Age of reform

Improving humanity

During the first half of the 19th century, there were many reform movements that sought to improve conditions for society overall, ranging from abolitionism, women’s rights and temperance to the common school movement and prison reform. While prominent leaders and members of these reform movements often overlapped, there were also splits and schisms within these movements that created significant tensions.

Abolitionism

The growth of the abolitionist movement in the first half of the 19th century was considerable, uneven and regionally concentrated. It is also vital to understand the different forms of opposition to slavery that were promoted during the antebellum period as well as the reactions that these antislavery movements encountered. Abolitionism first surfaced in several northern religious denominations, including the Quakers and several African American churches, but its growth in the early decades of the 19th century was limited. Far more prominent in the early 19th century were calls for gradual emancipation of enslaved persons and the colonization movement that called for resettling free African Americans, and potentially formerly enslaved persons, in Africa. Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, Francis Scott Key, and later Abraham Lincoln were all associated with the colonization movement during the first half of the 19th century. While the colonization movement only resettled several thousand free African Americans in Africa, it helped found the country of Liberia, with its capital, Monrovia, and second largest city, Buchanan, both being named in honor of US presidents. Promoters of the colonization movement invariably argued that racial prejudice against African Americans was so deeply entrenched in American society that both free African Americans and formerly enslaved persons could never truly integrate into the United States.

Henry Clay, Speech before the American Colonization Society, January 20, 1827

Numbers of the free African race among us are willing to go to Africa, The Society has never experienced any difficulty on that subject, except that its means of comfortable transportation have been inadequate to accommodate all who have been anxious to migrate. Why should they not go? Here they are in the lowest state of social gradation —aliens —political —moral —social aliens, strangers, though natives. There, they would be in the midst of their friends and their kindred, at home, though born in a foreign land, and elevated above the natives of the country, as much as they are degraded here below the other classes of the community.

The gradual emancipation movement emphasized a prominent viewpoint in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that slavery would eventually disappear as it would prove increasingly economically inefficient and morally repugnant. With the patenting of the cotton gin and the resulting surge in, and wealth generated from, cotton production and exports during the first half of the 19th century, southern white support for maintaining and expanding the “peculiar institution” of slavery became more common and vociferous. Far from being seen as a necessary moral evil, slavery was lionized by prominent southern politicians, such as John C. Calhoun, as the best possible system for the enslaved persons and the United States overall. These more vocal southern pronouncements of the moral as well as practical benefits of slavery emerged in direct opposition to the increasing prominence of the abolitionist movement.

On January 1, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of The Liberator, soon to be a prominent, and for many, highly controversial, newspaper calling for immediate and uncompensated abolition. Garrison’s strident advocacy of immediate abolition and refusal to negotiate with southern slaveowners met with vociferous and violent opposition, including an incident in October 1835 where Garrison was attacked and nearly lynched in his hometown of Boston. Garrison and other abolitionists, including several formerly enslaved persons such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, became increasingly convinced of the need for ending slavery by any means, including through the use of violence against slaveowners and the institutions that they believed protected and enriched them.

Temperance

The temperance movement also focused on moral improvement of American society by originally calling for reductions in the production and consumption of alcohol; over time, temperance advocates increasingly demanded the prohibiting of all alcohol production and consumption in the United States. Culminating in the ratification of the 19th Amendment, later rescinded by the 22nd Amendment, and the passage of the Volstead Act during what later came to be known as “Prohibition,” the temperance movement sought to reduce the “temperature” of the country, including domestic, spousal and child abuse and moral decay related to the consumption of alcohol.

Youth Temperance Lecture, 1841

The largest number by far of those wretched men and women who are now shut up in the jails and prisons in different parts of the country, would never have committed the crime of which they have been guilty, had they never allowed themselves to use strong drinks. And remember, little reader, that if you swallow these poisonous drinks, you cannot tell what you may be left to do, or what you may be made to suffer in consequence.

Women’s rights

The treatment and status of women and girls continue to be sources of contention and concern in the contemporary United States, but they were significantly worse in the first half of the 19th century. From republican motherhood in the first years after independence to the cult of domesticity, women and girls were expected to focus on raising children, maintaining a morally upright household, and contributing to household finances primarily through unpaid domestic and agricultural labor. Employment, marriage and inheritance laws all favored men and boys, with women, particularly married women, strongly discouraged, and at times prohibited, from working in many industries. Even when they were formally employed, women and girls earned often only half of what men and boys were paid and they faced other forms of workplace discrimination, including harassment.

Women frequently encountered chauvinistic attitudes within the broader reform movements themselves; female abolitionists were not permitted to speak at the World anti-slavery convention in London in 1840, prompting William Lloyd Garrison to sit in silence with the women delegates. After returning from London, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott began organizing the most important women’s rights convention in 19th century American history, the Seneca Falls convention held in upstate New York in July 1848. In the convention’s culminating document, The Declaration of Sentiments, Elizabeth Cady Stanton emulated Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrasing in The Declaration of Independence, but she emphasized the active, and often oppressive, roles that men, rather than King George III in relation to the American colonists of the 1770s, had played in depriving women of their rights.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Declaration of Sentiments, July 1848

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. …

Having deprived her of this first right as a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.

Education, prison and mental health reforms

Other vital reform movements of the first half of the 19th century sought to improve conditions for students, prisoners, and mental health patients, although in the cases of prisoners and mental health patients, often in fundamentally different ways from contemporary American approaches to the treatment and legal status of these institutionalized populations. In terms of educational reforms, Horace Mann and the common school movement were the most influential reformers in the northern United States; unfortunately, southern education, due both to geographic dispersal and isolation as well as prohibitions on the teaching of enslaved persons to read and write, was primarily restricted to private tutoring for the children of plantation owners. In regards to prison reforms, the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems, named for prisons in New York and Pennsylvania, respectively, sought to reform and rehabilitate incarcerated people, often through hard labor, isolation, and solitary confinement. For those suffering from both diagnosed and perceived mental illnesses, Dorothea Dix and other reformers sought to reduce and/or eliminate the use of harsh physical punishments.