The Age of Reforms

1. The Age of Reforms

2. Various Attempts at Reformin the 1840s • - Utopian Projects • - New Religions • - Educational Reforms • - Temperance Movement • - Feminist Movement • - Abolitionism

3. Emerson on the readers of The Dial: • A great variety of dialect and costume was noticed; a great deal of confusion, eccentricity and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and enthusiasm. If the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians and Philosophers,--all came successively to the top, and seized their moment, if not their hour, wherein to chide, or pray, or preach, or protest. (W, 10:374)

4. Utopian Projects– Brook Farm • Founded by the transcendentalist George Ripley, 1841/7, Roxbury, Mass., • Stress on integration of mental and physical labor; social harmony; communal living; positive value of leisure;

5. Utopian Projects – Oneida Community • John Humphrey Noyes, 1848, communal, rejecting traditional notions of marriage & family, NY, near Canadian border. • In 1847, the group agreed "that the Kingdom of God had come." . The community could believe this because of two of Noyes' teachings: one being that Christ's second coming took place in A.D. 70, and the other being that they could bring in the millennial kingdom themselves.

6. Oneida Community • Forty-five of his followers from Putney followed Noyes to Oneida and by the end of 1848, their membership grew to eighty-seven. The economic base of the Oneida Community was agricultural and industrial. They had approximately forty acres of partially cleared land on which to farm and an Indian sawmill in which to produce lumber. • http://www.nyhistory.com/central/oneida.htm • http://libwww.syr.edu/digital/images/o/OneidaCommunityPhotos/

7. The Principal Doctrines & Practices at Oneida • Principles: Complex marriage; male continence; ascending fellowship; mutual criticism • Each month they changed their job assignments and their rooms. • the regular love-making of all partners, was pre-scheduled. There were special rooms used for this purpose, but each person returned to their own bedrooms for the night. • The community was very interested in learning and self- and group-improvements. The library held the subscriptions of over 100 journals and newspapers and many books. • http://www.uwec.edu/Geography/Ivogeler/w188/utopian/oneida2.htm

8. Oneida Community • Each evening the whole community met in the Big Hall for practical and religious lectures, entertainment (hence the stage), and general discussions about the various enterprises of the community. On Sundays, this hall was also used to entertain outsiders (sometimes, over 1,000 on one Sunday) who were curious about the community. All meals were taken in the dinning room. • Common clothing was worn by women and men: notice women wore pants.

9. New Religions - The Mormons • Founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 • Based on the Book of Mormon • Initially Polygamous • Under Brigham Young, 12,000 believers migrated to Utah where they founded the present day Salt Lake City, the center of their religion. • http://www.hancockshakervillage.org/brdsidlg.html

10. New Religions: The Mormons • In the spring of 1820, a 14-year-old boy named Joseph Smith went into a grove of trees near his home in Palmyra, New York, and prayed to learn which church he should join. In answer to his prayer, God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, appeared to him, just as heavenly beings had appeared to prophets like Moses and Paul in biblical times. Joseph learned that the Church originally organized by Jesus Christ was no longer on the earth. Joseph Smith was chosen by God to restore the Church of Jesus Christ to the earth. During the next 10 years, Joseph was visited by other heavenly messengers, translated the Book of Mormon, and received authority to organize the Church. The Church was organized in Fayette, New York, on 6 April 1830, under the leadership of Joseph Smith. It has grown to an organization with members and congregations throughout the world. • http://www.mormon.org/welcome/0,6929,403-1,00.html

11. The Mormons • The Mormons - Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, http://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,104-1-3-1,00.html • Central text: The Book of Mormon • The book is a volume of holy scripture comparable to the Bible. It is a record of God’s dealings with the ancient inhabitants of the Americas and contains, as does the Bible, the fulness of the everlasting gospel. • The book was written by many ancient prophets by the spirit of prophecy and revelation. Their words, written on gold plates, were quoted and abridged by a prophet-historian named Mormon. The record gives an account of two great civilizations. One came from Jerusalem in 600 B.C., and afterward separated into two nations, known as the Nephites and the Lamanites. The other came much earlier when the Lord confounded the tongues at the Tower of Babel. This group is known as the Jaredites. After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians. • The crowning event recorded in the Book of Mormon is the personal ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ among the Nephites soon after his resurrection. It puts forth the doctrines of the gospel, outlines the plan of salvation, and tells men what they must do to gain peace in this life and eternal salvation in the life to come.

12. The Mormons • After Mormon completed his writings, he delivered the account to his son Moroni, who added a few words of his own and hid up the plates in the hill Cumorah. On September 21, 1823, the same Moroni, then a glorified, resurrected being, appeared to the Prophet Joseph Smith and instructed him relative to the ancient record and its destined translation into the English language. • In due course the plates were delivered to Joseph Smith, who translated them by the gift and power of God. The record is now published in many languages as a new and additional witness that Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God and that all who will come unto him and obey the laws and ordinances of his gospel may be saved. • Concerning this record the Prophet Joseph Smith said: “I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.” • In addition to Joseph Smith, the Lord provided for eleven others to see the gold plates for themselves and to be special witnesses of the truth and divinity of the Book of Mormon. Their written testimonies are included herewith as “The Testimony of Three Witnesses” and “The Testimony of Eight Witnesses.”

