APUSH Ch. 16
Emma Willard establishes Oberlin
1821 @Troy NY
American Temperance Society was formed
1826 @ Boston
American Peace society formed
1828
Mary Lyon creates Holyoke Seminary
1837
Dorothea Dix petitioned to the Massachusetts Legislature
1843
Federal Army March against Mormons
1857
Mormons disobeyed the antipolygamy laws
1862 & 1882
Utah Statehood
1896
...
A boiling reaction against the growing liberalism in religion set in about 1800. A fresh wave of roaring revivals, beginning on the southern frontier but soon rolling even into the cities of the Northeast. the Second Awakening was one of the most momentous episodes in the history of American religion. This tidal wave of spiritual fervor left in its wake countless converted souls, many shattered and reorganized churches, and numerous new sects. It also encouraged an effervescent evangelicalism that bubbled up into innumerable areas of American life—including prison reform, the temperance cause, the women's movement, and the crusade to abolish slavery. The Second Great Awakening was spread to the masses on the frontier by huge "camp meetings." As many as twenty-five thousand people would gather for an encampment of several days to drink the hellfire gospel as served up by an itinerant preacher. Thousands of spiritually starved souls "got religion" at these gather- ings and in their ecstasy engaged in frenzies of rolling, dancing, barking, and jerking. Many of the "saved" soon backslid into their former sinful ways, but the revivals boosted church membership and stimulated a variety of humanitarian reforms. Responsive easterners were moved to do missionary work in the West with Indians, in Hawaii, and in Asia.
Mormon crisis
A crisis developed when the Washington govern- ment was unable to control the hierarchy of Brigham Young, who had been made territorial governor in 1850. A federal army marched in 1857 against the Mormons, who harassed its lines of supply and rallied to die in their last dusty ditch. Fortunately the quarrel was finally adjusted without serious bloodshed. The Mormons later ran afoul of the antipolygamy laws passed by Congress in 1862 and 1882, and their unique marital customs delayed statehood for Utah until 1896.
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
A fighting Quaker with piercing dark eyes and swarthy complexion, was the uncrowned poet laureate of the antislavery crusade. Less talented as a writer than Longfellow, he was vastly more important in influencing social action. His poems cried aloud against inhumanity, injustice, and intolerance, against The outworn rite, the old abuse, The pious fraud transparent grown. Undeterred by insults and the stoning of mobs, Whittier helped arouse a callous America on the slavery issue. A supreme conscience rather than a sterling poet or intellect, Whittier was one of the moving forces of his generation, whether moral, humanitarian, or spiritual. Gentle and lovable, he was preeminently the poet of human freedom.
feminization of religion
A key feature of the Second Great Awakening. Middle-class women, the wives and daughters of businessmen, were the first and most fervent enthusiasts of religious revivalism. They made up the majority of new church members, and they were most likely to stay within the fold when the tents were packed up and the traveling evangelists left town.Perhaps women's greater ambivalence than men about the changes wrought by the expanding market economy made them such eager converts to piety. It helped as well that evangelicals preached a gospel of female spiritual worth and offered women an active role in bringing their husbands and families back to God. That accomplished, many women turned to saving the rest of society. They formed a host of benevolent and charitable organizations and spearheaded crusades for most, if not all, of the era's ambitious reforms.
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
A third member of the Knickerbocker group in New York was the belated Puritan transplanted from Massachusetts. At age sixteen he wrote the meditative and melancholy "Thanatopsis" (published in 1817), which was one of the first high-quality poems produced in the United States. Critics could hardly believe that it had been written on "this side of the water." Although Bryant continued with poetry, he was forced to make his living by editing the influential New York Evening Post. For over fifty years, he set a model for journalism that was dignified, liberal, and conscientious.
William Ladd
American Peace society's leader
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Best known of the transcendentalists was Boston- born Tall, slender, and intensely blue-eyed, he mirrored serenity in his noble features. Trained as a Unitarian minister, he early forsook his pulpit and ultimately reached a wider audience by pen and platform. He was a never-failing favorite as a lyceum lecturer and for twenty years took a western tour every winter. Perhaps his most thrilling public effort was a Phi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar," delivered at Harvard College in 1837. This brilliant appeal was an intellectual declara- tion of independence, for it urged American writers to throw off European traditions and delve into the riches of their own backyards. Hailed as both a poet and a philosopher, Emerson was not of the highest rank as either. He was more influential as a practical philosopher and through his fresh and vibrant essays enriched countless thou- sands of humdrum lives. Catching the individualistic mood of the Republic, he stressed self-reliance, self- improvement, self-confidence, optimism, and freedom. The secret of Emerson's popularity lay largely in the fact that his ideals reflected those of an expanding America. By the 1850s he was an outspoken critic of slavery, and he ardently supported the Union cause in the Civil War.
