Chapter 12: Remaking Society

• “And when they found them not,

they drew Jason and certain

brethren unto the rulers of the

city, crying, These that have

turned the world upside down are

come hither also; Whom Jason

hath received: and these all do

contrary to the decrees of Caesar,

saying that there is another king,

one Jesus.” Acts 17:6-7

Objectives: o We will examine the growth of

both religious revivalism and new theories of health, science, and education during the antebellum decades

o We will examine the origins and development of the nineteenth century women's movement, and its culmination in the Seneca Falls convention

REMAKING SOCIETY:

o Simultaneous efforts to liberate the individual and impose order on a changing world also helped create a wide range of new movements to remake society.

o Women formed the real rank and file and often the leadership as well in these movements.

o By the 1830s, such movements had taken the form of organized reform societies.

REMAKING SOCIETY: o The new organization did work on behalf

of a wide range of issues:

o Temperance,

o Education,

o Peace;

o The care of the poor,

o The handicapped,

o And the mentally ill;

o The treatment of criminals;

o The rights of women; and many more.

REMAKING SOCIETY: o Few era in American history

witnessed a wide range of reform efforts as emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.

o And few eras have exposed more clearly the simultaneous attraction of Americans to the ideas of personal liberty and social order.

Revivalism, Morality, and Order:

o The Philosophy of reform arose from several distinct sources.

o One was the optimistic vision of those who like the transcendentalists rejected Calvinist doctrines and preached the divinity of the individual.

o It included a larger group of Americans who embraced the doctrines of Unitarianism and Universalism and absorbed European romanticism.

Revivalism, Morality, and Order: o A second in many respects more

important source was Protestant revivalism, the movement known as the Second Great Awakening early in the century by the 1820s evolved into a powerful force for social reform.

o Although New Light Revivalists were theologically far removed from the transcendentalists and Unitarians, they had come to share the optimistic belief that every individual was capable of salvation.

Revivalism, Morality, and Order: o According to Charles Grandison Finney, an

evangelistic Presbyterian minister who became the most influential revival leader of the 1820s and 1830s, traditional Calvinist doctrine of predestination and individual human helplessness were both obsolete and destructive.

o Each person, he preached contained within himself or herself the capacity to experience spiritual rebirth and achieve salvation.

o A revival of faith need not depend on a miracle from God; it could be created by individual effort.

Revivalism, Morality, and Order: o Finney enjoyed particular success in upstate New

York, where he helped launch a series of passionate revivals in towns along the Erie Canals, a region so prone to religious awakenings that it was known as the Burden-over” district.

o This region was a strong source for this revival because of the construction of the canal brought both strong economic and social changes that people felt disoriented.

o It was the roughly the same area of New York where Joseph Smith first organized the Mormon Church.

Revivalism, Morality, and Order: o In Rochester, New York, the site of his

greatest success, Finney staged a series of emotionally wrenching religious meetings that aroused the people living there.

o He had particular success in mobilizing women, on whom he tended to concentrate his efforts both because women found the liberating message of revivalism particularly appealing and because, Finney discovered, they provided him with access to their male relatives.

Revivalism, Morality, and Order: o Gradually Finney developed a large

following among the relatively prosperous citizens of the region.

o They were enjoying the economic benefits of the new commercial growth, but they were also uneasy about some of the social changes accompanying it.

o As new undisciplined pool of transient labors started pouring in.

Revivalism, Morality, and Order: o For them, revivalism became not only

a means of personal salvation but a mandate for the reform and control of their society.

o Finney’s revivalism became a call for a crusade against personal immorality.

o And a call for practical morality in the subjects of temperance and moral reform.

• Another movement was the

Millerite movement.

Founded by William Miller, a

farmer from upstate New

York.

• Miller was originally a deist.

A belief that God created the

universe but lets it run

without His intervention.

• Miller had a conversion experience after a battle he fought as a Captain of the U.S. Army in the War of 1812 in upper New York.

• They were outnumbered three to one and yet they somehow defeated the British.

