Apush ch 11 vocab
Unitarian
believed in a single god, not a trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Minstrelsy
white actors in blackface presented comic routines that combined racist caricature and social criticism. Minstrelsy began around 1830, when a few actors put on blackface and performed song-and-dance routines. The most famous was John Dartmouth Rice, whose "Jim Crow" blended a weird shuffle-dance-and-jump with unintelligible lyrics delivered in "Negro dialect." Gavitt's Original Ethiopian Serenaders. The actor-singers' rambling lyrics poked racist fun at African Americans, portraying them as lazy, sensual, and irresponsible while simultaneously using them to criticize white society. Minstrels ridiculed the drunkenness of Irish immigrants, parodied the halting English of German immigrants, denounced women's demands for political rights, and mocked the arrogance of upper-class men. Still, by caricaturing blacks, the minstrels declared the importance of being white and spread racist sentiments among Irish and German immigrants.
Socialism
would liberate workers from capitalist employers and the slavish labor.
American Renaissance
A mid-nineteenth-century flourishing of literature and philosophy, wrote a remarkable number of first-class novels, poems, and essays. Influenced by Emerson.
Internal Divisions
Assailed by racists from the outside, evangelical abolitionists fought among themselves over gender issues. Many antislavery clergymen opposed an activist role for women, but Garrison had broadened his reform agenda to include pacifism, the abolition of prisons, and women's rights. In 1840, Garrison's demand that the American Anti-Slavery Society support women's rights split the abolitionist movement. American Anti-Slavery Society and assailed both the institutions that bound blacks and the customs that constrained free women.
Black Social Thought: Uplift, Race Equality, and Rebellion
Beginning in the 1790s, leading African Americans in the North advocated a strategy of social uplift, encouraging free blacks to "elevate" themselves through education, temperance, and hard work. By securing "respectability," they argued, blacks could become the social equals of whites.
Immigrant Masses and Nativist Reaction
By 1850, immigrants were a major presence throughout the Northeast. Native-born New Yorkers took alarm as hordes of ethnically diverse migrants altered the city's culture. They organized a nativist movement — a final aspect of the new urban world. Beginning in the mid-1830s, nativists called for a halt to immigration and mounted a cultural and political assault on foreign-born residents. Similarly, the disciplined rejection of tobacco and alcohol by the Shakers and the Mormons found a parallel in the Washington Temperance Society and other urban reform organizations.
individalism
Coined by Alexis de Tocqueville. Describe the result of how individuals are force to fend for themselves. Native born white American no longer attached to each other by caste, class, association, or family.
gag rule
Congress refused, but in 1836, the House of Representatives adopted the so-called gag rule. Under this informal agreement, which remained in force until 1844, the House automatically tabled antislavery petitions, keeping the explosive issue of slavery off the congressional stage.
American Colonization Society
Garrison accused the American Colonization Society of perpetuating slavery and assailed the U.S. Constitution as "a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell" because it implicitly accepted racial bondage.
John Humphrey Noyes and Oneida
He ascribed the Fourierists' failure to their secular outlook and embraced the pious Shakers as the true "pioneers of modern Socialism." The Shakers' marriageless society also inspired Noyes to create a community that defined sexuality and gender roles in radically new ways. Dismissed as the pastor of a Congregational church for holding unorthodox beliefs, Noyes turned to perfectionism, an evangelical Protestant movement of the 1830s that attracted thousands of New Englanders who had migrated to New York and Ohio. Perfectionists believed that Christ had already returned to earth (the Second Coming) and therefore people could aspire to sinless perfection in their earthly lives. Rejected marriage, calling it a major barrier to perfection. Noyes embraced "complex marriage," in which all members of the community were married to one another. He rejected monogamy partly to free women from their status as the property of their husbands, as they were by custom and by common law. Symbolizing the quest for equality, Noyes's women followers cut their hair short and wore pantaloons under calf-length skirts. To give women the time and energy to participate fully in community affairs, Noyes urged them to avoid multiple pregnancies. He asked men to help by avoiding orgasm during intercourse. Less positively, he encouraged sexual relations at a very early age and used his position of power to manipulate the sexual lives of his followers. It stems from their radical questioning of traditional sexual norms and of the capitalist values and class divisions of the emerging market society. Their utopian communities stood as countercultural blueprints of a more egalitarian social and economic order.