Brooklyn's Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Bold, brassy, and swaggering was the open-collared figure In his famous collection of poems Leaves of Grass (1855), he gave free rein to his gushing genius with what he called a "barbaric yawp." Highly romantic, emotional, and unconventional, he dispensed with titles, stanzas, rhymes, and at times even regular meter. He handled sex with shocking frankness, although he laundered his verses in later editions, and his book was banned in Boston. Whitman's Leaves of Grass was at first a financial fail- ure. The only three enthusiastic reviews that it received were written by the author himself—anonymously. But in time the once-withered Leaves of Grass, revived and honored, won for Whitman an enormous following in both America and Europe. His fame increased immensely among "Whitmaniacs" after his death. Leaves of Grass gained for Whitman the informal title "Poet Laureate of Democracy." Singing with tran- scendental abandon of his love for the masses, he caught the exuberant enthusiasm of an expanding America that had turned its back on the Old World: All the Past we leave behind; We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world; Fresh and strong the world we seize—world of labor and the march— Pioneers! O Pioneers! Here at last was the native art for which critics had been crying.
slavery issue in church
By 1844-1845 both the southern Baptists and the southern Methodists had split with their northern brethren over human bondage. The Methodists came to grief over the case of a slaveowning bishop in Georgia, whose second wife added several household slaves to his estate. In 1857 the Presbyterians, North and South, parted company. The secession of the southern churches foreshadowed the secession of the southern states. First the churches split, then the political parties split, and then the Union split.
drink problem
Custom, combined with a hard and monoto- nous life, led to the excessive drinking of hard liquor, even among women, clergymen, and members of Congress. Weddings and funerals all too often became disgraceful brawls, and occasionally a drunken mourner would fall into the open grave with the corpse. Heavy drinking decreased the efficiency of labor, and poorly safeguarded machinery operated under the influence of alcohol increased the danger of accidents occurring at work. Drunkenness also fouled the sanctity of the family, threatening the spiritual welfare—and physical safety—of women and children. After earlier and feebler efforts, the American Temperance Society was formed at Boston in 1826. Within a few years, about a thousand local groups sprang into existence. They implored drinkers to sign the temperance pledge and organized children's clubs, known as the "Cold Water Army." Temperance crusaders also made effective use of pictures, pamphlets, and lurid lecturers, some of whom were reformed drunkards. A popular temperance song ran, We've done with our days of carousing, Our nights, too, of frolicsome glee; For now with our sober minds choosing, We've pledged ourselves never to spree.
Deism
Deists relied on reason rather than revelation, on science rather than the Bible. They rejected the concept of original sin and denied Christ's divinity. Yet Deists believed in a Supreme Being who had created a knowable universe and endowed human beings with a capacity for moral behavior.
George Bancroft (1800-1891)
Energetic who as secretary of the navy helped found the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845, has deservedly received the title "Father of American History." He published a spirited, superpatri- otic history of the United States to 1789 in six (originally ten) volumes (1834-1876), a work that grew out of his vast researches in dusty archives in Europe and America.
Oberlin College (18210
Female Seminary jolted traditionalists in 1837 when it opened its doors to women as well as men. (Oberlin had already created shock waves by admitting black students.)
John J. Audubon (1785-1851)
His magnificently illustrated Birds of America attained considerable popularity. The Audubon Society for the protection of birds was named after him, although as a young man he shot much feathered game for sport.
Agitation for peace
In 1828 the American Peace Society was formed, with a ringing declaration of war on war. A leading spirit was William Ladd, who orated when his legs were so badly ulcerated that he had to sit on a stool. His ideas were finally to bear some fruit in the interna-tional organizations for collective security of the twenti- eth century. The American peace crusade, linked with a European counterpart, was making promising progress by midcentury, but it was set back by the bloodshed of the Crimean War in Europe and the Civil War in America.
Mother Ann Lee
Leader of Shakers
Shakers (1840-1940)
Led by Mother Ann Lee, they began in the 1770s to set up the first of a score or so of religious communities. The Shakers attained a membership of about six thousand in 1840, but since their monastic customs prohibited both marriage and sexual relations, they were virtually extinct by 1940.
professor James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
Many-sided who succeeded Professor Longfellow at Harvard, ranks as one of America's better poets. He was also a distinguished essayist, literary critic, editor, and diplomat—a diffusion of talents that hampered his poetical output. Lowell is remembered as a political satirist in his Biglow Papers, especially those of 1846 dealing with the Mexican War. Written partly as poetry in the Yankee dialect, the Papers condemned in blister- ing terms the alleged slavery-expansion designs of the Polk administration.
Brigham Young (1846-1847)
Mormon Moses who took over after Joseph Smith. The falling torch was seized by a remarkable Mormon Moses named Brigham Young. Stern and austere in contrast to Smith's charm and affability, the barrel-chested Brigham Young had received only eleven days of formal schooling. But he quickly proved to be an aggressive leader, an eloquent preacher, and a gifted administrator. Determined to escape further persecution, Young in 1846-1847 led his oppressed and despoiled Latter-Day Saints over vast rolling plains to Utah as they sang "Come, Come, Ye Saints."
The Blithedale Romance (1852)
Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel inspired by The Brook Farm experiment & main character was modeled on the feminist writer Margaret Fuller.
