Chapter Overview

The Jacksonian era witnessed immense and profound social changes. Not by coincidence, it also witnessed the greatest number of significant reform movements in American history. Women dominated church membership and played a critical role in those reform movements. Many leaders of reform were inspired by Protestant Christianity's millennial vision. The chapter opens with Lyman Beecher, who along with his children was destined to play such a large role in many of the movements striving for perfection. Beecher viewed religion and reform as forces of stability, yet he anticipated that faithful Christians could bring in the Kingdom of God, and his children increasingly advocated ways to liberate the individual. In short, religion and reform could become both agents of control and also forces for social change. The varied activities of Beecher and his children thus illustrated the close ties between reform and religion, the diversity of the reform impulse, and its growing radicalism.

Revivalism and the Social Order

The reform movements sometimes sought to preserve social institutions, sometimes to overturn them. They drew upon two intellectual developments: revivalism and romanticism. The Second Great Awakening, led by revivalists like Charles Grandison Finney, preached the doctrine of salvation for all sinners who would exercise their free will and choose it. Spurred on by this optimistic message, revivalists eventually endorsed the ideals of perfectionism (that individuals and society could become perfect) and millennialism (that the reign of 1,000 years of peace on earth prophesied in the Bible was at hand). Finney promoted techniques to convert sinners -- "new measures" originally used in frontier camp meetings. His revivals helped people adjust to the new market economy and the pressures they experienced in their daily lives by giving them hope and the internal discipline necessary for success. The number of independent black churches increased as well. Revivals strengthened the American belief in equality and individualism and made evangelical Protestantism the dominant expression of religion in America.

Women's Sphere

Women made up the greater number of converts at these revivals. Changes in women's world -- men working outside the home, fewer arranged marriages -- increased the unpredictability of life and led to a view of women as society's moral guardians. Women's role increasingly centered on home and the family -- the ideal of domesticity. Women themselves asserted that women, being morally stronger than men, could guard the nation's future by managing the home, their sphere. To shape society, they therefore turned to religion and reform. For example, as the market revolution and industrialization created a new middle class, families embraced a greater concern for privacy and adopted new techniques to assure the success of their children, including reduced family size, greater education, and equal inheritance and began to adopt practices that increasingly separated home and family from society.

American Romanticism

A new outlook known as Romanticism also stimulated the quest for perfectionism. An intellectual movement that began in Europe, romanticism emphasized the unlimited potential of each individual. It viewed emotion and intuition as sources of truth. Romanticism undergirded a distinct American literature that wrestled with questions about the source of truth and the clash between the individual and society. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the leading romantic thinker of the age. He embraced Transcendentalism, an intensely individualistic philosophical movement that sought to rise above the rational and material. The romantic movement produced a number of major writers who explored, with uniquely American voices, some of the complexities and contradictions of American culture.

The Age of Reform

Some reformers turned to utopian communities to build a model society for the rest of the world to follow. Many -- the Shakers, the Oneida community, and the Mormon settlement at Nauvoo -- were based in religion; others, like the community at New Harmony, were secular and socialist in their orientation. All believed in being able to perfect human character and remove evil from society. Other reformers turned to humanitarian movements that sought not to withdraw but to attack social evils directly. Movements like temperance, educational reform, and the establishment of asylums all gained support and typified the approach of perfecting society by reforming individuals. Each reflected aspects of both liberation and control.

Abolitionism

In the long run, the most important humanitarian reform movement of the period was abolitionism. William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston editor, laid the ideals and program -- "immediatism" and "moral suasion" -- of the abolitionist movement, and his views would later cause its breakup. Viewing slavery as the greatest sin in the Republic, abolitionists reflected the influence of the Christian revivals. Other important leaders helped mobilize the abolitionist movement, including Lewis Tappan, James Birney, Theodore Dwight, and free African-Americans in the north like Fredrick Douglass. Abolitionism drew on the crusading idealism of the revivals and the ideals of millennialism and perfectionism. Yet abolitionism attacked powerful groups in American society and championed African-Americans in the face of a pervasive racism. In doing so, abolitionism precipitated strong and often violent opposition. Abolitionists always remained a small minority of northern society.

Abolitionism attracted considerable support from women who were active in church work. Eventually several prominent female abolitionists, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, launched the women's rights movement at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. Drawing a parallel between the oppression of women and slaves, they called for greater educational and employment opportunities for women, enhanced legal rights in marriage, and most controversially the right to vote. The women's rights movement reflected growing internal divisions in the abolitionism. In 1840 the movement split into Garrison's radical wing and a more conservative wing, led by Tappan, that sought to end slavery through the political process.

Reform Shakes the Party System

The Tappan wing of abolitionism was typical in turning to political action. Advocates of temperance as well as antislavery sought to achieve their goals by passing legislation; women reformers thus focused on gaining the right to vote. The passage of the first statewide prohibition law in Maine in 1851 prompted the drive to pass similar laws in other states. The intrusion of these moral questions increasingly disrupted the two national parties; antislavery in particular made it difficult to preserve support in both sections of the country. The party system was weakened.