• This experience caused Him to realize that God does intervene in people’s lives.

• He committed to the Baptist church and began systematically to study the Bible.

• Miller studies Daniel and Revelation based on Daniel 8:14, that Jesus would most likely return in 1843-1844.

• This is based on the prophecy on Daniel 8:14, where it states that after 2300 days, the sanctuary would be cleansed.

• Miller saw that the 2300 days were 2300 years (Numbers 14:34, Ezekiel 4:6) and this prophecy was connected to a prophecy in Daniel 9 where the beginning of the prophecy was in 457 B.C. with the decree for Jerusalem to be rebuilt given by the Persian King Artaxerxes.

• He believed that the term sanctuary represented the earth, and the sanctuary being cleansed with the earth being cleansed by fire by the second coming of Jesus.

• In mark contrast to Finney,

Miller believed that Jesus

Christ will return and gather

His believers to Heaven,

and scorch the earth with

fire, destroying the wicked,

and the faithful will reside

in Heaven for a thousand

years, and return to a newly

created Earth.

• Interested in the second Coming of Jesus and the historicist view of Bible prophecy increased with the following Prophecies fulfilled.

• The arrest of Pope Pius VI by Napoleon’s Army in 1798 was seen as a fulfillment of Bible prophecy (Daniel 7:25, Revelation 12:5-6, Revelation 13:5-7). End of the 1,260 years of Papal political domination.

In 538 A.D. The Emperor Justinian gives the Roman Bishop head of all the churches.

• Additional Sources: See Great Controversy pages 54-55

• The ominous dark day of 19

May 1780, where the day

inexplicably went dark as night

in the northeast.

• The great star shower of 13

November 1833 (Matthew

24:29, Luke 21:25-26,

Revelation 6:12)

• This was a historicist view of Bible Prophecy is where Bible prophecy being fulfilled throughout both in the past, present, and is fulfilling in the future.

• It was different from the common view that Bible prophecy was thought of all been fulfilled in the past or all will be fulfilled in the future.

• Miller’s interpretations began to be published in Baptist publications.

• Miller’s views attracted those who opposed slavery (abolitionists), and those who opposed alcohol (temperance movements).

• Anti-slavery activist William Lloyd Garrison worked with Millerite Josiah V. Himes in anti-slavery causes.

• Millerite Joseph Bates was active in anti-slavery and temperance (anti-alcohol and anti-smoking causes).

• Large camp meetings with huge tents traveled from city to city, town to town. Attracting hundreds.

• Many were also attracted by the prophecy charts and diagrams of the various symbols found in the books of Daniel and Revelation.

• Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians and other Christians joined the movement. The Millerites were called “Adventists” those who believe in the coming or return of Jesus.

• But in October 22, 1844, Jesus did not return, this was called the Great Disappointment.

• The Millerite followers had up to 50,000 followers at that time.

• Many left the movement but a few began to restudy Daniel 8:14 and began to understand Miller misunderstood prophecy and that the term “sanctuary” was not the earth being cleansed by fire but it was a sanctuary in Heaven where the records of sins of the saints were being blotted out or deleted (Hebrews 8:1-2, Daniel 7:9-11).

o Ellen and James White,

Uriah Smith, and Joseph

Bates were part of this

Millerite movement.

o They would become

founders of the Seventh-

day Adventist Church.

The Temperance Crusade:

o Evangelical Protestantism added major strength to one of the most influential reform movements of the era, the crusade against drunkenness.

o No social vice in their view, was most responsible for crime, disorder, and poverty than the excessive use of alcohol.

The Temperance Crusade:

o Women who were particularly active in the temperance movement, claimed that alcoholism placed a special burden on wives:

o Men spent money on alcohol that their families needed basic necessities, and drunken husbands often abused their wives and children.

The Temperance Crusade:

o In fact, alcoholism was an even more serious problem in Antebellum America than it is today.

o The supply of alcohol was growing rapidly, particularly in the West; farmers there grew more grain than they could sell and they distilled the surplus into whiskey.

