How did social and cultural life change in the 1830s?

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Figure false: Images of the Family at Home
Figure false: Hundreds of itinerant amateur artists journeyed the back roads and small villages of antebellum America, earning a modest living painting individuals and families. This picture from the 1830s exhibits a common convention — the arrangement of family members by age and by sex, as if to emphasize the ideal of separate spheres. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Watercolors and Drawings, 1800–1875.

CHRONOLOGY

1817

  • – American Colonization Society is founded.

1826

  • – American Temperance Society is founded.

1829

  • – David Walker publishes An Appeal … to the Coloured Citizens of the World.

1830–1831

  • – Charles Grandison Finney preaches in Rochester, New York.

1831

  • – William Lloyd Garrison starts Liberator.

1832

  • – New England Anti-Slavery Society is founded.

1833

  • – New York and Philadelphia antislavery societies are founded.
  • – New York Female Moral Reform Society is founded.

1836

  • – American Temperance Union is founded.

THE GROWING ECONOMY, booming by the mid-1830s, transformed social and cultural life. For many families, especially in the commercialized Northeast, standards of living rose, consumption patterns changed, and the nature and location of work were altered. All this had a direct impact on the duties of men and women and on the training of youths for the economy of the future.

Along with economic change came an unprecedented revival of evangelical religion known as the Second Great Awakening. Among the most serious adherents of evangelical Protestantism were men and women of the new merchant classes. Not content with individual perfection, many of these people sought to perfect society as well, by defining excessive alcohol consumption, nonmarital sex, and slavery as three major evils of modern life in need of correction. Three social movements championing temperance, moral reform, and abolition gained strength from evangelistic Christianity.