Susan B. Anthony
Quaker-reared a militant lecturer for women's rights, fearlessly exposed herself to rotten garbage and vulgar epithets. She became such a conspicuous advocate of female rights that pro- gressive women everywhere were called "Suzy Bs."
women's rights movement
Set up by Lucretia Mott, a sprightly Quaker whose ire had been aroused when she and her fellow female delegates to the London antislavery convention of 1840 were not recog- nized. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a mother of seven who had insisted on leaving "obey" out of her marriage ceremony, shocked fellow feminists by going so far as to advocate suffrage for women. Quaker-reared Susan B. Anthony, a militant lecturer for women's rights, fearlessly exposed herself to rotten garbage and vulgar epithets. She became such a conspicuous advocate of female rights that pro- gressive women everywhere were called "Suzy Bs."
Insane
Sufferers from so-called insanity were still being treated with incredible cruelty. The medieval concept had been that the mentally deranged were cursed with unclean spirits; the nineteenth-century idea was that they were willfully perverse and depraved—to be treated only as beasts. Many crazed persons were chained in jails or poor-houses with sane people.
Tax-supported primary schools
Tax-supported primary schools were scarce in the early years of the Republic. They had the odor of pauperism about them, since they existed chiefly to educate the children of the poor—the so-called ragged schools. Advocates of "free" public education met stiff opposi- tion. A midwestern legislator cried that he wanted only this simple epitaph when he died: "Here lies an enemy of public education." But due to taxation for education, Tax-supported public education, though miserably lagging in the slavery-cursed South, triumphed between 1825 and 1850. Hard-toiling laborers wielded increased influence and demanded instruction for their children. Most important was the gaining of manhood suffrage for whites in Jackson's day. A free vote cried aloud for free education. A civilized nation that was both ignorant and free, declared Thomas Jefferson, "never was and never will be."
anticlericalism
The austere Calvinist rigor had long been seeping out of the American churches. The rationalist ideas of the French Revolutionary era had done much to soften the older orthodoxy. Thomas Paine's widely circulated book The Age of Reason (1794) had shockingly declared that all churches were "set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Unitarians
The more prosperous and conservative denominations in the East were little touched by revivalism
William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870)
The most noteworthy literary figure produced by the South before the Civil War Quantitatively, at least, he was great: eighty-two books flowed from his ever-moist pen, winning for him the title "the Cooper of the South." His themes dealt with the southern frontier in colonial days and with the South during the Revolutionary War. But he was neglected by his own section, even though he mar- ried into the socially elite and became a slaveowner. The high-toned planter aristocracy would never accept the son of a poor Charleston storekeeper.
Higher education
The religious zeal of the Second Great Awakening led to the planting of many small, denominational, liberal arts colleges, chiefly in the South and West. Too often they were academically anemic, established more to satisfy local pride than genuinely to advance the cause of learning. Like their more venerable, ivy-draped brethren, the new colleges offered a narrow, tradition-bound curriculum of Latin, Greek, mathematics, and moral philosophy. On new and old campuses alike, there was little intellectual vitality and much boredom. The first state-supported universities sprang up in the South, beginning with North Carolina in 1795. Federal land grants nourished the growth of state institutions of higher learning. Conspicuous among the early group was the University of Virginia, founded in 1819. It was largely the brainchild of Thomas Jefferson, who designed its beautiful archi- tecture and who at times watched its construction through a telescope from his hilltop home. He dedicated the university to freedom from religious or political shackles, and modern languages and the sciences received unusual emphasis.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
The scholarly who taught anatomy with a sparkle at Harvard Medical School, was a prominent poet, essay- ist, novelist, lecturer, and wit. A nonconformist and a fascinating conversationalist, he shone among a group of literary lights who regarded Boston as "the hub of the universe." His poem "The Last Leaf," in honor of the last "white Indian" of the Boston Tea Party, came to apply to himself. Dying at the age of eighty-five, he was the "last leaf" among his distinguished contemporaries.*
Maine Law of 1851
This drastic new statute, hailed as "the law of Heaven Americanized," prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor. Other states in the North followed Maine's example, and by 1857 about a dozen had passed various prohibitory laws. But these figures are deceptive, for within a decade some of the statutes were repealed or declared unconsti- tutional, if not openly flouted.
Woman's Rights Convention (1848)
Unflinching feminists met at Seneca Falls, New York, The defiant Stanton read a "Declaration of Sentiments," which in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence declared that "all men and women are created equal." One resolution formally demanded the ballot for females. Amid scorn and denunciation from press and pulpit, the Seneca Falls meeting launched the modern women's rights movement.
Unitarian faith
Unitarians held that God existed in only one person (hence unitarian), and not in the orthodox Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit). Although denying the deity of Jesus, Unitarians stressed the essential good- ness of human nature rather than its vileness; they proclaimed their belief in free will and the possibility of salvation through good works; they pictured God not as a stern Creator but as a loving Father. Embraced by many leading thinkers (including Ralph Waldo Emerson), the Unitarian movement appealed mostly to intellectuals whose rationalism and optimism contrasted sharply with the hellfire doctrines of Calvinism, especially predestination and human depravity.