Thoreau, Fuller, and Whitman
Henry David Thoreau - heeded Emerson's call and sought inspiration from the natural world. He published Walden which search for meaning beyond the artificiality of civilized society. Advocated a thoroughgoing individuality, urging readers to avoid unthinking conformity to social norms and peacefully to resist unjust laws. Margaret Fuller - exploring the possibilities of freedom for women. Embraced Emerson idea. Wrote The Dial and Woman in the Nineteenth Century. People could develop a life-affirming mystical relationship with god. Women deserved psychological and social independence. Inspired women writers and reformers. Walt Whitman - perfect communion with others.
transendentalism
It was an intellectual movement rooted in the religious soil of New England. First advocates were Unitarian ministers from rich New England families who questioned the constraints of their Puritan heritage. Inspired by European romanticism, a new conception of self and society. Rejected the ordered, rational world of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Embraced human passion and sought deeper insight into the mysteries of existence. Believe they could know the infinate and the eternal.
Brigham Young and Utah
Led by Brigham Young, Smith's leading disciple and now the sect's "prophet, seer and revelator". Joseph Smith III, they formed the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and settled throughout the Midwest. Congress set up the much smaller Utah Territory in 1850 and named Brigham Young its governor. Young and his associates ruled in an authoritarian fashion, determined to ensure the ascendancy of the Mormon Church and its practices. Pressed by Protestant church leaders to end polygamy and considering the Mormons' threat of nullification "a declaration of war," President James Buchanan dispatched a small army to Utah. Despite this bloodshed, the "Mormon War" ended quietly in June 1858.
Improving Prisons, Creating Asylums, Expanding Education
Other women set out to improve public institutions, and Dorothea Dix (1801-1887) was their model. In 1841, Dix took up a new cause. Discovering that insane women were jailed alongside male criminals, she persuaded Massachusetts lawmakers to enlarge the state hospital to house indigent mental patients. Exhilarated by that success, Dix began a national movement to establish state asylums for the mentally ill.
Moral Reform
Some religious women developed a sharp consciousness of gender and became public actors. In 1834, middle-class women in New York City founded the Female Moral Reform Society and elected Lydia Finney, the wife of revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, as its president. The society tried to curb prostitution and to protect single women from moral corruption. Employing only women as agents, the society provided moral guidance for young women who were working as factory operatives, seamstresses, or servants. Society members visited brothels, where they sang hymns, offered prayers, searched for runaway girls, and noted the names of clients. They also founded homes of refuge for prostitutes and won the passage of laws in Massachusetts and New York that made seduction a crime.
Joseph Smith and the Mormon Experience
The Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were religious utopians with a conservative social agenda: to perpetuate close-knit communities and patriarchal power. Joseph Smith Like many social movements of the era, Mormonism emerged from religious ferment among families of Puritan descent who lived along the Erie Canal and who were heirs to a religious tradition that believed in a world of wonders, supernatural powers, and visions of the divine. Smith came to believe that God had singled him out to receive a special revelation of divine truth. Published The Book of Mormon, which he claimed to have translated from ancient hieroglyphics on gold plates shown to him by an angel named Moroni. Explained the presence of native peoples in the Americas and integrated them into the Judeo-Christian tradition. Smith revived traditional social doctrines, including patriarchal authority. Goal was a church-directed society that would restore primitive Christianity and encourage moral perfection. Neighbor resentment increased when Smith refused to accept Illinois laws of which he disapproved, asked Congress to make Nauvoo a separate federal territory, and declared himself a candidate for president of the United States. Moreover, Smith claimed to have received a new revelation justifying polygamy, the practice of a man having multiple wives.
William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Weld, and Angelina and Sarah Grimké
The most determined abolitionist was William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879). He immediately started his own weekly, The Liberator (1831-1865), and founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Elizabeth Coltman Heyrick, Garrison demanded immediate abolition without compensation to slaveholders. In 1833, Garrison, Theodore Weld, and sixty other religious abolitionists, black and white, established the American Anti-Slavery Society. Abolitionist leaders launched a three-pronged plan of attack. To win the support of religious Americans, Weld published The Bible Against Slavery (1837), which used passages from Christianity's holiest book to discredit slavery.
Albert Brisbane and Fourierism
The movement mushroomed. Charles Fourier devised an eight-stage theory of social evolution that predicted the imminent decline of individual property rights and capitalists values. Albert Brisbane argued socialism would liberate workers from capitalist employers and the slavish labor. Phalanxes; own common property - stores, bank, and schools. Individual freedom was for men only. Women should do household chores. Shows difficulty in creating an utopia.
