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Introduction for Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11 Religion and Reform, 1800–1860

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA

To what extent did individualism, new religious sects, abolitionism, and women’s rights (as the movement was called in the nineteenth century) change American culture between 1820 and 1860?

The spirit of reform is in every place,” declared the children of legal reformer David Dudley Field in their handwritten monthly Gazette in 1842:

The labourer with a family says “reform the common schools,” the merchant and the planter say, “reform the tariff,” the lawyer “reform the laws,” the politician “reform the government,” the abolitionist “reform the slave laws,” the moralist “reform intemperance,” … the ladies wish their legal privileges extended, and in short, the whole country is wanting reform.

A Middle-Class Marriage During the 1830s, Joseph H. Davis used bright watercolors to paint scores of family portraits — 150 still survive — that capture the comfortable lives of New England’s middle classes. This double portrait commemorates the marriage of Hannah Roberts and Lewis Tebbets of Berwick, Maine. To emphasize their romantic love, Davis shows them gazing into each other’s eyes, their hands linked by a prayer book, a symbol of their education and piety. Such respectable couples — Lewis Tebbets became a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church — flocked to hear Ralph Waldo Emerson and other lecturers on the lyceum circuit. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago/Art Resource, NY.

Like many Americans, the Field children sensed that the political whirlwind of the 1830s had transformed the way people thought about themselves and about society. Suddenly, thousands of men and women took inspiration from the economic progress and democratic spirit of the age. Drawing on the religious optimism of the Second Great Awakening, they felt that they could improve their personal lives and society as a whole. Some activists dedicated themselves to the cause of reform. William Lloyd Garrison began as an antislavery advocate and foe of Indian removal and then went on to campaign for women’s rights, pacifism, and the abolition of prisons. Susan B. Anthony embraced antislavery, temperance, and female suffrage. Such obsessively reform-minded individuals, warned Unitarian minister Henry W. Bellows, were pursuing “an object, which in its very nature is unattainable — the perpetual improvement of [people’s] outward condition.” In Bellows’s view, human progress depended on inner character, the “regeneration of man” through Christian precepts.

Such debates reveal the multifaceted character of the reform impulse. Like Bellows, the first wave of American reformers, the benevolent religious improvers of the 1820s, hoped to promote morality and enforce social discipline. They championed regular church attendance, temperance, and a strict moral code. Their zeal offended many upright citizens: “A peaceable man can hardly venture to eat or drink, … to correct his child or kiss his wife, without obtaining the permission … of some moral or other reform society,” said one.

A second wave of reformers — Garrison, Anthony, and other activists of the 1830s and 1840s — undertook to liberate people from archaic customs and traditional lifestyles. Mostly middle-class northerners and midwesterners, these activists promoted a bewildering assortment of radical ideals: extreme individualism, common ownership of property, the immediate emancipation of slaves, and sexual equality. Although their numbers were small, second-wave reformers challenged deeply rooted cultural practices and elicited horrified opposition among the majority of Americans. As one fearful southerner saw it, radical reformers favored a chaotic world with “No-Marriage, No-Religion, No-Private Property, No-Law and No-Government.”