The Temperance Crusade: o But in the East, commercial

distilleries and private stills were widespread.

o The appetite for alcohol was growing along with the supply:

o Drinking helped ease loneliness in isolated western areas.

o In eastern cities, Pubs and saloons, is where drinking was the principle leisure activity for many workers.

The Temperance Crusade: o The average male in the 1830s drank nearly

three times as much alcohol as the average person does today.

o Many drank habitually and excessively.

o Many who supported the temperance movement was people who saw it as a way to overcome their own problems with alcoholism.

o Although advocates of temperance had been active since the late eighteenth century, the new reformers gave the movement an energy and influence it had never previously known.

The Temperance Crusade: o In 1826, the American Society for Promotion of

Temperance emerged as a coordinating agency among various groups.

o It attempted to use many of the techniques of revivalism in preaching abstinence.

o Then in 1840, six reformed alcoholics in Baltimore organized the Washington Temperance Society and began to draw large crowds in which workers (many of them attempting to overcome their own alcoholism) were heavily represented to hear their impassioned and intriguing confession of past sins.

The Temperance Crusade: o Temperance advocates had grown

dramatically in numbers; more than a million people had signed a formal pledge to forego hard liquor.

o As the movement gained strength, it also became divided in purpose.

o Some temperance advocates urged that abstinence include not only liquor but beer and wine as well.

o Not everyone agreed.

The Temperance Crusade: o Some began to demand the state

legislature to restrict the sale and consumption of alcohol (Maine passed such as law in 1851); others insisted that temperance must rely on the conscience of the individual.

o Whatever their disagreements, by promoting abstinence reformers were attempting to promote the moral self-improvement of individuals.

o They were also trying to impose discipline on society.

The Temperance Crusade: o The search for social discipline was

particularly clear in the battle over prohibition laws which pitted established Protestants against New Catholic immigrants to many whom drinking was an important social ritual an integral part of the life of their communities.

o Local residents believed that the restriction of alcohol can curb the disorder the new Catholic immigrant population was creating.

• Every year millions of gallons of intoxicating liquors are drunk, and millions of dollars are spent for tobacco. And the slaves of appetite, while constantly spending their earnings in sensual indulgence, rob their children of food and clothing and the advantages of education. There can never be a right state of society while these evils exist. {CD 423.2}

Health Fads and Phrenology: o In this era, epidemics such as cholera

devastated America.

o A quarter of the population of New Orleans died in 1833 epidemic.

o Cholera was a severe bacterial infection of the intestines usually by consuming contaminated food and water.

o Threats to public health were critical to the sense of insecurity that underlay many reform movements.

Health Fads and Phrenology:

o Medical professionals were unable to stop these epidemics.

o Instead Americans turned to non-scientific theories for improving health.

o Affluent men and especially women flocked to health spas for the celebrated “water cure” or hydrotherapy of hot and cold baths.

Health Fads and Phrenology:

o Sylvester Graham, a Connecticut born Presbyterian Minister and committed reformer won many followers with his prescription of eating fruits, vegetables, and bread made, from coarsely ground flour, instead of meat.

o The Graham Cracker was named after him.

Grains, fruits, nuts, and vegetables constitute the diet chosen for us by our Creator. These foods, prepared in as simple and natural a manner as possible, are the most healthful and nourishing. They impart a strength, a power of endurance, and a vigor of intellect, that are not afforded by a more complex and stimulating diet. {CD 81.2}

Health Fads and Phrenology: o Graham accompanied his dietary

prescriptions with moral warnings about the evils of excess and luxury.

o Perhaps the strangest of these theories was the widespread belief in the new “science” of phrenology.

o It appeared first in Germany, and became popular in the United State beginning in the 1830s through the efforts of Orson and Lorenzo Fowler.

