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13: Antebellum Revival and Reform

  • Page ID
    7953
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    Learning Outcomes

    After completing this chapter, you should be able to:

    • Evaluate the broad social implications of the Second Great Awakening.
    • Analyze the “perfectionist” tendencies of the movements of the 1820-1860 period.
    • Explain how the cultural movements of the nineteenth century (transcendentalism, Utopian communities, and the Cult of Domesticity) influenced American culture.
    • Explain how The Second Great Awakening influenced the anti-slavery movement and the women’s rights movement.

    The period between 1820 and 1860 was a time of great change in society, religion, and culture in the United States. The Second Great Awakening, a religious revival movement, saw evangelical Christianity supplant the established religious patterns of the colonial and Revolutionary eras: the Methodist and Baptist churches grew and spread. Others turned to “rational” religious denominations, such as Unitarianism. They based their religious beliefs and practices on rationalism, downplaying the miracles of scripture and concentrating instead on the morals it imparted and the historical events it recounted, arguing, “my rational nature is from God.” The mid-nineteenth century also witnessed the appearance of a number of millennial sects such as the Mormons, Shakers, and Millerites, advocating that the Second Coming of Jesus was at hand. Socially, society was in a period of great upheaval because of the changes spurred by the market revolution: increasing urbanization and industrialization, the growth of immigration, and growing inequality between classes. As a result, the reform impulse and its subsequent movements, such as abolitionism and the movement to reform prisons and asylums, were strongest in the northern United States, the area most affected by the social upheaval of the market revolution as reformers sought to impose order on a changing society. Socially and culturally, the period was also a time of experimentation. More than 100 Utopian communities sprang up all over the country. Some of these, such as the Shakers, were religious communities. Others, like Brook Farm, considered themselves to be social experiments.

    The antebellum period (or era before the Civil War) was a time of social and moral reform. Moral reform groups promoted temperance, or abstinence from alcohol. Others worked to make basic education available to all or sought to improve conditions in prisons and asylums. Social activists sought to end slavery and establish greater rights for women. American intellectualism and literature flowered, in part under the transcendentalist movement. Each of these movements, religious, moral, and reform, stressed a belief in the basic goodness of human nature, and in its own way, each of the movements sought to perfect humankind and society.

    • 13.1: Religious Reforms in the Antebellum United States
      The years after the War of 1812 brought a re-examination of American religious beliefs and their roles in society. Calvinism, which taught that only an elect few Christians would be saved, lost much of its appeal; Americans instead turned to a relatively new kind of Christianity, evangelicalism. Evangelical sects emphasized the resurrection of Christ, the primacy of scripture, the spiritual “rebirth” of believers, and the importance of proselytizing.
    • 13.2: Cultural Movements- Transcendentalism, Utopian Communities, and the Cult of Domesticity
      The nineteenth century saw cultural movements that, like the Second Great Awakening, perceived humanity as basically good and imminently perfectible. The transcendentalists, the United States’ first organized intellectual community, expressed this notion in their writings. American literature flourished in part because of the activities of the transcendentalists. Secular and religious utopian communities sought to live their lives and create communities that achieved some measure of perfection.
    • 13.3: American Antebellum Reform
      Early nineteenth-century America was a time of reform. Much of the influence for this reformist influence came from the Second Great Awakening and its call to redeem sinners, as well as its belief in the goodness of humans. Like the preachers of the revivals, the temperance movement reformers called for individuals to lead “clean” lives and to redeem their sinning neighbors. Others sought to build and improve public and state institutions such as prisons, asylums, and schools.
    • 13.4: Conclusion
    • 13.5: Critical Thinking Exercises
    • 13.6: Key Terms
    • 13.7: Chronology


    This page titled 13: Antebellum Revival and Reform is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Catherine Locks, Sarah Mergel, Pamela Roseman, Tamara Spike & Marie Lasseter (GALILEO Open Learning Materials) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.