Gender differences
Women were thought to be physically and emotionally weak, but also artistic and refined. Endowed with finely tuned moral sensibilities, they were the keepers of soci- ety's conscience, with special responsibility to teach the young how to be good and productive citizens of the Republic. Men were considered strong but crude, always in danger of slipping into some savage or beastly way of life if not guided by the gentle hands of their loving ladies.
Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827)
a Marylander, painted some sixty portraits of Washington, who patiently sat for about fourteen of them
Noah Webster (1758-1843)
a Yale-educated Connecticut Yankee who was known as the "Schoolmaster of the Republic." His "reading lessons," used by millions of children in the nineteenth century, were partly designed to promote patriotism. Webster devoted twenty years to his famous dictionary, published in 1828, which helped to standardize the American language.
Professor Louis Agassiz (1807-1873)
a distinguished French Swiss immigrant, served for a quarter of a century at Harvard College. A path-breaking student of biology who sometimes carried snakes in his pockets, he insisted on original research and deplored the reigning overempha- sis on memory work.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
a mother of seven who had insisted on leaving "obey" out of her marriage ceremony, shocked fellow feminists by going so far as to advocate suffrage for women.
Dorothea Dix (1802-1887)
a physically frail woman afflicted with persistent lung trouble, she possessed infinite compassion and willpower. She traveled some sixty thousand miles in eight years and assembled her damning reports on insanity and asylums from firsthand observations. Though she never raised her voice, Dix's message was loud and clear. Her classic petition of 1843 to the Massa- chusetts legislature, describing cells so foul that visitors were driven back by the stench, turned legislative stom- achs and hearts. Her persistent prodding resulted in improved conditions and in a gain for the concept that the demented were not willfully perverse but mentally ill.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
a poet, a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a nonconformist. Condemning a government that supported slavery, he refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax and was jailed for a night.* A gifted prose writer, he is well known for Walden: Or Life in the Woods (1854). The book is a record of Thoreau's two years of simple existence in a hut that he built on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. A stiff-necked individualist, he believed that he should reduce his bodily wants so as to gain time for a pursuit of truth through study and meditation. Thoreau's Walden and his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience exercised a strong influence in furthering idealistic thought, both in America and abroad. His writings later encouraged Mahatma Gandhi to resist British rule in India and, still later, inspired the development of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.'s thinking about nonviolence.
Joseph Smith (1830)
a rugged visionary, proud of his prowess at wrestling—reported that he had received some golden plates from an angel. When deciphered, they constituted the Book of Mormon, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) was launched. It was a native American product, a new religion, destined to spread its influence worldwide.After establishing a religious oligarchy, Smith ran into serious opposition from his non-Mormon neigh- bors, first in Ohio and then in Missouri and Illinois. His cooperative sect antagonized rank-and-file Americans, who were individualistic and dedicated to free enter- prise. The Mormons aroused further anger by voting as a unit and by openly but understandably drilling their militia for defensive purposes. Accusations of polygamy likewise arose and increased in intensity, for Joseph Smith was reputed to have several wives. Continuing hostility finally drove the Mormons to desperate measures. In 1844 Joseph Smith and his brother were murdered and mangled by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, and the movement seemed near collapse
Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828)
a spendthrift Rhode Islander and one of the most gifted of the early group, wielded his brush in Britain in competition with the best artists. He produced several portraits of Washington, all of them somewhat idealized and dehumanized. Truth to tell, by the time he posed for Stuart, the famous general had lost his natural teeth and some of the original shape of his face.
Lucretia Mott
a sprightly Quaker whose ire had been aroused when she and her fellow female delegates to the London antislavery convention of 1840 were not recog- nized
Ohioan William H. McGuffey (1800-1873)
a teacher-preacher of rare power. His grade-school readers, first published in the 1830s, sold 122 million copies in the following decades. McGuffey's Readers hammered home lasting lessons in morality, patriotism, and idealism.
foes of Demon Drink
adopted two major lines of attack. One was to stiffen the individual's will to resist the wiles of the little brown jug. The moderate reformers thus stressed "temperance" rather than "teetotalism," or the total elimination of intoxicants. But less patient zealots came to believe that temptation should be removed by legislation.
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
an orphaned and ill-educated New Yorker, went to sea as a youth and served eighteen adventuresome months on a whaler. "A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard," he wrote. Jumping ship in the South Seas, he lived among cannibals, from whom he providently escaped uneaten. His fresh and charming tales of the South Seas were immediately popular, but his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851), was not. This epic novel is a complex allegory of good and evil, told in terms of the conflict between a whaling captain, Ahab, and a giant white whale, Moby Dick. Captain Ahab, having lost a leg to the marine monster, lives only for revenge. His pursuit finally ends when Moby Dick rams and sinks Ahab's ship, leaving only one survivor. The whale's exact iden- tity and Ahab's motives remain obscure. In the end the sea, like the terrifyingly impersonal and unknowable universe of Melville's imagination, simply rolls on. Moby Dick was widely ignored at the time of its publi- cation; people were accustomed to more straightforward and upbeat prose. A disheartened Melville continued to write unprofitably for some years, part of the time eking out a living as a customs inspector, and then died in rela- tive obscurity and poverty. Ironically, his brooding mas- terpiece about the mysterious white whale had to wait until the more jaded twentieth century for readers and for proper recognition
Holyoke Seminary (1837)
an outstanding women's school in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Mossback critics scoffed that "they'll be educatin' cows next."