13. Translation or Divination? • The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has published many pictures of Joseph Smith dictating the Book of Mormon. These depictions invariably show Joseph seated at a table, carefully examining the gold plates which are in front of him on the table. The impression given is that the dictation process involved Joseph’s direct visual contact with the plates. • The witnesses tell a similar story of Joseph dropping a magical seer stone into his hat, then burying his face in the hat and proceeding to dictate the Book of Mormon. Joseph claimed to see in the darkened hat the words he dictated. Several of the witnesses comment that the gold plates were sometimes not even in sight as Joseph dictated the Book of Mormon. • http://www.irr.org/mit/divination.html

14. The Eight Witnesses • The Eight Witnesses were all members of the Whitmer or Smith families: Christian Whitmer, Jacob Whitmer, Peter Whitmer, Jr., John Whitmer, Hiram Page, Joseph Smith, Sr., Hyrum Smith, and Samuel Harrison Smith. Joseph Smith Sr. was Joseph's father, and Hyrum and Samuel H. Smith were his brothers. Christian, Jacob, Peter Jr. and John were David Whitmer's brothers, and Hiram Page was his brother-in-law.

15. The Shakers • Founded in England as an offshoot of Quakers, (Manchester, 1772) • Committed to celibacy • Believed in gender equality • New members won by conversion and adoption • http://www.hancockshakervillage.org/brdsidlg.html

16. The Shakers – Beliefs and Doctrines

17. The Shakers – religious dance

18. Educational Reform • Attempt at an Educational Reform, • Horace Mann – reorganizedthe Mass. School system, by 1850s the principle of tax-supported elementary schools was established in every state. In 1861 94% in the North and 58% in the South (83% white) could read. • Educating Native Americans

19. Temperance Movement • XVIII Amendment, 1918 • XXI Amendment, 1933

20. Feminist Movement • 1848 Seneca Falls, New York State, Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucrecia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Dorothea Dix, • http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/17.htm

21. Feminist Movement The Seneca Falls Convention was the first public gathering in the United States called explicitly for the purpose of debating the issue of women's rights. Meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, on 19–20 July 1848, a group of almost three hundred women and men passed a series of resolutions that protested against the moral, political, social, and legal status of women.

22. The Declaration of Sentiments • When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course. • 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; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they were accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.

23. The Declaration of Sentiments • He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women--the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands. • After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it. • He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known. • He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her. • He allows her in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church. • He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man. • He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God. • He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

24. The Declaration of Sentiments (ctnd.) • The history of mankind 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. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. • He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. • He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. • He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men--both natives and foreigners. • Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. • He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. • He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns. • He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming to all intents and purposes, her master--the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.

25. Seneca Falls Declaration (ctnd.) • Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation--in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and National legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions embracing every part of the country.Source: E.C. Stanton, S.B. Anthony and M.J. Gage, eds.,

26. Abolitionism • The American Colonization Society (1817) (in full: The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America) was the primary vehicle for proposals to return black Americans to greater freedom in Africa, and helped to found the colony of Liberia in 1821–22, as a place to send people who were formerly enslaved. Liberia is situated on the coast of West Africa. From 1821 thousands of black Americans moved there from the United States, and during the next 20 years the colony continued to grow and establish economic stability. In 1847, the legislature of Liberia declared itself an independent state with Monrovia as its capital. • John Randolph and Henry Clay

27. American Colonization Society

28. Prominent Abolitionists • William Lloyd Garisson, 1831, Boston, The Liberator, moral appeals, separation of the North, • The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845,

29. Prominent Abolitionists • Sojourner Truth • John Brown, Pottawatomie Massacre in Kansas, 1855, 1859 Harpers Ferry raid, fall of 1859 • Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852, 300,000 copies within a year, • The pro-slavery argument, 1852, Professor Thomas R. Dew, George Fitzhugh

30. Thomas Roderick Dew (1802–1846) was an economist, professor of law, and president of the College of William and Mary. His influential Pro-Slavery Argument offers theological, historical, and political evidence in a point-by-point refutation of the anti-slavery arguments of his day. Slavery was not a sin, Dew argued, but an established social institution in which God did not meddle: Jesus did not speak against slavery. Nor was slavery immoral… http://www.answers.com/topic/text-of-the-pro-slavery-argument-1832-by-thomas-dew George Fitzhugh (1806 - 1881 was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based sociological theories in the antebellum era. He argued that "the Negro is but a grown up child" who needs the economic and social protections of slavery. Fitzhugh decried capitalism as spawning "a war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another" – rendering free blacks "far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition." Slavery, he contended, ensured that blacks would be economically secure and morally civilized. The Pro-Slavery Side

31. The Underground Railroad • The Underground Railroad was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th century Black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists who were sympathetic to their cause. The term is also applied to the abolitionists who aided the fugitives. • Harriet Tubman, the most well-known worker on the Underground Railroad, made 13 trips to the South, helping to free approximately 70 people. [

32. Some Common Features: • idealism, • belief in the future, • belief in human perfectibility & hence the possibility of reforming the society

33. Transcendentalism • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller • spokesman Emerson: Nature, Divinity School Address, The American Scholar, Self-Reliance, the first American public intellectual • The Transcendentalists replaced a defunct Christian myth with the myth of nature, it made primary religious experience available to all men, took religion to the open air, naturalized it and democratized it • T. – “the party of the future” • T. represented a reaction to deism, the mechanistic conception of universe (Newton), deterministic notion of man, • T. stressed facts of consciousness, the power of thought and of the will, inspiration, miracle (intuitive perception) individual culture & development, • As a philosophy T. was eclectic, unclear, unsystematic

34. Sources of Transcendentalism British - Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle Classical: Plato German: German idealistic Philosophy Oriental Philosophy

35. Romantic Idealism • Idealistic: power of ideas to reshape matter, nature immanent with spirit, capable of fulfilling the ideas of god & man • claimed that people are not estranged from nature, but intimate with her • Stress on the individual genius, nature, etc. • Democratic: everybody is a potential genius, • America vs. Europe: the notion of the new beginning, celebration of nature, eliminating the weight of tradition.

36. The Rise of US Literature • Henry David Thoreau Walden 1854 • Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter 1850 • Herman Melville Moby Dick 1851 • Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass1855