Health Fads and Phrenology: o Phrenologists argued that the shape of an

individuals skull was an important indicator of his or her character and intelligence.

o For a time many Americans believed this as a vehicle for improving society and providing a way of measuring an individuals fitness for various positions in life and seemed to promise an end to the arbitrary process of which people matched their talents and responsibilities.

Medical Science:

o In an age of rapid technological and advances, the science of medicine sometimes seemed to lag behind.

o In part, that was because of the greater difficulty of experimentation in medicine, which required human subjects as compared to other areas of science and technology that relied on inanimate objects.

Medical Science: o In part it was because of the character of the

medical profession, which in the absence of any significant regulation, attracted many poor educated people and many quacks in addition to trained physicians.

o Efforts to regulate the profession were beaten back by those who considered the licensing of physicians to be a form of undemocratic monopoly.

o The prestige of the profession remained low and it was for many people a career of last resort.

Medical Science: o The biggest problem facing American

medicine was the absence of basic knowledge about disease.

o The great medical achievement of the eighteenth century including the development of the vaccine against small pox by Edward Jenner came from no broad theory of infection, but from a brilliant adaptation of folk practices among country people.

Medical Science:

o The development of anesthetics came not from medical doctors at first but from a New England dentist, William Norton who was looking to help his patients endure the extraction of teeth.

o John Warren, a Boston surgeon soon began using ether to sedate surgical patients.

Medical Science: o But these advances met with stiff

resistance from traditional physicians some of whom continued to believe that all medical knowledge derived from timeless truth and ancient scholars

o There was mistrust on innovations and experimentation.

o Others rejected scientific advances because of unorthodox and untested “medical” techniques popularized by entrepreneurs many who were fakes.

Medical Science:

o In the absence of any broad

acceptance of scientific methods

and experimental practice in

medicine, it was very difficult for

even the most talented doctors

to succeed in treating disease.

Medical Science: o Even so, halting progress toward the

discovery of the germ theory did occur in antebellum America.

o In 1843 the Boston essayist, poet, and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes published his findings from a study of a large number of cases of “puerperal fever” and concluded that disease could be transmitted from one person to another.

Medical Science: o Holmes faced stiff criticism.

o But his study was vindicated by Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis who noticed that the infection seemed to be spread by medical students who had been working with corpses.

o Once he began requiring students to wash their hands and disinfect their instruments, the infections virtually disappeared.

Reforming Education:

o In the 1830s, interest in public education grew rapidly.

o It was a reflection of the new belief in the innate capacity of every person and of society’s obligation to tap that capacity; but it was a reflection too of the desire to expose students to stable social values as a way to resist instability.

Reforming Education:

o One of the outstanding reform

movements of the mid-nineteenth

century was the effort to produce a

system of universal public education.

o As of 1830 no state had a public

education system with the exception

of Massachusetts which had a

limited version.

Reforming Education:

o The greatest educational reformer was Horace Mann , the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, which was established in 1837.

o To Mann and his followers education was the only way to counterwork this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor.

Reforming Education: o Mann believed that the only way to

protect democracy was to create an educated electorate.

o He recognized the Massachusetts School System, lengthened the academic year (to six months), doubled teachers’ salaries, enriched the curriculum, and introduced new methods of professional training for teachers.

Reforming Education: o Henry Barnard helped produce a new

educational system in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

o Pennsylvania passed a law in 1835 appropriating state funds for the support of universal education.

o Governor William Seward of New York extended public support of schools throughout the state in the early 1840s.

o By the 1850s, the principle of tax-supported elementary schools had been accepted in all the states; and all were asking at least a start toward putting the principle into practice.

Reforming Education: o Yet the quality of the new education

continued to vary widely.

o In Massachusetts, educators were highly trained men and women who saw themselves as career professionals

o Mann established the first American state-supported teachers’ college in 1839 and where the first professional association of teachers was created in 1845.

Reforming Education: o In other areas teachers were often barely literate

and limited funding for education restricted opportunities severely.

o In the newly settled regions in the West, many children had no access to schools at all.

o In the South, entire black population was barred from formal education.

o Only about a third of white children in the south enrolled in school in 1860.

o In the North, the percentage was 72 percent but even there, many students only attended classes briefly and casually.

