Age of JacksonCultural Change and Reformers

The spectacular religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening reversed a trend toward secular rationalism in American culture, and fueled a spirit of social reform

ERA OF REFORM1790-1860

• 1794: Thomas Paine attacks hierarchical religion• Deism and Unitarianism spreads COUNTER-REACTION

is the Second Great Awakening (1800-1830’s)

Reform Movements:1. Evangelicalism2. Prison Reform3. Care of the mentally ill (Dorothy Dix)4. Temperance (Neal Dow, Maine Law - 1851)5. Women’s Movement6. Abolitionism

http://www.gprep.org/~sjochs/reform-revival.jpg

Charles G. Finney

http://www.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/images/CharlesGrandisonFinney.html

Revivalism and Class

Revivals are:

• More common on frontier, South and West

• Less common among elites

• Creates more democratic churches, i.e. Methodists, Baptists, Adventists, etc.

• “Canary” for societal attitudes toward slavery

Churches Split Parties Split Union Splits

• The spirit of optimism and reform affected nearly all areas of American life and culture, including education, the role of women and the family, and literature and the arts.

Free Schools• Spread of Democracy Public

Education

• Education Stability

• CATALYST: Universal white male suffrage

• Basic public schools spread 1825-1850

• Horace Mann reforms/upgrades schools

• Webster’s “lessons” & McGuffey “readers”

• State supported colleges spread, esp.UVA

NOTE: schools still rare in West and esp. for free African-Americans, slaves prohibited.

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Free SchoolsNOTE: Schools still rare in West and esp. for free

African-Americans, slaves prohibited.

Women also struggle for equality in Education.

NOTABLE EXCEPTIONS:• Emma Willard est. Troy Female Seminary• Oberlin College• Mary Lyon founds Mount Holyoke Seminary

Democratic Culture

• Artists’ audience was broad citizenry of democracy, not refined elite

• Romanticism in America appealed to feelings and intuitions of ordinary Americans

Democratic Culture

• Popular literature sensationalized– Genres included Gothic horror and romantic

fiction– Much popular literature written by and for

women – Melodrama dominated popular theater

• By 1830s, subject of paintings switched from great events and people to scenes from everyday life

Literature• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet

– Song of Hiawatha– The Courtship of Miles Standish

• James Russell Lowell, poet– Bigelow Papers, re. Mexican War

• Oliver Wendell Holmes, writer• Louisa May Alcott - Little Women• Emily Dickinson, poet• Edgar Allen Poe, author, “The Raven”• William Gilmore Simms, Southern writer• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter• Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Democratic Culture

• Architectural style reflected the tenets of ancient Greek democracy

• Purpose of art in democratic society was to encourage virtue and proper sentiment– Landscape painters believed representations

of untamed nature would elevate popular taste and convey moral truth

• Only a few truly avant-garde, romantic artists, like Edgar Allan Poe

“The Hudson River School, first identified at the end of its heyday, was a fraternity of artists who worked principally in New York City from about 1840 to 1875. Together, they raised landscape painting to preeminent status in America in the mid-nineteenth century. Originally attracted by the grandeur of natural scenery along the Hudson River and in New England, the painters interpreted both the wilderness and the pastoral face of a growing and changing nation.”

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Hudson_River/gifford_more.htm

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Arts and Sciences• Asa Gray, botanist• James Audubon, naturalist• Thomas Jefferson, philosophy and architecture• Gilbert Stuart, painter• Charles Wilson Peale, painter (from MD)• John Trumbull, painter• Hudson River School of painting• Stephen C. Foster, American folk music• Washington Irving, writer• James Fenimore Cooper, writer• William Cullen Bryant, poet

Transcendentalists (1830’s)

TRUTH IS NOT OBJECTIVE ALONE –DISCOVERED BY “INNER LIGHT”

Individualism, Self-reliance, Self-Discipline

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist

• Henry David Thoreau– Walden– Civil Disobedience

• Walt Whitman– Leaves of Grass

Radical Ideas and Experiments: Utopian Communities

• Utopian socialism – Inspired by Robert Owen, Charles Fourier– New Harmony, Indiana—Owenite– Fourierite phalanxes

• Religious utopianism– Shakers– Oneida Community

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UTOPIAS

• New Harmony, Indiana –fails

• Brook Farm, MA – transcendentalists – destroyed by fire

• Oneida Community, NY – eugenics, lasts 30 years – famous for metalwork

• Shakers, Mother Ann Lee, 1770’s – peak in 1840’s, slow decline after

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The Shakers

What is evidence of

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http://www.pbs.org/americanprophet/joseph-smith.html

JOSEPH SMITH

Affected by the great religious excitement taking place around his home in Manchester, New York, in 1820, fourteen-year-old Joseph was determined to know which of the many religions he should join. …Early one morning in the spring of 1820, Joseph went to a secluded woods …, while praying Joseph was visited by two "personages" who identified themselves as God the Father and Jesus Christ. He was told not to join any of the churches.

In 1823, Joseph Smith said he was visited by an angel named Moroni, who told him of an ancient record containing God's dealings with the former inhabitants of the American continent. In 1827, Joseph retrieved this record, inscribed on thin golden plates, and shortly afterward began translating its words by the "gift of God."3 The resulting manuscript, the Book of Mormon, was published in March 1830. Joseph was persecuted much of his adult life and was killed along with his brother Hyrum by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, on June 27, 1844.

Joseph Smith and the Mormons

• All American religion, created in US• Mormons move from Ohio to Missouri & Illinois.• Communitarian sect not popular• Mormon militia arouses fear• Polygamy unpopular• 1844 Mormons flee Illinois after mobs murder Smith • Brigham Young leads Mormons west to Utah, 1846-

1847, est. frontier cooperative theocracy• Conflict with federal govt. over polygamy, threatens

fighting, over polygamy delays statehood to 1896

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J H Noyes and the Oneida Community