Woman's higher education
as frowned upon in the early decades of the nineteenth century. A woman's place was believed to be in the home, and training in needlecraft seemed more important than training in algebra. In an era when the clinging-vine bride was the ideal, coeducation was regarded as frivolous. Prejudices also prevailed that too much learning injured the feminine brain, undermined health, and rendered a young lady unfit for marriage. The teachers of Susan B. Anthony, the future feminist, refused to instruct her in long division. Women's schools at the secondary level began to attain some respectability in the 1820s, thanks in part to the dedicated work of Emma Willard Women's schools at the secondary level began to attain some respectability in the 1820s, thanks in part to the dedicated work of Emma Willard
The Knickerbocker Group
blazed brilliantly across the literary heavens, thus enabling America for the first time to boast of a literature to match its magnificent landscapes.
Washington Irving (1783-1859)
born in New York City, was the first American to win international recogni- tion as a literary figure. Steeped in the traditions of New Netherland, he published in 1809 his Knickerbocker's History of New York, with its amusing caricatures of the Dutch. When the family business failed, Irving was forced to turn to the goose-feather pen. In 1819-1820 he published The Sketch Book, which brought him immedi- ate fame at home and abroad. Combining a pleasing style with delicate charm and quiet humor, he used English as well as American themes and included such immortal Dutch American tales as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Europe was amazed to find at last an American with a feather in his hand, not in his hair. Later turning to Spanish locales and biography, Irving did much to interpret America to Europe and Europe to America. He was, said the Englishman William Thackeray, "the first ambassador whom the New World of letters sent to the Old."
Sarah & Angelina (Grimke sisters)
championed antislavery.
Imprisonment for debt
continued to be a night- mare, though its extent has been exaggerated. As late as 1830, hundreds of penniless people were languishing in filthy holes, sometimes for owing less than one dollar. The poorer working classes were especially hard hit by this merciless practice. But as the embattled laborer won the ballot and asserted himself, state legislatures gradually abolished debtors' prisons.
painting
continued to be handicapped. It suffered from the dollar-grabbing of a raw civilization; from the hustle, bustle, and absence of leisure; from the lack of a wealthy class to sit for portraits—and then pay for them. Some of the earliest painters were forced to go to England, where they found both training and patrons. America exported artists and imported art. lso suffered from the Puritan prejudice that art was a sinful waste of time— and often obscene. John Adams boasted that "he would not give a sixpence for a bust of Phidias or a painting by Raphael." When Edward Everett, the eminent Boston scholar and orator, placed a statue of Apollo in his home, he had its naked limbs draped.
Medicine
despite a steady growth of medical schools, was still primitive by modern standards. Bleeding remained a common cure and a curse as well. Smallpox plagues were still dreaded, and the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia took several thousand lives. "Bring out your dead!" was the daily cry of the corpse-wagon drivers. People everywhere complained of ill health— malaria, the "rheumatics," the "miseries," and the chills. Illness often resulted from improper diet, hurried eat-ing, perspiring and cooling off too rapidly, and igno- rance of germs and sanitation. "We was sick every fall, regular," wrote the mother of future president James Garfield. Life expectancy was still dismayingly short— about forty years for a white person born in 1850, and less for blacks. The suffering from decayed or ulcerated teeth was enormous; tooth extraction was often prac- ticed by the muscular village blacksmith. Self-prescribed patent medicines were common (one dose for people, two for horses) and included Robertson's Infallible Worm Destroying Lozenges. Fad diets proved popular, including the whole-wheat bread and crackers regimen of Sylvester Graham. Among home remedies was the rubbing of tumors with dead toads. The use of medicine by the regular doctors was often harmful, and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in 1860 that if the medicines, as then employed, were thrown into the sea, humans would be better off and the fish worse off. Victims of surgical operations were ordinarily tied down, often after a stiff drink of whiskey. The surgeon then sawed or cut with breakneck speed, undeterred by the piercing shrieks of the patient. A priceless boon for medical progress came in the early 1840s, when several American doctors and dentists, working independently, successfully employed laughing gas and ether as anesthetics.
Margaret Fuller
edited a tran- scendentalist journal, The Dial, and took part in the strug- gle to bring unity and republican government to Italy. She died in a shipwreck off New York's Fire Island while return- ing to the United States in 1850.
Taxation for education
ell-to-do, conservative Americans gradually saw the light. If they did not pay to educate "other folkses brats," the "brats" might grow up into a dangerous, ignorant rabble—armed with the vote was an insurance premium that the wealthy paid for stability and democracy.