Reforming Education: o The interest in education was visible too in

growing movement to educate American Indians.

o White educators held hope that Indians could be “civilized” if only they could be taught the ways of the white world.

o Efforts to educate Native Americans and encourage them to assimilate were practically prominent in the Far west and Oregon.

o Nevertheless the great majority of Native Americans remained outside the reach of educational reform, either by choice or by circumstance or both.

Reforming Education: o Despite limitations and inequities, the

achievements of the school reformers were impressive by any standard.

o By the beginning of the Civil War, the United States had one of the highest literacy rates of any nation of the world: 94 percent of the population of the North and 83 percent of the white population of the South (58 percent of the total southern population).

Reforming Education: o Most typical of educational reform were

efforts was for schools to impose a set of social values on children.

o These values that reformers believed were appropriate for their new, industrializing society.

o These values included thrift, order, discipline, punctuality, and respect for authority.

o Horace Mann, spoke frequently of the role of public schools in extending democracy and expanding individual opportunity.

Reforming Education:

o But Mann spoke too, of their role in

creating social order. “The

unrestrained passions of men are not

only homicidal but suicidal.”

Rehabilitation: o Another powerful movement of reform was

the creation of asylums for criminals and for the mentally ill.

o On the one hand, advocating prison and hospital reform, Americans were reacting to one of society’s most glaring ills.

o Criminals of all kinds, debtors unable to pay their debts, the mentally ill, even senile paupers all were crowded together indiscriminately into prisons and jails, which in some cases were literally holes in the ground.

Rehabilitation: o Beginning in the 1820s numerous states

replaced these antiquated facilities with new penitentiaries and mental institutions designed to provide a proper environment for inmates.

o New York built the first penitentiary at Auburn in 1821.

o In Massachusetts, the reformer Dorthea Dix began a national movement for new methods of treating the mentally ill.

Rehabilitation: o Imprisonment and debtors and paupers

gradually disappeared as did such traditional practices as legal public hangings.

o But the creation of asylums of social deviants was not simply an effort to curb the abuses of the old system.

o It was also an attempt to reform and rehabilitate the inmates.

o New forms or rigid prison discipline were designed to rid criminals of the “laxness” that had presumably led them astray.

Rehabilitation:

o Solitary confinement and the

imposition of silence on work crews

(both adopted in Pennsylvania and

New York in the 1820s) was meant to

give prisoners opportunities to

meditate on their wrongdoings (hence

the term penitentiary a place where

individuals can cultivate penitence).

Rehabilitation: o Although the initial optimism of this

mode of correction faded and many prisons degenerated to little more than warehouses for criminals with scant emphasis on rehabilitation.

o The asylum movements promoted the idea that a properly structured institution could prevent moral failings or rescue individuals for failure and despair, extended to orphanages, and alms houses.

The Indian Reservation: o In the 1840s and 1850s, a new reform

approach to the problem of Native Americans, the idea of the reservation developed.

o For several decades, the dominant thrust of U.S. policy toward the Indians in areas of white settlement had been relocation.

o The principle motive behind relocation was simple, getting the tribes out of way for White Civilization.

The Indian Reservation:

o But among Whites there has been

also been another if secondary intent.

o To move the Indians to a place where

they would be protected from whites

and allowed to develop to a point

where assimilation might be possible.

The Indian Reservation: o It was a small step from the idea of relocation to the

idea of the reservation:

o The idea of creating an enclosed region in which Indians would live in isolation from white society.

o The reservations served white economic purposes above all—moving Native Americans out of good lands that white settlers wanted.

o But they were also supposed to serve a reform purpose.

o It was meant to bring the great work of regeneration of the Indian race.

o Native Americans would learn the ways of civilization in a protected setting.

The Indian Reservation:

o The reservation was also suppose to

serve a reform purpose.

o It was meant to bring the great work

of regeneration of the Indian race.

o Native Americans would learn the

ways of civilization in a protected

setting.

