Chapter 13

Question 1

The reform efforts of the antebellum years, including abolitionism, aimed to perfect the national destiny and redeem the souls of individual Americans. A great deal of optimism, fueled by evangelical Protestantism revivalism, underwrote the moral crusades of the first half of the nineteenth century

Question 2

Others dreamed of a
more equal society and established their own idealistic communities. Still others, who viewed slavery as the most serious flaw in American life, labored to end the institution. Women’s rights, temperance, health
reforms, and a host of other efforts also came to the forefront during the heyday of reform in the 1830s and 1840s.

Question 3

Evangelical Protestantism pervaded American culture in the antebellum era and fueled a belief in the possibility of changing society for the better. Leaders of the Second Great Awakening like Charles G. Finney urged listeners to take charge of their own salvation. This religious message dovetailed with the new economic possibilities created by the market and Industrial Revolution, making the Protestantism of the Second Great Awakening, with its emphasis on individual spiritual success, a reflection of the individualistic, capitalist spirit of the age.

Question 4

THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING - The reform efforts of the antebellum era sprang from the Protestant revival fervor that found expression in what historians refer to as the Second Great Awakening. (The First Great Awakening of evangelical Protestantism had taken place in the 1730s and 1740s.) The Second Great Awakening emphasized an emotional religious style in which sinners grappled with their unworthy nature before concluding that they were born again, that is, turning away from their sinful past and devoting themselves to living a
righteous, Christ- centered life.

Question 5

The burst of religious enthusiasm that began in Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s and early 1800s
among Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians owed much to the uniqueness of the early decades of the republic. These years saw swift population growth, broad western expansion, and the rise of participatory
democracy. These political and social changes made many people anxious, and the more egalitarian,
emotional, and individualistic religious practices of the Second Great Awakening provided relief and
comfort for Americans experiencing rapid change. The awakening soon spread to the East, where it had a profound impact on Congregationalists and Presbyterians. The thousands swept up in the movement believed in the possibility of creating a much better world. Many adopted millennialism, the fervent belief that the Kingdom of God would be established on earth and that God would reign on earth for a thousand years, characterized by harmony and Christian morality. Those drawn to the message of the Second Great Awakening yearned for stability, decency, and goodness in the new and turbulent American republic.

Question 6

Church membership
doubled in the years between 1800 and 1835.

Question 7

TRANSCENDENTALISM
Beginning in the 1820s, a new intellectual movement known as transcendentalism began to grow in the
Northeast. In this context, to transcend means to go beyond the ordinary sensory world to grasp personal insights and gain appreciation of a deeper reality, and transcendentalists believed that all people could attain an understanding of the world that surpassed rational, sensory experience.

Question 8

European romanticism, a movement in literature and art that stressed emotion over
cold, calculating reason, also influenced transcendentalists in the United States, especially the transcendentalists’ celebration of the uniqueness of individual feelings.

Question 9

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Question 10

Henry David Thoreau, disgust over the Mexican-American War and slavery. In 1849, he published his lecture “Civil Disobedience” and urged readers to refuse to support a government that was immoral.

Question 11

Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (b) articulated his emphasis on the importance of nature as a gateway to greater individuality.

Question 12

Walt Whitman also added to the transcendentalist movement, most notably with his 1855 publication of twelve poems, entitled Leaves of Grass, which celebrated the subjective experience of the individual.

Question 13

Reformers who engaged in communal experiments aimed to recast economic and social relationships by introducing innovations designed to create a more stable and equitable society. Their ideas found many expressions, from early socialist experiments (such as by the Fourierists and the Owenites) to the dreams of the New England intellectual elite (such as Brook Farm). The Second Great Awakening also prompted many religious utopias, like those of the Rappites and Shakers. By any measure, the Mormons emerged as the most successful of these.

Question 14

RELIGIOUS UTOPIAN SOCIETIES - members wanted to create a new social order, not
reform the old.