Mary Lyon
established an outstanding women's school
Amelia Bloomer
fevolted against the current "street sweeping" female attire by donning a short skirt with Turkish trousers—"bloomers," they were called—amid much bawdy ridicule about "Bloomerism" and "loose habits." A jeering male rhyme of the times jabbed, Gibbey, gibbey gab The women had a confab And demanded the rights To wear the tights Gibbey, gibbey gab.
magazines
flourished as a way to spread info but most of them withered after a short life
private subscription libraries/tax-supported libraries
for Adults who craved more learning
House-to-house peddlers
for Adults who craved more learning did a lush business in feeding the public appetite for culture.
Traveling Lectures
for Adults who craved more learning helped to carry learning to the masses through the lyceum lecture associations, which numbered about three thousand by 1835.
John Trumbull (1756-1843)
fought in the Revolutionary War, recaptured its scenes and spirit on scores of striking canvases.
Robert Owen
founded in 1825 a communal society of about a thousand people at New Harmony, Indiana. Little harmony prevailed in the colony, which, in addition to hard-working visionaries, attracted a sprinkling of radicals, work-shy theorists, and outright scoundrels. The colony sank in a morass of contradiction and confusion.
Godey's Lady's Book (1830-1898)
founded in 1830, survived until 1898 and attained the enormous circulation (for those days) of 150,000. It was devoured devotedly by millions of women, many of whom read the dog-eared copies of their relatives and friends.
Oneida Community (1848)
founded in New York It practiced free love ("complex marriage"), birth control (through "male continence," or coitus reservatus), and the eugenic selection of parents to produce superior offspring. This curious enterprise flourished for more than thirty years, largely because its artisans made superior steel traps and Oneida Community (silver) Plate
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)
grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, in the bosom of transcenden- talism, alongside neighbors Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller. Her philosopher father Bronson Alcott occupied himself more devotedly to ideas than earning a living, leaving his daughter to write Little Women (1868) and other books to support her mother and sisters.
Matthew F. Maury (1806-1873)
had important writings on ocean winds and currents
Nathaniel Bowditch (1733-1838)
had important writings on practical navigation
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
he first American novelist, as Washington Irving was the first general writer, to gain world fame and to make New World themes respectable. Marrying into a wealthy family, he settled down on the frontier of New York. Reading one day to his wife from an insipid English novel, Cooper remarked in disgust that he could write a better book himself. His wife challenged him to do so—and he did.After an initial failure, Cooper launched out upon an illustrious career in 1821 with his second novel, The Spy—an absorbing tale of the American Revolution. His stories of the sea were meritorious and popular, but his fame rests most enduringly on the Leatherstocking Tales. A dead-eye rifleman named Natty Bumppo, one of nature's noblemen, meets with Indians in stirring adventures like The Last of the Mohicans. James Fenimore Cooper's novels had a wide sale among Europeans, some of whom came to think of all American people as born with tomahawk in hand. Actually Cooper was exploring the viability and destiny of America's republican experiment, by contrasting the undefiled values of "natural men," children of the wooded wilderness, with the artificiality of modern civilization.
American Temperance Society
hey implored drinkers to sign the temperance pledge and organized children's clubs, known as the "Cold Water Army." Temperance crusaders also made effective use of pictures, pamphlets, and lurid lecturers, some of whom were reformed drunkards. A popular temperance song ran, We've done with our days of carousing, Our nights, too, of frolicsome glee; For now with our sober minds choosing, We've pledged ourselves never to spree.
Brook Farm (1841-1846)
in Massachusetts, comprising two hundred acres of grudging soil the brotherly and sisterly cooperation of about twenty intellectuals committed to the philosophy of transcen- dentalism They prospered reasonably well until 1846, when they lost by fire a large new communal building shortly before its completion nspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel The Blithedale Romance (1852)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
lived as a recluse but created her own origi- nal world through precious gems of poetry. In deceptively spare language and simple rhyme schemes, she explored universal themes of nature, love, death, and immortality. Although she refused during her lifetime to publish any of her poems, when she died, nearly two thousand of them were found among her papers and eventually made their way into print.
North American Review (1815)
long-lived leader of the intellectual magazines
Audubon Society
made for the protection of birds & names after John Audubon
Professor Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864)
most influential American scientist a pioneer chemist and geologist who taught and wrote brilliantly at Yale College for more than fifty years
female reformers
most of them white and well-to-do—began to gather strength as the century neared its halfway point. Most were broad-gauge battlers; while demanding rights for women, they joined in the general reform movement of the age, fighting for temper- ance and the abolition of slavery. Like men, they had been touched by the evangelical spirit that offered the promise of earthly reward for human endeavor. Neither foul eggs nor foul words, when hurled by disapproving men, could halt women heartened by these doctrines.
Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There (1854)
most popular anti-alcohol tract written by T.S. Arthur described in shocking detail how a once-happy village was ruined by Sam Slade's tavern. The book was second only to Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and it enjoyed a highly successful run on the stage. Its touching theme song began with the words of a little girl: Father, dear father, come home with me now, The clock in the belfry strikes one.
famed little red schoolhouse
ne room, one stove, one teacher, and often eight grades—became the shrine of American democracy.