Origins of the Women's Movement
Their spiritual activism bolstered their authority within the household and gave them new influence over many areas of family life, including the timing of pregnancies. Women in propertied farm families were equally vigilant and carried domestic issues into the public sphere. To protect their homes and husbands from alcoholic excess, they joined the Independent Order of Good Templars, a temperance group which made women full members.
Seneca Falls and Beyond
They tried to strengthen the legal rights of married women by seeking legislation that permitted them to own property. This initiative won crucial support from affluent men, who feared bankruptcy in the volatile market economy and wanted to put some family assets in their wives' names.
Sex in the City
Thousands of young men and women flocked to the city searching for adventure and fortune, but many found only a hard life. Men - hard labor. Women - prostitution or servant.
The American Anti-Slavery Society
To spread their message, the abolitionists turned to mass communication. Using new steam-powered presses to print a million pamphlets, the American Anti-Slavery Society carried out a "great postal campaign" in 1835, flooding the nation, including the South, with its literature. The abolitionists' second tactic was to aid fugitive slaves. They provided lodging and jobs for escaped blacks in free states and created the Underground Railroad, an informal network of whites and free blacks in Richmond, Charleston, and other southern towns that assisted fugitives. Gave free black identification. There, they faced an uncertain future because most whites continued to reject civic or social equality for African Americans. Voters in six northern and midwestern states adopted constitutional amendments that denied or limited the franchise for free blacks. To thwart these efforts, white abolitionists and free blacks formed mobs that attacked slave catchers, released their captives, and often spirited them off to British-ruled Canada, which refused to extradite fugitive slaves. A political campaign was the final element of the abolitionists' program. Between 1835 and 1838, the American Anti-Slavery Society bombarded Congress with petitions containing nearly 500,000 signatures. They demanded the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, an end to the interstate slave trade, and a ban on admission of new slave states. Emerson condemned Americans for supporting slavery, and Thoreau, viewing the Mexican War as a naked scheme to extend slavery, refused to pay taxes and submitted to arrest. In 1848, he published "Resistance to Civil Government," an essay urging individuals to follow a higher moral law.
Mother Ann and the Shakers
United Sociey of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing(Shakers). First successful American communal movement. Ann Lee Stanley believe she was the incarnation of Christ. Establish a church near Albany, New York. Members embraced the common ownership of property; accepted strict oversight by church leaders;and pledged to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, politics, and war. Repudiated sexual pleasure and marriage. God was a dual person, male and female. Community government - female or male. - Eldresses and the Elders. Quietly disappeared.
Attacks on Abolitionism
Wealthy men feared that the attack on slave property might become an assault on all property rights, conservative clergymen condemned the public roles assumed by abolitionist women, and northern wage earners feared that freed blacks would work for lower wages and take their jobs. Racial solidarity was especially strong in the South, where whites banned abolitionists. Politicians joined the fray. President Andrew Jackson, a longtime slave owner, asked Congress in 1835 to restrict the use of the mails by abolitionist groups. Congress refused, but in 1836, the House of Representatives adopted the so-called gag rule. Under this informal agreement, which remained in force until 1844, the House automatically tabled antislavery petitions, keeping the explosive issue of slavery off the congressional stage.
Abolitionist Women
Women were central to the antislavery movement because they understood the special horrors of slavery for women. Harriet Beecher Stowe pinpointed the sexual abuse of women as a profound moral failing of the slave regime. As Garrisonian women attacked slavery, they frequently violated social taboos by speaking to mixed audiences of men and women. By 1840, female abolitionists were asserting that traditional gender roles resulted in the domestic slavery of women. No charter of rights, no individuality of her own. Having acquired a public voice and political skills in the crusade for African American freedom, thousands of northern women now advocated greater rights for themselves. The activists' legislative campaign required talented organizers and lobbyists. The most prominent political operative was Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), a Quaker who had acquired political skills in the temperance and antislavery movements. Addressing state legislatures, they proposed laws to allow married women to institute lawsuits, testify in court, and assume custody of their children in the event of divorce or a husband's death. Finally, they began a concerted campaign to win the vote for women.
perfectionism
an evangelical Protestant movement of the 1830s that attracted thousands of New Englanders who had migrated to New York and Ohio. Perfectionists believed that Christ had already returned to earth (the Second Coming) and therefore people could aspire to sinless perfection in their earthly lives.