Question 15

The Shakers provide another example of a community established with a religious mission. The Shakers
started in England as an outgrowth of the Quaker religion in the middle of the eighteenth century. Ann
Lee, a leader of the group in England, emigrated to New York in the 1770s, having experienced a profound
religious awakening that convinced her that she was “mother in Christ.” She taught that God was both male and female; Jesus embodied the male side, while Mother Ann (as she came to be known by her followers) represented the female side. To Shakers in both England and the United States, Mother Ann represented the completion of divine revelation and the beginning of the millennium of heaven on earth.
In practice, men and women in Shaker communities were held as equals—a radical departure at the time—and women often outnumbered men. Equality extended to the possession of material goods as well; no one could hold private property. Shaker communities aimed for self-sufficiency, raising food and making all that was necessary, including furniture that emphasized excellent workmanship as a substitute for worldly pleasure.

Question 16

prohibition of sexual intercourse, which they held as an example of a lesser spiritual life and a source of conflict between women and men.

Question 17

Another religious utopian experiment, the Oneida Community, began with the teachings of John Humphrey Noyes, a Vermonter who had graduated from Dartmouth, Andover Theological Seminary, and Yale. The Second Great Awakening exerted a powerful effect on him, and he came to believe in perfectionism, the idea that it is possible to be perfect and free of sin. Noyes claimed to have achieved this state of perfection in 1834.

Question 18

Putney, Vermont - Noyes home town. He began to advocate for what he called a “complex marriage”

Question 19

complex marriage scandalized the townspeople in Putney, so Noyes and his followers removed to Oneida, New York.

Question 20

Joseph Smith - . In 1823, Smith claimed to have to been visited by the angel Moroni, who told him the location of a trove of golden plates or tablets. During the late 1820s, Smith translated the writing on the golden plates, and in 1830, he published his finding as The Book of Mormon.

Question 21

Church of Christ, the progenitor of the Church of Latter-Day Saints popularly known as Mormons.

Question 22

They moved to Missouri due to disaster everywhere he went. then Nauvoo Illinois.

Question 23

Male church leaders to practice polygamy.

Question 24

Smith was arrested for treason (for destroying the printing press of a newspaper that criticized Mormonism), and while he was in prison, an anti-Mormon mob stormed into his cell and killed him. Brigham Young then assumed leadership of the group, which he led to a permanent home in what is now Salt Lake City, Utah.

Question 25

SECULAR UTOPIAN SOCIETIES - Not all utopian communities were prompted by the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening; some were outgrowths of the intellectual ideas of the time, such as romanticism with its emphasis on the importance of individualism over conformity. One of these, Brook Farm, took shape in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in the 1840s. It was founded by George Ripley, a transcendentalist from Massachusetts. In
the summer of 1841, this utopian community gained support from Boston-area thinkers and writers, an intellectual group that included many important transcendentalists. Brook Farm is best characterized as a community of intensely individualistic personalities who combined manual labor, such as the growing and harvesting food, with intellectual pursuits.

Question 26

Reformers targeted vices that corrupted the human body and society: the individual and the national soul. For many, alcohol appeared to be the most destructive and widespread. Indeed, in the years before the Civil War, the United States appeared to be a republic of drunkenness to many. To combat this national substance abuse problem, reformers created a host of temperance organizations that first targeted the middle and upper classes, and then the working classes.

Question 27

According to many antebellum reformers, intemperance (drunkenness) stood as the most troubling problem in the United States, one that eroded morality, Christianity, and played a starring role in corrupting American democracy.

Question 28

They called not for the eradication of drinking but for a more restrained and genteel style of imbibing.

Question 29

Thereafter, most temperance societies advocated total abstinence; no longer would beer and wine be tolerated. Such total abstinence from alcohol is known as teetotalism.