Professor Asa Gray (1810-1888)
of Harvard College, the Columbus of American botany, published over 350 books, monographs, and papers. His textbooks set new standards for clarity and interest.
Neal S. Dow
of Maine, a blue-nosed reformer who, as a mayor of Portland and an employer of labor, had often witnessed the debauching effect of alcohol—to say nothing of the cost to his pocketbook of work time lost because of drunken employees. Dow—the "Father of Prohibition"—sponsored the so-called Maine Law of 1851. This drastic new statute, hailed as "the law of Heaven Americanized," prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor. Other states in the North followed Maine's example, and by 1857 about a dozen had passed various prohibitory laws. But these figures are deceptive, for within a decade some of the statutes were repealed or declared unconsti- tutional, if not openly flouted.
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell
pioneer in a previously forbidden profession for women, was the first female graduate of a medical college
Stephen C. Foster (1826-1864)
produced best black songs His one excursion into the South occurred in 1852, after he had published "Old Folks at Home." Foster made a valuable contribution to American folk music by cap- turing the plaintive spirit of the slaves. An odd and pathetic figure, he finally lost both his art and his popu- larity and died in a charity ward after drowning his sor- rows in drink.
lyceums
provided platforms for speakers in such areas as science, literature, and moral philosophy. Talented talkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson journeyed thousands of miles on the lyceum circuits, casting their pearls of civilization before appreciative audiences.
Methodists and Baptists
reaped the most abundant harvest of souls from the fields fertilized by revivalism. Both sects stressed personal conversion (contrary to predestination), a relatively democratic control of church affairs, and a rousing emotionalism. As a frontier jingle ran,The devil hates the Methodists Because they sing and shout the best." spawned by the swelling evangelistic fervor tended to come from less prosperous, less "learned" communities in the rural South and West along with other new sects
transcendentalist movement of the 1830s
resulted in part from a liberalizing of the straightjacket Puritan theology. It also owed much to foreign influ-ences, including the German romantic philosophers and the religions of Asia. The transcendentalists rejected the prevailing theory, derived from John Locke, that all knowledge comes to the mind through the senses. Truth, rather, "transcends" the senses: it cannot be found by observation alone. Every person possesses an inner light that can illuminate the highest truth and put him or her in direct touch with God, or the "Oversoul." These mystical doctrines of transcendentalism defied precise definition, but they underlay concrete beliefs. Foremost was a stiff-backed individualism in matters religious as well as social. Closely associated was a commitment to self-reliance, self-culture, and self-discipline. These traits naturally bred hostility to authority and to formal institutions of any kind, as well as to all conventional wisdom. Finally came exaltation of the dignity of the individual, whether black or white—the mainspring of a whole array of humanitarian reforms.
Lucy Stone
retained her maiden name after marriage—hence the latter-day "Lucy Stoners," who follow her example.
Millerites/Adventists
rose from the superheated soil of the Burned-Over District in the 1830s. Named after the eloquent and commanding William Miller, they inter- preted the Bible to mean that Christ would return to earth on October 22, 1844. Donning their go-to-meeting clothes, they gathered in prayerful assemblies to greet their Redeemer. The failure of Jesus to descend on sched- ule dampened but did not destroy the movement.
Western New York
so blistered by sermonizers preaching "hellfire and damnation" that it came to be known as the "Burned-Over District."
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
somber Salem, Mas- sachusetts writer grew up in an atmosphere heavy with the memories of his Puritan forebears and the tragedy of his father's pre- mature death on an ocean voyage. His masterpiece was The Scarlet Letter (1850), which describes the Puritan practice of forcing an adultress to wear a scarlet "A" on her clothing. The tragic tale chronicles the psychological effects of sin on the guilty heroine and her secret lover (the father of her baby), a minister of the gospel in Puri- tan Boston. In The Marble Faun (1860), Hawthorne dealt with a group of young American artists who witness a mysterious murder in Rome. The book explores the concepts of the omnipresence of evil and the dead hand of the past weighing upon the present.
Mormons
some golden plates from an angel. When deciphered, they constituted the Book of Mormon, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) was launched. It was a native American product, a new religion, destined to spread its influence worldwide. Overcoming pioneer hardships, the Mormons soon made the desert bloom like a new Eden by means of ingenious and cooperative methods of irrigation. The crops of 1848, threatened by hordes of crickets, were saved when flocks of gulls appeared, as if by a miracle, to gulp down the invaders. (A monument to the seagulls stands in Salt Lake City today.) Mormons continued to grow with their polygamy and multiple wives producing a huge population as well as incoming immigrants.
Early free schools
stayed open only a few months of the year. Schoolteachers, most of them men in this era, were too often ill-trained, ill-tempered, and ill-paid. They frequently put more stress on "lickin'" (with a hickory stick) than on "larnin'." These knights of the blackboard often "boarded around" in the commu- nity, and some knew scarcely more than their older pupils. They usually taught only the "three Rs"—"readin', 'ritin', and 'rithmetic." To many rugged Americans, suspi- cious of "book larnin'," this was enough.
