Chapter 15

1. Chapter 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture

2. Religious Camp Meeting, by J. Maze Burbank, 1839 • At huge, daylong encampments, repentant sinners dedicated themselves to lives of personal rectitude and social reform. Fire-and-brimstone preachers like the one depicted here inspired convulsions, speaking in tongues, and ecstatic singing and dancing among the converted. Out of this religious upheaval grew many of the movements for social improvement in the pre– Civil War decades, including the abolitionist crusade.

3. Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), 1834 • The charismatic Finney appears here at age forty two, at the height of his career as an evangelist. A mesmerizer of audiences, he was said to have converted over a half million people. In 1834, Finney had just led a series of enormously successful revivals in cities along the Erie Canal. The next year he would establish a theology department at the newly founded Oberlin College in Ohio, where he helped train a generation of ministers and served as president from 1851 to 1866.

4. Mormon Trekkers Crossing the Mississippi on the Ice • Driven out of Illinois after the murder of founder Joseph Smith in 1844, the Mormons wintered near Council Bluffs, Iowa Territory, before beginning the long overland trek to Utah.

5. The Mormon World • After Joseph Smith’s murder at Carthage in 1844, the Mormons abandoned their thriving settlement at Nauvoo, Illinois (which had about twenty thousand inhabitants in 1845) and set out for the valley of the Great Salt Lake, then still part of Mexico. When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (see p. 410) in 1848 brought the vast Utah Territory into the United States, the Mormons rapidly expanded their desert colony, which they called Deseret, especially along the “Mormon Corridor” that stretched from Salt Lake to southern California.

6. The Country School, by Winslow Homer, 1871 • Stark and simple by latter-day standards, the one-room schoolhouse nevertheless contributed richly to the development of the young Republic.

7. The Women Graduates of the Oberlin College Class of 1855 • Oberlin was the first coeducational institution of higher education in the United States, accepting women in 1837, two years after it had welcomed African Americans. Feminists continued to press for coeducation, and by 1872 ninety-seven American universities accepted women. At some of these institutions, however, such as Radcliffe College of Harvard University and Barnard College of Columbia University, women were educated in associated schools, not alongside male students.

8. The Stepping Mill, Auburn Prison, New York, 1823 • Reformers like Dorothea Dix believed that idleness was a scourge and prescribed rigorous exercise regimens for prisoners. At the experimental prison in Auburn, chained prisoners were obliged to turn this wheel for long periods of time.

9. Temperance Banner Lithograph, by Kellogg and Comstock, ca. 1848–1850 • Among the many evils of alcohol, reformers fulminated especially against its corrupting effects on family life. Here a young man is torn between a drink-bearing temptress and a maiden who exemplifies the virtues of womanly purity.

10. Stellar Suffragists • Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) and Susan B. Anthony (right) were two of the most persistent battlers for rights. Their National Woman Suffrage Association fought for women’s equality in courts and workplaces as well as at the polls.

11. What It Would Be If Some Ladies Had Their Own Way • The men in this antifeminist cartoon are sewing, tending the baby, and washing clothes. The scene seemed absurd then, but not a century later.

12. Dress as Reform

13. Women Planting Corn, by Olof Krans, 1894–1896 • The Shakers’ emphasis on simplicity and ingenuity, and their segregation of the sexes, were captured in this painting of the Bishop Hill community in Illinois. The prongs on the poles measured the distance between rows, and the knots on the rope showed the women how far apart to plant the corn.

14. Mansion House • A sprawling, resplendent building, it formed the center of the Oneida Community’s life and was a stunning specimen of mid-nineteenth-century architectural and engineering achievement.

15. The Founding Father • John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886).

16. A Bag Bee on the Lawn of Mansion House • The fledgling community supported itself in part by manufacturing bags. Men and women shared equally in the bag-making process.

17. Passenger Pigeons, by John Audubon • An astute naturalist and a gifted artist, Audubon drew the birds of America in loving detail. Ironically, he had to go to Britain in the 1820s to find a publisher for his pioneering depictions of the unique beauty of American wildlife. Born in Haiti and educated in France, he achieved fame as America’s greatest ornithologist. The passenger pigeons shown here once numbered in the billions in North America but were extinct by 1900, thanks to aggressive hunting and trapping. This was perhaps the greatest mass slaughter of wildlife in history.

18. John J. Audubon (1785–1851) • An astute naturalist and a gifted artist, Audubon drew the birds of America in loving detail. Ironically, he had to go to Britain in the 1820s to find a publisher for his pioneering depictions of the unique beauty of American wildlife. Born in Haiti and educated in France, he achieved fame as America’s greatest ornithologist. The passenger pigeons shown here once numbered in the billions in North America but were extinct by 1900, thanks to aggressive hunting and trapping. This was perhaps the greatest mass slaughter of wildlife in history.

19. Early Advertising • Hawkers of patent medicines pioneered the techniques of modern advertising. Here a painkiller is promoted by invoking the totally irrelevant image of Molly Pitcher. The legendary subject of a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, Pitcher reputedly took her fallen husband’s place at a cannon during the Revolutionary War Battle of Monmouth in 1778. What this exploit had to do with anesthetics is by no means clear, but it supposedly sold the product.

20. The Oxbow, by Thomas Cole, 1836 • This rendering of the oxbow of the Connecticut River near Northampton, Massachusetts, after a thunderstorm is considered one of Cole’s (1801–1848) masterpieces. A leader of the so-called Hudson River school, Cole wandered on foot over the mountains and rivers of New York State and New Eng land, making pencil studies from which he painted in his studio during the winter. He and other members of this group transformed their realistic sketches into lyrical, romantic celebrations of the beauty of the American wilderness.

21. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) • Public lecturing provided a way for Emerson to put his ideas before a larger audience than his readers and to support his family. His philosophical observations included such statements as “The less government we have, the better—the fewer laws, and the less confided power”; “To be great is to be misunderstood”; “Every hero becomes a bore at last”; “Shallow men believe in luck”; and “When you strike a king, you must kill him.”

22. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), 1856 • Thoreau’s lyrical essays about nature made him a spiritual father of the later conservation movement.

23. Walt Whitman (1819–1892), ca. 1860 • Whitman’s love affair with America and the American people inspired later poets such as Allen Ginsberg, and “Whitmanesque” came to describe any poetry that celebrates the possibilities of American life and unbridled personal freedom.

24. Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), 1856 • In search of independence for herself and financial security for her family, Alcott worked as a seamstress, governess, teacher, and housemaid until her writing finally brought her success. Her much-loved, largely autobiographical novel Little Women has remained in print continuously from 1868 until our own day.

25. Capturing a Sperm Whale, painted by William Page from a sketch by C. B. Hulsart, 1835 • This painting and Melville’s Moby Dick vividly portray the hazards of whaling. Despite the dangers, it proved to be an important industry from colonial times to the end of the nineteenth century