Underground Railroad
an informal network of whites and free blacks in Richmond, Charleston, and other southern towns that assisted fugitives.
married women's property laws
between 1839 and 1845. Then, women activists in New York won a comprehensive statute that became the model for fourteen other states. The New York statute of 1848 gave women full legal control over the property they brought to a marriage.
abolitionist
crusade of the 1830s drew on the religious enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening. Around 1800, antislavery activists had assailed human bondage as contrary to republicanism and liberty. Three decades later, white abolitionists condemned slavery as a sin and demanded immediate, uncompensated emancipation. Their uncompromising stance led to fierce political debates, urban riots, and sectional conflict.
Mormonism
emerged from religious ferment among families of Puritan descent who lived along the Erie Canal and who were heirs to a religious tradition that believed in a world of wonders, supernatural powers, and visions of the divine.
Utopias
ideal communities that allow people to live differently and realize their spiritual potential. Rural utopias symbols of social protest and experimentation which challenged property rights and gender roles. Many were rural communalists of farmers and artisans seeking refuge from the economic depression of 1837 to 1843. Advocated the common ownership of property (socialism) Formed the Mother Ann and the Shakers.
lyceum movement
modeled on the public forum of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle — arranged lecture tours by hundreds of poets, preachers, scientists, and reformers. The lyceum became an important cultural institution in the North and Midwest, but not in the South, where the middle class was smaller and popular education had a lower priority. In 1839, nearly 150 lyceums in Massachusetts invited lecturers to address more than 33,000 subscribers. Emerson was the most popular speaker, eventually delivering fifteen hundred lectures in more than three hundred towns in twenty states.
separate sphere
or domestic life, said Reverend Fowler, and had no place in "the markets of trade, the scenes of politics and popular agitation, the courts of justice and the halls of legislation. Home is her peculiar sphere."
David Walker's Appeal
published a stirring pamphlet, An Appeal ... to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), protesting black "wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty!!!!!" Walker ridiculed the religious pretensions of slaveholders, justified slave rebellion, and in biblical language warned of a slave revolt if justice were delayed. "We must and shall be free," he told white Americans. In 1830, Walker and other African American activists called a national convention in Philadelphia. The delegates refused to endorse either Walker's radical call for a slave revolt or the traditional program of uplift for free blacks. Instead, this new generation of activists demanded freedom and "race equality" for those of African descent. They urged free blacks to use every legal means, including petitions and other forms of political protest, to break "the shackles of slavery."
Nat Turner's Revolt
staged a bloody revolt — a chronological coincidence that had far-reaching consequences. Turner had a religious vision in which "the Spirit" explained that "Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first." Turner and a handful of relatives and friends rose in rebellion and killed at least 55 white men, women, and children. Turner hoped that hundreds of slaves would rally to his cause, but he mustered only 60 men. The white militia quickly dispersed his poorly armed force and took their revenge. One company of cavalry killed 40 blacks in two days and put 15 of their heads on poles to warn "all those who should undertake a similar plot." Turner died by hanging, still identifying his mission with that of his Savior. "Was not Christ crucified?" he asked. Deeply shaken by Turner's Rebellion, the Virginia assembly debated a law providing for gradual emancipation and colonization abroad. When the bill failed by a vote of 73 to 58, the possibility that southern planters would voluntarily end slavery was gone forever. Instead, the southern states toughened their slave codes, limited black movement, and prohibited anyone from teaching slaves to read.
amalgamation
the racial mixing and intermarriage that Garrison seemed to support by holding meetings of blacks and whites of both sexes. Racial fears and hatreds led to violent mob actions. White workers in northern towns laid waste to taverns and brothels where blacks and whites mixed, and they vandalized "respectable" African American churches, temperance halls, and orphanages. In 1833, a mob of 1,500 New Yorkers stormed a church in search of Garrison and Arthur Tappan.
Seneca Falls Convention
which issued a rousing manifesto extending to women the egalitarian republican ideology of the Declaration of Independence. "All men and women are created equal," the Declaration of Sentiments declared, "[yet] the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman [and] the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her." To persuade Americans to right this long-standing wrong, the activists resolved to "employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and National legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press on our behalf." By staking out claims for equality for women in public life, the Seneca Falls reformers repudiated both the natural inferiority of women and the ideology of separate spheres. Most men dismissed the Seneca Falls declaration as nonsense, and many women also rejected the activists and their message.