Horace Mann (1796-1859)
stepped Horace Mann (1796-1859), a brilliant and idealistic graduate of Brown University. As secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, he campaigned effectively for more and better schoolhouses, longer school terms, higher pay for teachers, and an expanded curriculum. His influence radiated out to other states, and impressive improvements were chalked up. Yet education remained an expensive luxury for many communities. As late as 1860, the nation counted only about a hundred public secondary schools—and nearly a million white adult illiterates. Black slaves in the South were legally forbidden to receive instruction in reading or writing, and even free blacks, in the North as well as the South, were usually excluded from the schools.
Thomas Jefferson
the ablest American architect of his generation. He brought a classical design to his Virginia hilltop home, Monticello—perhaps the most stately mansion in the nation. The quadrangle of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, another of Jefferson's creations, remains one of the finest examples of classical architecture in America.
Peter Cartwright (1785-1872)
the best known of the Methodist "circuit riders," or traveling frontier preachers. This ill-educated but sinewy servant of the Lord ranged for a half-century from Tennessee to Illinois, calling upon sinners to repent. With bellowing voice and flailing arms, he converted thousands of souls to the Lord. Not only did he lash the Devil with his tongue, but with his fists he knocked out rowdies who tried to break up his meetings. His Christianity was definitely muscular.
Charles Grandison Finney
the greatest of the revival preachers. Trained as a lawyer, Finney abandoned the bar to become an evangelist after a deeply moving conversion experience as a young man. Tall and athletically built, Finney held huge crowds spellbound with the power of his oratory and the pungency of his message. He led massive revivals in Rochester and New York City in 1830 and 1831. Finney preached a version of the old-time religion, but he was also an innovator. He devised the "anxious bench," where repentant sinners could sit in full view of the congregation, and he encouraged women to pray aloud in public. Holding out the promise of a perfect Christian kingdom on earth, Finney denounced both alcohol and slavery. He eventually served as president of Oberlin College in Ohio, which he helped to make a hotbed of revivalist activity and abolitionism.
home
was a woman's special sphere, the center- piece of the "cult of domesticity." Even reformers like Catharine Beecher, who urged her sisters to seek employ- ment as teachers, endlessly celebrated the role of the good homemaker. But some women increasingly felt that the glorified sanctuary of the home was in fact a gilded cage. They yearned to tear down the bars that separated the private world of women from the public world of men.
Music
was slowly shaking off the restraints of colonial days, when the prim Puritans had frowned upon nonreligious singing. Rhythmic and nostalgic "darky" tunes, popularized by whites, were becoming immense hits by midcentury. Special favorites were the uniquely American minstrel shows, featuring white actors with blackened faces. "Dixie," later adopted by the Confederates as their battle hymn, was written in 1859, ironically in New York City by an Ohioan.
Criminal Codes
were likewise being softened, in accord with more enlightened European practices. The number of capital offenses was being reduced, and brutal punishments, such as whipping and branding, were being slowly eliminated. A refreshing idea was taking hold that prisons should reform as well as punish—hence "reformatories," "houses of correction," and "penitentiaries" (for penance).
William H. Prescott (1796-1859)
who accidentally lost the sight of an eye while in college, conserved his remaining weak vision and published classic accounts of the conquest of Mexico (1843) and Peru (1847)
Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
who for many years taught modern languages at Harvard College, was one of the most popular poets ever produced in America. Hand- some and urbane, he lived a generally serene life, except for the tragic deaths of two wives, the second of whom perished before his eyes when her dress caught fire. Writ- ing for the genteel classes, he was adopted by the less cul- tured masses. His wide knowledge of European literature supplied him with many themes, but some of his most admired poems—"Evangeline," "The Song of Hiawatha," and "The Courtship of Miles Standish"—were based on American traditions. Immensely popular in Europe, Longfellow was the only American ever to be honored with a bust in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
who spent much of his youth in Virginia, was an eccentric genius. Orphaned at an early age, cursed with ill health, and married to a child-wife of thirteen who fell fatally ill of tuberculosis, he suffered hunger, cold, poverty, and debt. Failing at suicide, he took refuge in the bottle and dissipated his talent early. Poe was a gifted lyric poet, as "The Raven" attests. A master stylist, he also excelled in the short story, especially of the horror type, in which he shared his alcoholic nightmares with fascinated readers. If he did not invent the modern detective novel, he at least set new high standards in tales like "The Gold Bug." Poe was fascinated by the ghostly and ghastly, as in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and other stories. He reflected a morbid sensibility distinctly at odds with the usually optimistic tone of American culture. Partly for this reason, Poe has perhaps been even more prized by Europeans than by Americans. His brilliant career was cut short when he was found drunk in a Baltimore gutter and shortly thereafter died.
Francis Parkman (1823-1893)
whose eyes were so defective that he wrote in darkness with the aid of a guiding machine, penned a brilliant series of volumes beginning in 1851. In epic style he chronicled the struggle between France and Britain in colonial times for the mastery of North America.
Emma Willard (1787-1870)
woman who bought woman's school more respectability by establishing Oberlin
T. S. Arthur
wrote the dramatic novel Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There