Question 30

REFORMS FOR THE BODY AND THE MIND
Beyond temperance, other reformers looked to ways to maintain and improve health in a rapidly changing world. Without professional medical organizations or standards, health reform went in many different directions; although the American Medical Association was formed in 1847, it did not have much power to oversee medical practices. Too often, quack doctors prescribed regimens and medicines that did far more harm that good.
Sylvester Graham stands out as a leading light among the health reformers in the antebellum years. A Presbyterian minister, Graham began his career as a reformer, lecturing against the evils of strong drink.
He combined an interest in temperance with vegetarianism and sexuality into what he called a “Science of Human Life,” calling for a regimented diet of more vegetables, fruits, and grain, and no alcohol, meat, or spices.

Question 31

Many leading American statesmen, including slaveholders, favored colonization, relocating American blacks to Africa, which abolitionists scorned. Slave rebellions sought the end of the institution through its violent overthrow, a tactic that horrified many in the North and the South. Abolitionists, especially those who followed William Lloyd Garrison, provoked equally strong reactions by envisioning a new United States without slavery, where blacks and whites stood on equal footing. Opponents saw abolition as the worst possible reform, a threat to all order and decency. Slaveholders, in particular, saw slavery as a positive aspect of American society, one that reformed the lives of slaves by exposing them to civilization and religion.

Question 32

“REFORMS” TO SLAVERY
An early and popular “reform” to slavery was colonization, or a movement advocating the displacement
of African Americans out of the country, usually to Africa. In 1816, the Society for the Colonization of Free
People of Color of America (also called the American Colonization Society or ACS) was founded with this goal. Leading statesmen including Thomas Jefferson endorsed the idea of colonization.
Members of the ACS did not believe that blacks and whites could live as equals, so they targeted the roughly 200,000 free blacks in the United States for relocation to Africa. For several years after the ACS’s founding, they raised money and pushed Congress for funds. In 1819, they succeeded in getting $100,000 from the federal government to further the colonization project. The ACS played a major role in the creation of the colony of Liberia, on the west coast of Africa. The country’s capital, Monrovia, was named in honor of President James Monroe. The ACS stands as an example of how white reformers, especially men of property and standing, addressed the issue of slavery. Their efforts stand in stark contrast with other reformers’ efforts to deal with slavery in the United States.

Question 33

Nat Turner was inspired by the evangelical
Protestant fervor sweeping the republic. He preached to fellow slaves in Southampton County, gaining a reputation among them as a prophet. He organized them for rebellion, awaiting a sign to begin, until an eclipse in August signaled that the appointed time had come.

Question 34

Turner and as many as seventy other slaves killed their masters and their masters’ families, murdering a total of around sixty-five people. Turner eluded capture until late October, when he was tried, hanged, and then beheaded and quartered. Virginia put to death fifty-six other slaves whom they believed to have taken part in the rebellion. White vigilantes killed two hundred more as panic swept through Virginia and the rest of the South.

Question 35

Abolitionists took a far more radical approach to the issue of the slavery by using moral arguments to advocate its immediate elimination.

Question 36

William Lloyd Garrison - I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to
think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; —but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.

Question 37

Garrison also preached immediatism: the moral demand to take immediate action to end slavery.

Question 38

Frederick Douglass
Many escaped slaves joined the abolitionist movement, including Frederick Douglass. Douglass was born in Maryland in 1818, escaping to New York in 1838. He later moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, with
his wife. Douglass’s commanding presence and powerful speaking skills electrified his listeners when he began to provide public lectures on slavery. He came to the attention of Garrison and others, who encouraged him to publish his story. In 1845, Douglass published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written by Himself, in which he told about his life of slavery in Maryland. He identified by name the whites who had brutalized him, and for that reason, along with the mere act of
publishing his story, Douglass had to flee the United States to avoid being murdered.

Question 39

The spirit of religious awakening and reform in the antebellum era impacted women lives by allowing them to think about their lives and their society in new and empowering ways. Of all the various antebellum reforms, however, abolition played a significant role in generating the early feminist movement in the United States.