Emergence of Feminism: o American women played central roles in a wide

range of reform movements on behalf of the temperance movement and abolition of slavery.

o In the process they expressed their awareness of the problems that women themselves faced in a male-dominated society.

o The result was the creation of the first important American feminist movement.

o One that laid the groundwork for role than a century of agitation for women’s rights.

Emergence of Feminism:

o Women faced not only all the

traditional restrictions imposed

by society but also a new set of

barriers emerged from the

doctrine of “separate spheres.”

and the transformation of the

family.

Emergence of Feminism: o Many women who were involved in the

reform movements came to look on such restrictions with rising resentment.

o Some began to defy them.

o Sarah and Angelina Grimke’ sisters born in South Carolina became abolitionists ignored attacks by men and claimed their activities were inappropriate for their sex.

o Men and women were created equal they argued.

Emergence of Feminism:

o Other reformers such as Catherine

Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe

(her sister) Lucereita Mott,

Elizabeth Candy Stanton, and

Dorthea Dix also challenged the

restrictions placed on them by men

similarly pressed at the boundaries

of “acceptable” female behavior.

Emergence of Feminism: o Finally in 1840, the patience of several

women snapped.

o A group of American female abolitionists arrived at a world antislavery convention in London only to be turned away.

o Angered Lucreita Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton became convinced that their first duty as reformers should now be to elevate the status of women.

Emergence of Feminism:

o Over the next several years, Mott,

Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and others

began drawing pointed parallels

between the plight of women and the

plight of slaves.

Emergence of Feminism:

o In 1848, Mott, Stanton, and Anthony

organized a convention in Seneca Falls,

New York to discuss the question of

women’s rights.

o Out of the meeting emerged a

“Declaration of Sentiments which

stated that both men and women are

created equal and were modeled after

the Declaration of Independence.

Emergence of Feminism: o That women no less than men have

certain inalienable rights.

o Their most prominent demand was for the right to vote, thus launching the movement for women suffrage that would continue until 1920.

o But the document was more important for its rejection that women and men were assigned separate spheres in society.

Emergence of Feminism: o Many of the women involved in the

feminist efforts were Quakers.

o Quakerism had long embraced the ideal of sexual equality and tolerated and encouraged the emergence of women as preachers and community leaders.

o Women taught to expect the absence of gender-based restrictions in their own communities naturally resented the restrictions they encountered when they moved outside of them.

Emergence of Feminism:

o Quakers have long been leaders of

the antislavery movement and

Quaker women played a leading

role within those efforts.

o Of the women who drafted the

Declaration of Sentiments, all but

Elizabeth Cady Stanton were

Quakers.

Emergence of Feminism:

o Individual women however broke

social barriers to advancement.

o Elizabeth Blackwell gained

acceptance as a famed physician.

o Her sister-in-law Antoinette Brown

Blackwell became the first ordained

women minister in the U.S.

Emergence of Feminism: o Another sister-in-law, Lucy Stone took

revolutionary steps of retaining her maiden name after marriage as did Angelina Grimke’, an abolitionist.

o Stone became an influential lecturer of women’s rights.

o Emma Willard founder of the Troy Female Seminary in 1821, and Catherine Beecher founded the Hartford Female Seminary in 1823, worked on behalf of women’s education.

Emergence of Feminism: o Some women expressed their feminist

sentiments even in their choice of costume, wearing a distinctive style of dress that combined a short skirt with full length pantalettes, an outfit that allowed freedom of movement without loss of modesty.

o Introduced by famous actress Fanny Kemble, it was called “bloomer” costumes, after one of its advocates Amelia Bloomer.

o It caused so much controversy that feminists finally abandoned it, convinced that the furor was drawing attention away from their more important demands).

Emergence of Feminism:

o Feminism benefited greatly from

associating with abolition and

other reform movements.

o But feminism became a

secondary issue to the most

pressing issue at that time for

reform movements, slavery.