Utopian Communities
Communities that lived “differently” and in an “ideal” way
- Shakers:
- Abstained from alcohol, politics, and war
- Repudiated marriage and became celibate (adoption)
- Common ownership of property
- Fourierism:
- Advocated for socialism
- Members worked in collaborative groups
- Lack of leadership and disagreement led to dissolution
Minor Social Reform Movements
- Temperance: curb heavy use of alcohol and pushed for prohibition
- Preached evils of alcohol to prevent abuse
- Prison Reform: rehabilitation of prisoners through mediation and silence
- Name change to penitentiaries
- End of debtors prison
- Easing of criminal law with fewer capital offenses
- Reforms for Mentally Ill: Dorothea Dix led effort for reform
- State asylums
- Public hospitals
- Improve prisons
- Education Reform: Increased suffrage and immigration led to better education
- Higher standards and teachers colleges
- Elementary schools
- Longer school year
- Mandatory attendance
- Women hired as teachers
Womens Movement
- Women operate in a “domestic sphere”
- Do work inside the house
- Women were treated worse under the law overall
- Could not own property or a business
- Cult of Domesticity
- Women are supposed to be more moral than men
- piety, purity, submission
- Early womens movement tried to extend this to the public sphere
- Women are supposed to be more moral than men
- Seneca Falls Convention
- 1848 gathering of womans rights activists in NY
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments called for equal rights using the language of the Declaration of Independence.
Early Opposition to Slavery
- Peaceful
- Gradualism: slavery would be slowly phased out and slaveowners compensated for loss
- Colonization: Move African Americans to Liberia after the American Colonization society acquired Liberia.
- Violent
- David Walker: a free African American who opposed colonization as racist and advocated for violence to end slavery
- Seen as racist
- Why ship away the slaves, America is their home too
- Nat Turner: Slave that led to an uprising in Virginia and killed 55 whites.
- Did not lead to a mass revolt
- Turner was captured and hanged
- Southern states made slave codes stricter
- David Walker: a free African American who opposed colonization as racist and advocated for violence to end slavery
- Abolition is a radical idea
- Far from a majority movement
- Republican party is not for abolition until Lincoln, using war as a way to transform the country
- Slavery is an aristocratic institution
Growing Abolitionist Movement
- William Lloyd Garrison writes a newspaper called The Liberator
- Doesnt stop publishing until slavery ends
- Full emancipation is the only option
- American Anti Slavery Society
- Fund raised on behalf of abolition
- Hosts speakers and writers, has a printing press
- Underground railroad
- Assisted fugitive slaves with help of white people
- Harriet Tubman
- Conductor of the underground railroad and helps slaves escape to their freedom
- Grimke Sisters
- Wrote about slavery as it is, direct testimonies
- Fredrick Douglass
- Wrote the North Star
- Prominent speaker and runaway slave
- Learned illegally to read and write
- Wanted pictures taken of him
- Well dressed, determined, doesnt look like a slave
- Knew how to manipulate the media
Resistance to Abolition
- South sees abolition as a direct threat to their way of life
- Slave investment and plantations
- Tried to limit spread of abolitionist pamphlets
- Wealthy saw it as an attack from the rich north bankers
- Attack on free property ownership
- Gag Rule on slavery was implemented in Congress in 1836