Question 40

THE GRIMKÉ SISTERS
Two leading abolitionist women, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, played major roles in combining the fight to end slavery with the struggle to achieve female equality. The sisters had been born into a prosperous
slaveholding family in South Carolina. Both were caught up in the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening, and they moved to the North and converted to Quakerism.

Question 41

THE DECLARATION OF RIGHTS AND SENTIMENTS - In 1848, about three hundred male and female feminists, many of them veterans of the abolition campaign, gathered at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York for a conference on women’s rights that was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It was the first of what became annual meetings that have continued to the present day. Attendees agreed to a “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” based on the Declaration of Independence; it declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” “The history of mankind,” the document continued, “is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”

Question 42

1. Which of the following is not a characteristic of the Second Great Awakening?
   A. greater emphasis on nature
   B. greater emphasis on religious education of
   children
   C. greater church attendance
   D. belief in the possibility of a better world

Answer 42

A. greater emphasis on nature

Question 43

2. Transcendentalists were most concerned with ________.
   A. the afterlife
   B. predestination
   C. the individual
   D. democracy

Answer 43

C. the individual

Question 44

3. What do the Second Great Awakening and
   transcendentalism have in common?

Answer 44

They both emphasize the power of the individual over that of the majority. Evangelists of the Second Great Awakening preached the power of personal spirituality, whereas transcendentalists were more concerned with the individual soul.

Question 45

4. Which religious community focused on the power of patriarchy?
   A. Shakers
   B. Mormons
   C. Owenites
   D. Rappites

Answer 45

B. Mormons

Question 46

5. Which community or movement is associated with transcendentalism?
   A. the Oneida Community
   B. the Ephrata Cloister
   C. Brook Farm
   D. Fourierism

Answer 46

C. Brook Farm

Question 47

6. How were the reform communities of the antebellum era treated by the general population?

Answer 47

Many reform communities were shunned, especially those that emphasized different forms of marriage (like the Oneida Community) or a departure from mainstream Protestantism.

Question 48

7. The first temperance laws were enacted by ________.
   A. state governments
   B. local governments
   C. the federal government
   D. temperance organizations

Answer 48

B. local governments

Question 49

8. Sylvester Graham’s reformers targeted ________.
   A. the human body
   B. nutrition
   C. sexuality
   D. all of the above

Answer 49

D. all of the above

Question 50

9. Whom did temperance reformers target?

Answer 50

At first, temperance reformers, who were predominantly led by Presbyterian ministers,
targeted the middle and upper classes. When the movement veered toward teetotalism instead of temperance, the movement lost momentum. However, it was reborn with a focus on the working class in the 1840s.

Question 51

10. In the context of the antebellum era, what does colonization refer to?
    A. Great Britain’s colonization of North
    America
    B. the relocation of African Americans to
    Africa
    C. American colonization of the Caribbean
    D. American colonization of Africa

Answer 51

B. the relocation of African Americans to
Africa

Question 52

11. Which of the following did William Lloyd Garrison not employ in his abolitionist efforts?
    A. moral suasion
    B. immediatism
    C. political involvement
    D. pamphleteering

Answer 52

C. political involvement

Question 53

12. Why did William Lloyd Garrison’s endorsement of the Grimké sisters divide the
    abolitionist movement?
    A. They advocated equal rights for women.
    B. They supported colonization.
    C. They attended the Seneca Falls Convention.
    D. They lectured to co-ed audiences.

Answer 53

D. They lectured to co-ed audiences.

Question 54

13. Which female reformer focused on women’s roles as the educators of children?
    A. Lydia Maria Child
    B. Sarah Grimké
    C. Catherine Beecher
    D. Susan B. Anthony

Answer 54

C. Catherine Beecher

Question 55

14. How did the abolitionist movement impact the women’s movement?

Answer 55

helped women see the discrimination they encountered in their own lives, and they organized to end this discrimination.