women's rights move came to focus more sharply—simply not exclusively—on voting rights after the Fourteenth Subpoena to the Constitution (1868) guaranteed suffrage for male citizens, merely not for women. That campaign culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1920), long advocated past reformers with roots in the antebellum years like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Many abolitionists retired from the field after the Ceremonious War ended slavery, while others—notably Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips—remained faithful to a broad vision of human being rights and economic opportunity that included women, African Americans, and immigrants. Later the war, nonetheless, new approaches to achieving social modify emerged. At ane stop of the spectrum there arrived from Europe a variety of anarchism advocating revolutionary violence. Toward the other end was the late nineteenth-century notion, associated with Progressivism, that professional expertise, science, and social scientific discipline could pb to positive social change. Since the early nineteenth century, ways of thinking about how to achieve reform have evolved as dynamically as accept means of thinking nearly what needs to be reformed.
Beyond their successes and failures, insights and blind spots, antebellum reform movements put on the tabular array a question of indelible relevance: In a political system similar ours, with many layers and much inertia, what is the role of social movements that try to push button the land one fashion or another? Are they safety valves that release discontent without necessarily addressing its root causes? Do they mark the outer limits of what is believable within the political system? Do they force into the open problems mainstream politicians prefer to ignore? Are they social clubs for cranks and fanatics, as critics merits? Are they the nation'southward censor and an essential part of American democracy? The men and women Emerson had in listen in 1841 would take answered "aye" to the latter.
[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Human the Reformer," January 25, 1841, in The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion (Boston: Weeks, Hashemite kingdom of jordan, and Co., 1841) one:523.
Ronald M. Walters , professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of The Antislavery Entreatment: American Abolitionism later on 1830 (1976) and American Reformers, 1815–1860 (rev. ed., 1997).
Source: https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/first-age-reform/essays/first-age-reform
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